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 Tonight's game sees the player's PC's finding the lizardmen tribesmen in dire straits because of the smugglers. This puts the PC's square in the middle of the Saltmarsh situation. This picks right up from the last week's game session. The situation is very dire because of the rise in the number of Deep One warriors who have been harrying the lizardmen's people. They were imported into Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

I went to Vogue Knitting Live, I survived, and I have stories to share! So it's time to Crochet and Catch Up with Moogly in the video and links below! Disclaimer: This post may contain affiliate links. Live videos are unscripted, unedited, and occasionally weird; all opinions are my own.  Crochet and Catch Up with […]

The post Crochet and Catch Up with Moogly - January 22, 2025 appeared first on moogly. Please visit www.mooglyblog.com for this post.

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My mission: read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! This week, I'm looking at the comics Santa might have stuffed in a stocking that were published January 19, 1984.

Green Lantern #175: Weirdly, part of this is a replay of the events of last week's Flash that Jordan participated in just from Jordan's perspective. Even the dialogue is the same. Beyond that, the Shark is on a mind-absorbing spree in Coast City. Clay Kendall's Psi-Chair experiments accidentally make contact with the creature, but the contact is fleeting, and the Shark moves in on STAR Labs instead. Green Lantern tries to intervene but in a fight the Shark gets the better of him and leaves him unconscious on the ground. 
Meanwhile, Jason Bloch is stewing over the failure of Javelin to get the revenge for his family on Ferris Aircraft thanks to the action of Green Lantern. gets a visit from the mysterious Mr. Smith from Continental Petroleum (Con-Trol) who asks him to stop cease or at least delay his vendetta until Con-Trol his company can conclude their business. Bloch refuses, and when Smith is gone, reviews his file revealing he knows Green Lantern is Hal Jordan.

Legion of Super-Heroes #310: Levitz, Giffen, and Mahlstedt really up the action this issue. It's made all the more frenetic (and honestly, more than a bit hard to follow) thanks to Giffen's new, ragged art style. On Khundia, the Legion has a showdown with the Omen and the partially controlled Prophet, even as Ambassador Relnic, per the Khunds' demands, orders them off the planet. Ultimately, Omen reveals that the Khunds have constructed a "negaton bomb," a weapon spacetime-puncturing weapon. As Omen easily defeats the combined powers of the strongest Legionnaires, Dream Girl detonates the bomb, sucking Omen and Prophet out of the universe--and disgorging back into it the original Invisible Kid! Meanwhile, Brainiac 5 thinks he's discovered a way to cure Danielle Foccart.
The Prophet and Omen storyline sort of ends abruptly with us never really understanding their conflict or motives. In a way, that's an interesting approach: a cosmic menace that remains an enigma. I think to make that work the story needs to feel like it has a bit more of a payoff, though.

New Talent Showcase #4: Perhaps editorial felt like they have to have more at least superhero adjacent material to sell this title? We get a whole new batch of features and most of them are. Margopoulos and Steve Lightle/Gary Martin introduce Ekko, a hunky, pipe-smoking MD-PhD who developed an ultrasound-powered superhero suit. Just in time, too, because superhuman assassins in employ of the Crimeking are after his no-account older brother. This one reminds me a lot of 80s smaller press/indie stuff. It's clear Margopoulos' knowledge of medicine comes from TV, but I don't hold that against him.
"Who is Feral Man?" by Ringgenberg and Brigman/Magyar is similar but a bit more amateurish. I could have easily seen it being a late 70s/early 80s TV show as it has a Man from Atlantis or Manimal vibe. A Altered States-esque experiment unlocks the primal essence of our hero giving him animalistic heightened abilities. The shadowy government agency wants to make him a weapon, so he's got to escape and fight back.
"Bobcat" by Tiefenbacher and Woch/Kessel gets making me think it's going to turn horror, but nope it's a little hearted tail of a bullied kid with a perhaps unhealthy fixation on big cats who turns homemade costumed vigilante to scare his bully--and winds up befriending him. Similarly, "Full Circle" by Tillman and McManus/Alexander is about an older guy (the story says he's "near retirement" and some characters call him old, but he's only 51!) who feels like his life is effectively over, until a moment to be a hero fighting for an old homeless woman preyed on by street punks. He takes a beating but makes a friend. 

Sgt. Rock #387: This feels like an unusually grim issue. The Kanigher/Redondo main story has Easy getting two new soldiers after a tough battle: one's gung-ho and the other is a conscientious objector. They wind up being able to work together--and dying in the same foxhole. The reprint from '73 by Kanigher and Estrada has George Washington taking the time to talk with a boy who tried to desert at Valley Forge. Washington convinces the boy to be brave--as he meets his end in front of a firing squad. Then, there's a one-page humor strip to round out the issue.

Supergirl #18: Supergirl takes her new headband out on the town for the first time and gets into conflict with a storm-causing alien named Kraken. He entered Earth-One's dimension years ago, tried to conquer Argo City but repulsed and almost killed. When he returned years later, he found Argo City depopulated but vowed get its last survivor in gain revenge. He boasts that is magical powers will easily defeat his target, Supergirl. Turns out his magic is really the product of super-science devices in his belt and bracelets. Supergirl melts those with heat vision, and Kraken is easily subdued. It's interesting just how different Infantino's art looks under Oksner's inks than McLaughlin's.

Warlord #80: I discussed the main story here. In the Barren Earth backup by Cohn and Randall, the slavers pursue Jinal and her friends. With the help of their the Harashashan, they set traps for the slavers, destroying their force and allowing Jinal to retrieve her weapons.

 'Baptism of Fire is an OSR RPG set in the dawn of the Polish monarchy in the early medieval period. It is a complete rulebook and setting. As a setting, it is “medieval authentic,” meaning that it is set in our own historical Earth rather than a fantasy world, but this is the world as the people living in the setting imagined and envisioned it. That is to say, religion, magic, and monsters Needleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

The post Video of the Day – Mojo: Top 10 Times David Tennant Was a Legend, 2025 appeared first on Blogtor Who.

We got back from PAGE 2 Sunday afternoon, and both Rach and I escaped Con Crud: The Reckoning. Still, we had a bunch of catching up to do, so gifting the gifts from Days 9 and 10 of OSR Christmas 2024 Got delayed, but I'm caught up, so here we go.

If your name/screen name/handle appears below, email me at tenkarsDOTtavern @ that Gmail thing. Please put "OSR Christmas Days 9 & 10" in the Subject Header. In the body of the email, indicate what your name/screen name/handle is, as well as what gift you are claiming.

Without further wait, let's get 'er done!

Gift 1 - Dragonlock Lost Caverns: Master Set FDG0410 ($50.00) 

davrion

Gift 2 - Dragonlock Lost City of the Dwarves: Master Set FDG0411 ($25.00) 

Rob F.

Gift 3 - Frog God Games 50% off Coupon 

Brian S

Gift 4 - A 2nd Frog God Games 50% off Coupon

Ikaros

Gift 5 - What Price Glory

FallenAngel

Gift 6 - Worlds Beyond

macloud

Gift 7 - $10 DTRPG Gift Cert

Jeff Bernstein

Gift 8 - Another $10 DTRPG Gift Cert

David T (via Discord)

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. The Tavern DOES NOT do "Paid For" Articles and discloses personal connections to products and creators written about when applicable.

DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern.  You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Rumble or YouTube - Tenkar 

Get Ready to PLAN YOUR CLAIM for Lady Death: Savage Reign #1! Mesa, Arizona – January 21, 2025 – Coffin Comics invites fans to witness the future of crowdfunding with…

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Hey, folks. How's things? It's 2025 now, and we can start making new promises to break them later this year. Fun times ahead, I'd say. Anyway. In this post I want to talk about how Lost Songs made its way back into my top pile to work at. I know, I'm slow. I also keep getting things done, so speed isn't all that if you eventually get to see results. Point in case: a revision of LSotN is underway and making progress, to a degree where I'm setting up a little online game with friends to give it all another spin to see where it wobbles. Here's how I set up that campaign ...

this is a lose series, but here is Part 1 anyways.

The Plan

I've collected some ideas over the last months and looked at what I got as well as what needs doing. Nothing serious, just some preliminary scouting. As one would when getting back into a project that actually was on pause for some time. It never left my mind, but other things piled up to a degree that Lost Songs took a back seat, like, waaay back on the bus.

As soon as I felt confident enough to get something started, I set up a doscord server for it and invited the couple of people that could be convinced to give this a shot.

That the first thing: I love working this on discord. Lots of nice ways to organize the information for the campaign with the revision running in the background. And I can do it on the road easily, which is a huge plus.

It's amazing how much changed in the last 10 years in that regard. Nowadays we have AI to help with research (I basically use it like I used search engines when that was still a thing) and it is a blast. Quick, too. Also something that can be done anywhere easily (I'm falling in love with Grok right now). For instance, when I wrote the Tribe Generator for the game, a quick discussion about what would make a tribe helped me getting the numbers just right enough to hammer it into a table.

Good show.

Wouldn't use AI to write or design a game for me (because I actually enjoy doing those things!), but it offers great research and reasoning on all kinds of topics. It is, just as with the art, a great asset to have on hand.

The plan, then, is to revise the game as I prepare and then playtest the game, adding stuff as need be while I'm at it. Right now setting and tribe are done. Here's what I did so far.

The Setting

What you see here is the result of the revised Sandbox Generator. Can't show the thing itself yet, as it'd contain information the players are not yet privy to. This is basically what their characters can know:

"This is it. After years of wandering around, your elders decide the spot to settle down: a huge chasm between mountains, hills and forests. Uneven land that doesn't see a lot of sun, but fertile nonetheless. The elders say waterghosts carved the grooves into the valley here, leaving only the hard rock to stand guard above the rich streams coming down from the mountains. It is land suited for miners and artisans, hunters and gatherers, not farmers. Here is your fate. The new roots your tribe is destined to strike. But you are not alone in this valley. Two other tribes have arrived here. One, a strange folk with even stranger mores, is indifferent to you. The other, a tribe led by powerful women, is outright unfriendly, although not hostile. You will make a home here either way. This is where your songs begin."Typical longhouse.

"IMMEDIATE SURROUNDINGS & LIVING

Water created the extensive chasm your tribe located in by eroding all the soft stone and leaving harder stones throughout the valley it created. It created a hugely complex and fertile biome full of little lakes and rivers, cliffsides and little waterfalls, moss and forest as well as natural caves. Your tribe settled on the west side of this area, directly on the foot of a huge mountain you call "Grey Man" (Graumann) because clouds kept hanging on his peak like grey hair throughout the summer you arrived here. Since all of this is not easily accessible, longhouses are spread all over the place and in the strangest places, the chief's great longhouse having the highest position on the western slope. All of it is connected with little trails, but some tribesmen even made stone steps and little wooden bridges here and there to have those homes better connected. Many homes expand into the mountain as well, partially using natural caverns, partially carving new rooms into soft stone.""Established routes lead west up into the mountain where several mining operations dot the slope, east into the valley, mainly for hunting, and north towards the closest settlement that will trade with you, four days travel away.""Your immediate neighbors are a strange people on the north border of this chasm. They are quite elusive, but what you found of them are wooden frog figures and weird markings. Some of your tribe have seen them in the distance, but they mostly just ignore you and you have no quarrels with them. They seem to have settled on the lake that is mostly hidden in thick fog and forms a natural border before the land grows from chasms into thickly forested hills further north.""The other tribe is situated close to the south border of this area, just where the chasms transition into forested hills. What you know is that it is a tribe led by female warriors, but other then that no contact has been made. Rumors among your people say that they despise you for your lack of warriors, but you know nothing for certain.
Other than the Graumann to the west, this area is nested between fertile hills with beautiful woods and rivers as well as more high mountains to the southwest, the predominant of them called "King's Crown" (Königskrone") by your people. This is good land, rich and fertile."The Tribe

This part needed some more rules and tools to allow for some variety (I'll share them later in this post). The sandbox has always been the first strong indicator what kind of people a group's tribe consists of. Why would they settle where they ended up settling? What kind of skills and trades would come with the territory? What opposition (as far as they are aware of it) are they willing to face? Stuff like that could easily be deduced from the hex they are dropped in and the immediate surroundings.

But I needed some more meat on that, mainly how their migration there went, what they gained and what they had to leave behind. It'd change, to a degree, their reasoning for staying where they ended up staying, but not in a bad way. Beyond that I wanted to have some soft numbers for the size of the tribe (ended up going with "families"). If anything, it gives a GM more to work with while being set up quite fast.

Here's what I shared with my players:

"So what's your tribe like? Well, the place they chose to stay, despite the other tribes settling there, already tells us a lot. They are accustomed to living in mountainous areas, so miners and smiths they should be as well as hunters and animal farmers. The blight that is Christianity has not yet reached your people, so they believe in a variation of the old gods and follow their traditions. Migration lost you the majority of your warriors, but despite that your elders feel confident about your fate in this chasm. You can draw from a rich history of sophisticated craftsmen and you have among your people some very capable weapon smiths and artisans.""Where the Chief's Longhouse was build

Your holy men had seen the place where you were to hold the ritual in their dreams, just two days before your track came across it. It was held that same night, under a huge thunderstorm. The mountains in the east, it seemed, fought the mountains in the west in the sky. Thor was busy drumming that night. It had been at the peak of the ritual when a massive lighting strike hit the side of the Graumann, the short bright light dotted with the rocks it detonated from the mountainside. The next morning, at first sunlight, they found among the debris a huge shattered quartz, all glitzy and pink. The biggest piece build the foundation for the chief's longhouse right where it struck the ground, the smaller pieces had been distributed among the nobility and brought much honor to their houses. They called that night the Invitation of the Mountain, and it has always been regarded as a good omen.""The place of that ritual is where your people hold official gatherings.  It is a stone platform floating over the valley and it offers a great view of the Graumann as well as the chief's majestic longhouse at the base of it. At the beginning it was not easy to get to the plateau, as it stands somewhat isolated. Now there is an ornate wooden bridge leading to it. Three holy sheep are held on that platform to keep the grass short.""Other then the player characters' families, the tribe is 167 families strong. Around 120 of them have build their longhouses close to the chief's house, the rest is scattered all around, equally distributed towards mountain, the valley itself and along the trading route you established north."

Ideas like the ritual, the other two tribes close by and the trading route all spun naturally from tools used to set up the sandbox and the tribe. 

New Rules: The Tribe Generator

The revised Sandbox Generator still needs some more work, but what I can share today is the Tribe Generator. It might even be useful in other games. Either way, it'll tell you something about Lost Songs, so here we go.

Like with character creation, all it needs is a roll of 3d6. It'd be used right after completing the sandbox. Everything else follows from that. The individual results will give you:

TRIBE GENERATOR (3d6)

Your tribe is …

1 barely there (lowest column)
2 weak (lowest column)
3 quarreling (middle column)
4 desperate (middle column)
5 confident (high column)
6 strong (high column)

Your ancestors are …

1 primal (+10 families)
2 secluded (-10 families)
3 odd
4 honorable (+20 families)
5 noble (+30 families)
6 sophisticated (-10 families)

Your tribe lost …

1 the weak (-30 families)
2 the warriors (-20 families)
3 the royalty (-10 families)
4 spiritual leadership (+10 families)
5 wealth (-10 families)
6 history The sum, now, will give you a base number of families that needs to be modified by the individual results:

             High   Middle   Low

3-5:          80        60        40
6-8:        140      120      100
9-12:      200      180      160
13-16:    230      220      210
17-18:    260      250      240

The sum also reduces the base number further. In the end, each player character adds one family to the result. Example:

"This tribe is (5/6/2) confident with sophisticated ancestry to build on, but lost their warriors on their migration to this valley."That gives us a Base Number of 200 (high column) modified by -10 (for being sophisticated), -20 (for losing the warriors), and -13 (the sum itself), resulting in 167 families PLUS the number of players.

It's quick while offering lots of little details to work with and a rough estimate of how big a tribe actually is (a "family" would have an average of four people).

That's it for now

This is where we are at. Next is character creation and the final touches on the sandbox, as well as a calendar and elements for all the hexes ...

But about this we will talk another time. It'll be an interesting year in that regard, I think. I wonder how much my sensibilities changed since I last touched the game. And if I'm finally able to overcome the road blocks that made me shift my focus on other projects.

For now I can say I'm having fun with it. And I'm again and again surprised how much was already done. Anyway. More to come.

I wish you guys all the best for 2025!

PORTLAND, Ore. 01/21/2025 — The fan-favorite creative team behind Plastic, Plush, and Vinyl—Doug Wagner & Daniel Hillyard—will reteam for an all-new, campy horror story in the upcoming I Was a Fashion…

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01/21/2025, Missoula, Montana — 9x diamond-certified GRAMMY® Award-nominated Post Malone, Vault Comics, and Platinum Dunes team up to bring Post Malone’s Big Rig to Free Comic Book Day 2025. An original…

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Learn about ULTIMATE BLACK PANTHER #15, ULTIMATES #11, ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN #16, ULTIMATE WOLVERINE #4, and ULTIMATE X-MEN #14, coming this April!   New York, NY— January 21, 2025 — Month…

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  Who’s your cybernetically enhanced wolf daddy? MILWAUKIE, Ore., (January 21, 2024)—Gear up for Dark Horse Comics’ newest bombastic action-comedy, RoboWolf. This new comic miniseries is jam-packed with outrageous humor,…

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This April, Chris Claremont teams up with artist Damian Couceiro for WOLVERINE AND KITTY PRYDE, a five issue limited series set in the aftermath of Claremont and Al Milgrom’s classic…

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 “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” -1984

Martian Manhunter: American Secrets illustrates how superhero comics can be used for retrospective moral satire. The Martian Manhunter’s original Detective Comics adventures in 1959, written for children, contained no deliberate…

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D&D is best when its corporate owner isn’t paying attention. When I asked who deserved credit for that observation, it proved too widespread and too old to name a source. The D&D team started sharing the notion soon after 1985, when D&D’s co-creator Gary Gygax lost control of publisher TSR and non-gamers started managing the game. Since then, when the suits steered D&D’s creative direction, the game suffered, but when they ignored it, it thrived. Corporate attention has risen and fallen over the game’s 50-year history, leading to a cycle of highs and lows.

Many gamers fell in love with D&D with its second edition, but the release stands as a creative low. Sure, the second edition designers loved the game and fought to make the release as good as possible, but TSR’s management stifled their ability to improve on the rules. Lead designer David “Zeb” Cook recalled, “We had to convince management that [second edition] was a good idea because they’re going, ‘That’s our Core Business right there and you’re talking about rewriting it.’  Fear starts to appear in their eyes. ‘We have a whole warehouse full of product. If you do this, what’s going to happen to all that product?’”

“There were all kinds of changes that we would have made if we had been given a free hand to make them—an awful lot of what ultimately happened in the third edition,” said second-edition designer Steve Winter said. “We heard so many times, ‘Why did you keep armor classes going down instead of going up?’ People somehow thought that that idea had never occurred to us. We had tons of ideas that we would have loved to do, but we still had a fairly narrow mandate that whatever was in print should still be largely compatible with the second edition.”

A game outside of management’s scrutiny, the 1992 edition of Gamma World, benefited from the design team’s innovations. “We basically said, take all these ideas that we couldn’t do and incorporate them into Gamma World and make it as streamlined as possible,” explained Steve Winter. Gamma World featured many innovations that corporate blocked from reaching the second edition.

• Ascending armor class
• Skills called skills
• Attribute checks
• Attribute modifiers similar to those that would appear in 3rd edition
• Health and Mental Defense saves that resemble 3rd edition’s Fortitude and Will saves

(See The Dungeons & Dragons Books that Secretly Previewed Each New Edition.)

Management also made the decision to remove demons and devils. “That didn’t work because, oh my goodness, they’re the best monsters ever” Designer Wolfgang Baur said, only slightly in jest. “Every hero wants to take on and defeat them.” The game steered away from anything that might alarm concerned parents. See D&D’s Biggest Controversies Ranked—1. D&D Becomes a Target of the Satanic Panic.

During D&D’s second edition era, parts of the D&D product line also gained freedom and creative energy from management’s inattention. The Planescape campaign setting makes a perfect example. The setting met widespread critical acclaim. For example, in Pyramid issue 8, Scott Haring wrote, “Normally, I start a review off slowly…forget that noise. I’ll cut to the chase—Planescape is the finest game world ever produced for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Period.” He concluded, “Planescape is a revolutionary product, a breakthrough for TSR. If you think you’ve ‘graduated’ from AD&D, that you’ve evolved past it, go back and take a look at Planescape. This is the game world that will get you playing AD&D again.”

Planescape’s lead designer, Zeb Cook, started the setting from minimal instructions summarized in Slaying the Dragon by D&D historian Ben Riggs. “Do the planes. Have a base location as a setting. And do factions.” The idea for factions came from the bestselling Vampire: The Masquerade game. “The vagueness gave [Zeb Cook] license. He could do almost anything and play anywhere in the D&D cosmos.”

Soon after the setting’s release, Cook left TSR, but follow-up products continued to gain from a lack of oversight. “Fortunately for the Planescape team, upper management was very hands-off with Planescape, even after it won the Origins Award, and we could get as weird as we wanted,” recalled designer Colin McComb. “Now that I think about it, it’s possible Creative Director Andria Hayday and David Wise (who would be promoted to the manager for the whole department) managed to shield us from the Eye of Sauron—getting us the resources we needed while keeping management from paying too much attention to us.”

Despite Planescape’s creative success, the line failed to make money for TSR. None of TSR’s products made enough money, so by 1997 the company neared bankruptcy. Wizards of the Coast (WotC) purchased TSR and saved D&D from being auctioned piecemeal by the courts. Peter Adkison, WotC’s CEO and a D&D fan, led D&D to a new high.

Adkison became deeply involved in D&D, attending third edition design meetings and earning a designer credit in the rule books. But Adkison approached the game as a fan and game designer. “Coming into 1990…I was spending so much time on D&D that I decided, along with many of my friends, to start a gaming company—Wizards of the Coast.” When the third-edition design team struggled to agree on a direction for the new edition, Adkison set one from a gamer’s perspective. “I was filled with trepidation. I was assuming responsibility for something very important to, literally, millions of fans around the world. If I made the wrong decisions, a lot of gamers would be very disappointed.” He feared disappointing gamers rather than stockholders.

Adkison set a good direction for the game, and the designers released an edition that delighted existing players and won new enthusiasts. “Fan response was immediate and overwhelmingly positive,” wrote Adkison.

The 2003 release of a 3.5 rules update brought D&D to another low. By then, Peter Adkison had left Wizards of the Coast. Most D&D players now owned third-edition books, so sales slowed. Corporate management looked for a way to boost D&D revenue. Based on his insider knowledge, game designer Monte Cook concludes that management sped the release of D&D 3.5 to just three years after third edition’s debut and that “the amount of change in the books was artificially increased beyond what was needed to force the player base to buy all new rule books.”

The update’s designers succeeded at making improvements, so when Paizo developed their Pathfinder game, they built on 3.5. Still, the sudden release hurt D&D overall. “The changes in 3.5 are so pervasive, and some of them so subtle, that any mastery people had achieved is gone. ‘Oh come on, Monte,’ one might reply, ‘the changes aren’t that bad.’ I’m not even talking about ‘good’ or ‘bad’ here. The problem is that there are just enough changes that a player has to question everything. Even if fireball didn’t really change, after you’ve had to re-learn how wall of force, flame arrow, and polymorph work, how can you be sure? Welcome to the game sessions where you’ve got to look everything up again.”

At the time, D&D players enjoyed a surging number of third-party, D&D-compatible products that filled game store shelves. The release of 3.5 instantly made those books incompatible. Game stores suffered from stocks of nearly worthless products. Most of the publishers went out of business. Everyone lost.

While the D&D team developed the game‘s fourth edition for a 2008 release, Harbro management brought big ideas for an edition could increase the game’s profitability. “Some of the people who ran WotC were really jealous of World of Warcraft’s subscription model and so a whole bunch of the things that happened at Wizards of the Coast at that time were based on trying to get people to pay money every month,” lead designer Rob Heinsoo said. Management also hoped a new edition would break ties to the Open Gaming License, stopping other publishers from profiting from D&D compatibility without paying for a license.

The millions of people playing World of Warcraft seemed to far outnumber those playing D&D. “When we made the fourth edition, one of the earliest design goals given to us by the management was that it should be more familiar to people who were coming in having played World of Warcraft and other digital games. We were supposed to be more approachable.” So the new edition focused on the elements that made the D&D fun and especially appealing to fans of online fantasy games.

Designer Mike Mearls recalled that the team felt that “building a player character was the real thing that drove people to play the games. You wanted to choose your feats, your prestige classes and whatnot.” Rob Heinsoo focused on adding an irresistible hook. “The solution James Wyatt, Andy Collins, and I were excited about was to give every PC an ongoing series of choices of interesting powers. Every combat round you have an interesting choice of which power or powers to use.”

While the ultimate design offered many virtues, it failed to interest enough D&D fans. Mike Mearls later wrote, “No one at Wizards ever woke up one day and said, ‘Let’s get rid of all our fans and replace them.’ That was never the intent. With fourth edition, there were good intentions. The game is very solid, there are a lot of people who play it and enjoy it, but you do get those people that say ‘hey, this feels like an MMO, this feels like a board game.’” (For the full story of fourth edition, see The Threat that Nearly Killed Dungeons & Dragons—Twice.)

By the time the D&D team started on a fifth edition, corporate no longer gave the tabletop game as much scrutiny. After all, the fourth edition had become a financial disappointment and the tabletop RPG market had declined since 2005. Years of annual layoffs had eliminated most of the fourth-edition team. “While we didn’t talk about it in public, the business goal was to make a game that could keep people happy so that D&D could grow via video games and licensing,” fifth-edition lead Mike Mearls wrote later. “We ended up laying off or re-assigning several of the designers and editors after the game launched.”

The focus on video games and licensing brought freedom to the fifth-edition team. Instead of taking orders from upper management, the design team relied on feedback from the fans. Between the edition’s announcement in 2012 and its release in 2014, the D&D team offered a series of open playtest packets, collected feedback from 170,000 players, and then let the fans help guide the design.

Fifth edition became a hit. While every other edition of the game brought a surge of sales that quickly fell after existing players bought in, fifth edition sales climbed year after year. During Hasbro’s investor calls, the company now routinely boasted of D&D’s growth and profitability. Before the fifth edition, D&D only rated a mention once.

But over eight years, sales inevitably cooled, and in the corporate world, a steady profit is a disappointment. In 2022, Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks and Wizards of the Coast CEO Cynthia Williams appeared in a presentation for investors. Williams touted D&D’s popularity but described the game as “under monetized.” Wizards aimed to do a better job of gaining income from the game, bringing more earnings to stockholders. Corporate scrutiny returned.

WotC’s lawyers found a way to potentially invalidate the OGL that allowed publishers to profit from D&D-comparable products without giving WotC a cut. Incensed D&D fans forced the company to kill the plan. (See D&D’s Biggest Controversies Ranked—3. Wizards of the Coast Attempts To Revoke the Current Open Gaming License.)

Unlike D&D 3.5, I suspect something more noble than a cash grab led to the release of D&D’s 2024 update. In a 2020 article on diversity, the team wrote that in the six years since fifth edition’s release “making D&D as welcoming and inclusive as possible has moved to the forefront of our priorities.” D&D needed a new Player’s Handbook that dropped racial ability score modifiers and reflected the priority. As a bonus, the team could also make refinements based on years of play. (For my prediction of an upcoming update, see D&D‘s Ongoing Updates and How a Priority Could Lead to New Core Books.) The 2024 books include many improvements that I love.

Despite the good intentions, the 2024 update suggests Hasbro’s corporate influence, and I think the meddling left us with a weaker game than the D&D team might have created if left alone.

Watch the videos promoting the update to fans. The designers rarely mention all the welcome refinements and corrections to the existing rules. Instead, they boast of additions that never appeared on anyone’s wish list of essential updates.

• They show new benefits player characters gain. The scale of these boosts goes beyond shoring up weaker classes, adding new candy like features that will “frustrate” DMs and a new weapon mastery system certain to slow play.
• They showcase the bastion system—a game within a game that lets players farm more boons for their characters. Since 1974, D&D has sporadically included stronghold rules, but players rarely use them.
• They tout the new crafting system that lets characters manufacture their own loot. When Chris Perkins pitched the crafting system, he cautioned that it appears in the Dungeon Master’s Guide because “this is unlocked by the dungeon master. The dungeon master determines whether or not the materials are available, whether or not the characters can build these items.” Perkins knows if characters with nowhere else to spend their gold can manufacture items like wands and enspelled gear, they will derail any campaign. The book offers no advice to DMs on managing crafting, so this system feels like a trap rushed into the book.

Because few gamers asked for many of the advertised changes, I suspect the push to make them came from corporate. The most unnecessary and weakest additions to the 2024 version of the game seem like they came from a meeting where a marketing executive stood at a white board with a marker, turned to face the D&D design team, and then demanded that they pitch new goodies that would sell the 2024 books to players who already have the 2014 books. Years from now, I may write a post that includes quotes from those designers talking about just such a meeting.

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