A Busy January!

We’re finally out of January, so I thought I’d give you a quick post letting you know what we’ve been up to.

Open Gaming Victory!

The month started off with leaks about the Open Gaming License and a general vibe of impending doom. If you weren’t plugged into the news, Wizards of the Coast mocked up a new license that would have ostensibly destroyed all VTTs and most of the 3rd-party content market, including us. To make it worse, the timeline was disastrous: they were to announce the new license on January 4th and it was to become active on January 13th. This news leaked out to folks like myself and then to the general press, which reacted appropriately and sounded a general alarm.

To help inform the community and coordinate a response, I made opendnd.games, a website designed as an open letter to Wizards of the Coast. It started with about a dozen signatures from creators in the space, and accrued over 77,000. Entering these signatures involved manually skimming through submissions to trim spam and other junk -- ceaseless hours of spreadsheet work.

But the response worked! News sites reported on our reaction until I was interviewed by the likes of CNBC and the Washington Post. The community response remained strong until WotC capitulated, softening the OGL update, and then abandoning the OGL completely a few days ago. The 5e rules are now under the Creative Commons license, which means they’re free for us to use forever!

Witchy Cakes Funded!

Throughout all of this, we prepped the launch of our brand new card game Witchy Cakes and the accompanying D&D adventure, The Witching Flour. Getting this ready meant we didn’t have anything for you this month on Patreon. Thanks to all of the OGL craziness, our Kickstarter had a rocky launch, but we finally got funded!

If you're at all interested in this game, pick it up! It's probably the best thing I've ever made.

We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming starting next month! Until then, I wanted to thank everyone who made their voices heard to save open gaming, and everyone who pledged to make Witchy Cakes possible.

Stay cool, roll 20s.

--Mike