I was planning on writing a lot more here over the last month, I’m planning a series of blog posts to make me expand my Traveller setting, but the holidays kicked me in the teeth as far as productivity was concerned.

There’s an elephant in the room right now though, and while I’m not qualified at all to talk licenses and contracts I do want to write down some of my thoughts. Wizards of the Coast is apparently updating the Open Gaming License to coincidence with their new OneD&D, and the leaked document has a lot of people worried. While I don’t play nearly as much D&D as I did a few years ago, and didn’t have any big plans to publish D&D content in the near future this news is worrying and problematic for a few reasons. The Traveller SRD, and by extension Cepheus Engine makes use of the OGL, and there’s a lot of worry about the new OGL effectively shutting down OGL derived projects with its restrictive and short-sighted terms. The TTRPG community is understandably in a panic, and as of writing WotC has yet to comment.

Lots of people are understandably concerned for the future. A lot of people’s livelihoods are on the line with this. I’m not victim blaming with this, I feel for my fellow game designers and desperately hope WotC and Hasbro walk this back, but I do think this is a valuable lesson about diversifying your work. Anybody who’s making a living of off building content for a corporation that you don’t work for directly should make sure they’re not exclusively depending on that corporations goodwill. It’s a concern I’ve held in mind ever since I first started getting involved in online content creation with Youtube and Twitch, and every year these corporations prove they do not care about you or your ability to make a living. They will screw you over without a second thought if it might make them an extra cent.