I. Spotlight
There’s a lot of news coming out of GenCon. First, the Ennies winners were announced and it was dominated by Crooked Moon, Daggerheart, Legends in the Mist, and Dolmenwood in a way that makes the whole thing a lot less interesting to me. If half the awards listed go to four games in an occasionally arbitrary spread, there’s not much to do but shrug and move on.
The biggest stuff is probably that D&D will now be a platform for all the biggest IPs in a Universes Beyond format including World of Warcraft and Star Wars, classic settings including Dark Sun and Greyhawk are returning, and existing settings like Faerun and Ravenloft will get official material developed by third-part publishers like Kobold Press and Ghostfire Gaming.
Also, Vampire the Masquerade 6e saw an alpha playtest released. The reactions online is shock and horror that they have completely broken from tradition, rules-wise, and are making a modern-feeling game more in the vein of Daggerheart, Year Zero, and Blades in the Dark.
Rascal will probably have an article contextualizing all of it more but for now, if you want details right away, I’ve enjoyed reading TTRPG Insider covering it from the convention floor.
II. Media of the Week
- If you missed it, Emily Friedman is on the latest Adventuring Academy with Brennan Lee Mulligan talking about
- You too can support the newsletter on patreon!
III. Links of the Week
- Valeria asks “Why didn’t Silent Titans change the world?” and it’s lovely as always. I’ve been circling around Silent Titans ever since it was released. Patrick Stuart’s writing has always been delightful to me. But I’ve never run it. Not because I thought it would be unplayable — this hobby is about playing the unplayable, people do it every day — but rather because I wasn’t sure I would have fun with it. I think I will now. So I’m going to put my money where my mouth is and get this thing to the table.
- Unrelated: I don’t know what happened to Dirk Detweiler Leichty.
- On the recent Carouse Carouse newsletter, there’s links to cool stuff as usual but also an interesting interview with two people who ran a Over/Under-type game and what they learned from it.
- Jason Tocci has a talent for capturing good ideas and explaining them clearly. This is him voicing how to make rules opt-in.
- In 1984, before D&D was officially localized and before Record of Lodoss War existed, there was a game called Roads to Lord that tried to essentially bring D&D fantasy to Japan.
IV. Status Update
The newsletter is late today and I missed last week and generally, it’s been a year of that. I’ve also ended up taking an unplanned but predictable extended hiatus from Yes Indie’d that’s hitting its third month, I think. I think this is just how it’s going to be for a while. The newsletter and podcast are a second job and right now, I want to focus on my first job which is running Rascal News.
I’m currently one of two full-time people at the site now. I see my job as still primarily waking up every day and trying to tell the most interesting stories from the neighbourhood of RPGs that I can. (August is going to be a good example of that.) It’s a good job that would be a great job if we weren’t always scrabbling for resources. But given that we are, I have to spend a lot of time trying to change that (including all throughout August). As you can imagine, it’s a challenge that balloons to fill all available time. It also leaves me filling my weekend with my other obligations to family and so on. 100% of the time when I miss the newsletter, it’s because I spent my weekends doing something that I deemed to be objectively more important to my life.
All that said, I’m not stopping anything. I’m going to do the newsletter as often as I can. I plan to get back to Yes Indie’d at some point but it’s not clear to me how I’ll find the time right away. (When I do the Rascal Reading Club, it means making a podcast every week.) I’m aiming for October, with me recording a couple episodes in September but we’ll see. I can’t promise anything. I’m extremely proud of the back catalogue of that show but also feel no particular need to scramble to find people to interview. A schedule of regular releases is a lovely thing but having the freedom to stop and start again is even better.
Thank you as always — very genuinely! — for reading and listening. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions!
V. Small Ads
All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.
- Virtual Battle Mat: the simplest VTT online. Drop a map, place tokens, play. Voice and video built in. No rules engine, any system. Feels like a real table. vbm.games
This newsletter is sponsored by the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:
- Seven GURPS offers: you can get the essentials, infinite settings, fantasy, horror, space, supers, and over-the-top action
- A bundle of standalone games from the talented Cezar Capacle
Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend. If you’d like to know more about my work, check out the coolest RPG website in the world Rascal News or listen to me talking to other people on the Yes Indie’d Podcast.
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