With the recent "leak" of the new Dungeons & Dragons OGL, we were forced to take a hard look at where we want to go with the information as a company. Though it was only a "leak", the initial leaked form of OGL 1.1 has sparked a slew of negative reactions from the TTRPG community, especially among third party creators. WotC/Hasbro have been slow to respond (we're still waiting), but in the meantime several key (and distressing) portions of the updated OGL have been confirmed by Kickstarter heads and others in the industry, some like Kobold Press even announcing their own game systems in response. At the time I'm writing this blog post, WotC has said they'd have answers shortly, but thus far haven't said anything concrete.
So where do we go as creators of third party 5E content? We think the new OGL 1.1 is insanely out of touch with the community, so there's no way we would ever be a part of it. Luckily, we are a company that produces more than just 5E content - so we're going to go into defensive mode for the foreseeable future and produce system neutral and system agnostic content, like our exciting upcoming project - Villains & Villagers. Not only that, but we're pretty proud of some of our original IPs like Organic Towns, and Hexplorer Map Tiles so expect to see more of that kind of content from us in the future. As for the blog content, we release a lot of 5E content here as well, so while we have a bunch of pre-written 5E things already scheduled to post for the next month or so, we may be looking at changing up the contents of our blog posts to reflect the new atmosphere.
We appreciate all the support in the past, present, and future, and hope that you'll sign this Open Letter to keep a truly #opendnd for the future of our TTRPG community. This is also sort of a reminder that as beloved as D&D is to most of us, no matter what happens we'll always be free to replay earlier editions or even other TTRPG games. I've been getting back into Warhammer 40k lately myself (though GW has their own problems - they are revamping the rules currently to make it more accessible), and Shane has been getting me into Battletech and we've been playing Alien: The Roleplaying Game when we've been able to. My own love for what D&D stood for in the past still stands, and we've got a dedicated game group that meets Thursdays so we'll still be following the adventures of the orphans Anders, Zanari, Emblethicket, and Flaraenin as they seek to return to their own dimension in our own 5E campaign. We're all in this together, and no matter what happens - in the end we're all lovers of TTRPGs. - Joe
In case you missed the link above: #OpenDND