In this week’s episode, we take a final look at the OGL and Creative Commons situation with Dungeons & Dragons, and consider what it means for indie authors
Coupon of the Week!
The audiobook of GHOST IN THE MASK (as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy) is now available on my Payhip store! You can get it for 50% off with this coupon code:
FEBMASK
The coupon code is valid until February 27th, 2023.
https://payhip.com/b/LHcX4
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 146 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is February 3rd, 2023. Today, we’re going to talk about one final Dungeons and Dragons business lesson for indie authors.
Before we get into all that, let’s have an update on my current writing projects. I am pleased to report that my LitRPG book is done (the rough draft of it, anyway). I thought it would be about 60,000 words, but it turned out to be 87,000 words, so it’s about as long as a Dragonskull book. What is the title and what is the book about? The book is called Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation. What is it about? I will read the book description right now:
The greatest epic fantasy MMORPG in history has a ticking time bomb at its heart. Noah Carver used to work for Maskell Entertainment developing the smash hit virtual reality game Sevenfold Sword Online, loosely based on the fantasy novels of Jonathan Moeller. Then Carver got fired not for incompetence and not for laziness, but because he discovered the truth. The game’s runaway success was built on the deadly technology of humanity’s ancient enemy and Maskell Entertainment doesn’t want anyone to find out. And unless Carver finds proof, a lot of innocent people are going to die.
If you go to my website or my Facebook page, you can see the cover image, which for obvious reasons is impossible to share over an audio podcast. Next up, once that’s done is a short story called Griefer that will describe how the protagonist of Creation met someone significant to him and my newsletter subscribers will get that for free when Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation comes out in February, and then that is my plan to have it out before the end of February, if all goes well.
Will there be sequels? I don’t know at this point. I’ve never written a LitRPG book before, so I have no idea how this is going to go. At various times I was writing it, I would either thought I ever thought this is amazing, it’s going to do well, or this was a terrible idea, I shouldn’t have done this, but we are committed now. I have a specific sales figure in mind for the first thirty days of the book is out and if it hits that, I will write sequels. If it doesn’t hit that, well, we’ll chalk this one up to a learning experience, but one way or another you will be able to read the book and decide for yourself before the end of February, if all goes well. I am also planning on posting the first two chapters on my website and Facebook once they are ready so that people can read the first two chapters and decide for themselves if it’s something they want to read since, as I’ve said, I’ve never written a LitRPG book before.
I’m also working on Cloak of Dragonfire and Silent Order: Thunder Hand on the side and they both passed the 3,000 word mark today. After Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation comes out, my next big project will be Dragonskull: Wrath of the Warlock, and I’m doing that right away because Dragonskull is my best-selling series and if Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation turns out to be a flop then it would be nice to have a Dragonskull to help to recover from that. That is where I’m at with my current writing projects.
Now it’s time for Coupon of the Week and the Coupon of the Week for this week is for the audiobook of Ghost in the Mask, as excellently narrated by Hollis McCarthy. It’s now available on my Payhip store for 50% off with this coupon code: FEBMASK. That would be FEBMASK again, that’s FEBMASK and you get that at Payhip. I’ll include the link to that in the show notes and the coupon code will be valid until February 27th, 2023.
00:03:50 Reader Question
Before we get to our main topic, we have a question from Reader AB, who wrote in to ask: Hello. I just wanted to ask if you could tell me where the Dragonskull books fit on your reading order as I don’t see them. Are they standalone? I thought maybe they were with the Frostborn/Sevenfold Sword/Dragontiarna universe.
They do indeed. The Dragonskull books take place in the Frostborn/Sevenfold Sword/Dragontiarna universe and they take place about ten years or so after the end of Dragontiarna. I do have to make sure I get that reading list updated on my website since I haven’t done that for a while and I’m afraid it’s one of those chores that falls behind the necessity of writing more because it’s like, I could write another 5,000 words of book today or I could do miscellaneous chores and I’m afraid that it has fallen under that category, but I really do need to get a better reading list put together and posted on my website.
00:04:40 Main Topic: Business Lesson for Indie Authors from Dungeons and Dragons
Now on to our main topic of this week: one more business lesson for indie authors from Dungeons and Dragons. I think part of the reason I’m a writer is because I am trying to understand human nature, which as we all know, is an unending puzzle that often defies explanation. As humans, we are both simultaneously rational thinking creatures and irrational to the point of self-destructive madness. People can both stun you with their generosity and amaze you with their perfidy. And this sometimes happens inexplicably in the same person, sometimes even on the same day. And a recurring theme in human history is how often a group of smart people put together a plan that somehow backfires and has exactly the opposite result of what they intended.
I’ve written before about the latest legal controversy engulfing Dungeons and Dragons, though to be honest, based on what I’ve read, you could put together a history solely of the many, many lawsuits and legal maneuvers around Dungeons and Dragons, and you’ll arrive at a very nearly complete history of the game. I should mention that I haven’t actually played a tabletop RPG since, like 1999 or so, but as a self-published fantasy writer, I’m sort of living the next street over, so to speak, so I watch this controversy with interest.
Anyway, to sum up, for the last 20 years, Dungeons and Dragons had an Open Game License which lets people create compatible content like settings, adventures, and so forth for Dungeons and Dragons without paying royalties to Hasbro, which currently owns the rights to the game. Recently a draft from an updated OGL leaked, probably by a Hasbro employee who recognized what a bad idea the updated license was, imposing far more restrictive terms and including the right for Hasbro to take any D&D compatible material without payment.
Predictably, a massive snowballing uproar ensued, with a variety of interesting consequences. Paizo (I’m not sure I pronounced that right or not but it’s spelled PAIZO), which makes the second biggest tabletop RPG after Dungeons and Dragons, sold through eight months worth of inventory in a few weeks. Many other RPG publishers announced high sales. Dungeons and Dragons Beyond, Hasbro’s virtual tabletop site, lost a ton of subscribers, and Paizo and a bunch of smaller RPG publishers announced plans to make their own version of the OGL, the Open RPG Creative License, which will have the clever acronym of ORC. So what Hasbro wanted to do, what they wanted to have happen, was to increase Dungeons and Dragons’ revenue and drum up publicity before the new Dungeons and Dragons movie that is coming out later this year.
Instead, the actual results of their plan were one: damage to their reputation, two: loss of monthly subscription revenue, three: increased sales for their competitors, and four: the possible creation of a new long-term rival in the ORC license. I doubt it would be any comfort to Hasbro, but this kind of thing happens again and again in human history, though often with far more serious results.
Unintended consequences can be nasty customers. When King Richard II of England seized the estates of Henry of Bolingbroke, he didn’t think to himself, “this plan will end with me starving to death in a prison cell.” Richard just wanted to rid himself of a potential rival. But what actually happened was that Henry gathered an army from the other nobles who Richard had angered, seized the crown for himself, and Richard was deposed and died of starvation in captivity.
Or when the conspiracy of Brutus and Cassius stabbed Julius Caesar to death. Their plan was to rid Rome of a dangerous tyrant and restore the rule of the Senate instead of a dictator. Instead, the actual result of their plan was that within a few years, all the conspirators were dead and Caesar’s nephew, Octavian, would rule Rome as a far more competent and ruthless tyrant for decades. A common joke among historians is that Caesar was a merciful man who forgave his enemies, and so he was stabbed to death while Octavian was a ruthless man who killed his enemies without mercy, and so died of bed in old age. No doubt we can all think of examples in our own lives or from our old employers, where what was supposed to be a good plan blew up in everyone’s faces. And without naming any examples, I’m sure we can all think of recent political and economic plans that have produced somewhat less than desirable outcomes.
However, it seems that cooler and more farsighted minds have prevailed at Hasbro. A few days before this recording, the company announced those releasing the Core Rules of Dungeons and Dragons to Creative Commons. Of course, the Core Rules are a massive 400 page PDF document that’s actually quite well written. It’s basically a condensed version of the Player’s Handbook and the Dungeon Master’s guide without the excellent illustrations and artwork. This was actually a fairly clever move on Hasbro’s part. It defangs much of the criticisms, since anyone can use Creative Commons stuff, so long as they attribute it.
Of course, one of the things I learned reading about this is that you can’t actually copy or game mechanics, thanks to a Supreme Court decision that goes back to the 19th century. This is why if you go on the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store, you can see a lot of free games with names like Business Town that basically use a lightly modified version of the Monopoly rules, but with none of the trademark terms, images, or iconography associated with Monopoly. So if Hasbro tried to sue over it, the odds were not in the company’s favor, and if and if anyone makes their own RPG stuff using the Core Rules in Creative Commons, the Creative Commons License means that Hasbro can’t sue about it, and they are prohibited at this point from doing so.
It also means that people will continue making RPG stuff compatible with the core Dungeons and Dragons rules, so that’s a win for Hasbro. One of the reasons that TSR went bankrupt in the 1990s was that the company kept making campaign settings with beautiful illustrations and maps. But the books were so expensive to print that TSR frequently lost money on each copy sold. So when TSR was about to grow a business, Wizards of the Coast bought the company, and Hasbro bought Wizards of the Coast, which is got we got to where we are today.
With the Creative Commons release, people will make compatible RPG campaign settings, which will encourage sales of Hasbro’s Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide. And if Hasbro wants to go into a more restrictive license with a future version of Dungeons and Dragons or virtual tabletop software, they have a clear avenue to do so. If people complain, Hasbro can always say, well, the Core Rules for 5th edition are in Creative Commons. Go use those but enjoy premium features in our new version of the game. The welcoming invitation is usually a better tactic than the coercive hard sell. Freemium is a successful business model for a reason. This might even remove the ORC license as a potential long-term threat. The tabletop RPG world is a notably quarrelsome one, and getting a lot of RPG publishers to agree on anything would be difficult.
It’s too soon to predict what will happen, but it’s easy to see the ORC project devolving into infighting. To use a lightly exaggerated example, it’s hard to see a military veteran owned RPG publisher that specializes in war games about the global War on Terror agreeing with an RPG publisher that specializes in romantic furrykin adventures and prominently has the phrase “we recognize that words are violence” on their social media profiles. However, stranger things have happened, and nothing unites people quite like a common enemy, though to return to our starting observation about human nature, nothing quite inspires bickering and infighting like a common enemy.
So after that lengthy introduction, how does this relate to indie authors? It shows the value and goodwill generated by giving away things for free. I don’t mean the copyrights to my books or anything like that. I’m keeping those. I mean the value of giving away free ebooks for people to read. Right now, as of the time I’m recording this, Frostborn: The Gray Knight, Frostborn: The First Quest, Sevenfold Sword: Champion, Child of the Ghosts, Cloak Games: Thief Trap, Silent Order: Iron Hand, and The Tower of Endless Worlds are all free on the various ebook stores, and I will probably make Avenging Fire free as well when comes out of Kindle Unlimited later in February.
In fact, when I was typing this, I forgot that I made Ghost in the Ring free a while back. That comes to over 800,000 words of fiction that I give away for free almost every day across multiple platforms. At my absolute top writing speed, at peak health, and with nothing going wrong with real life, I can write about 100,000 words a month, though I’ve slowed down in the last few years. That means every single day of the year I give away like eight months of work for free. Eight months! Taken it on its own, that sounds like utter insanity, but in January 2023, I sold three times as many ebooks as I gave away for free. The free ebooks are an excellent way to draw new readers and get them to try the paid books in the rest of my various series. And anecdotally, I have heard from many, many readers who say they got started reading one of my free books and kept on reading.
I also wrote about 50,000 words of short stories or so that I gave away for free to my newsletter subscribers in 2022. Again, that’s several weeks of work, but it encourages people to sign up to my newsletter, which is my best tool for selling books. It also has a salutary effect of increasing my newsletter engagement since people click on the links to get the free story, which means fewer of my newsletters end up in spam folders. So I think the lesson for indie authors here is clear: don’t be afraid to give away ebooks for free. I don’t think I would have found as many readers as I’d have if I did not.
00:14:00 This Section: Comments from Reader JD about the Situation
Now, when I talked about this on Facebook, I got a very good comment from my reader JD, who is much more knowledgeable about the tabletop RPG world than I am and so he had some good points that I would like to read here.
He said: The leak was not a draft, it was a legally binding contract that rather than sign, a third party creator leaked. I believe it was a creator. Either way, it was clearly not a draft. That designation was applied by Hasbro after they got called out. On the whole, this is probably a boon for the tabletop RPG vertical at large.
Rather than a mass migration to a single new platform, I suspect that more niche options will start to gain traction. Creators will be emboldened to try new things and this will spread awareness about smaller systems from Deadlands to Thirsty Sword Lesbians. Yes, Thirsty Sword Lesbians is a real system that someone really designed and people really bought. Pathfinder is a better game anyway, and while I am a capitalist, this is a drawback to late-stage capitalism. Investors want tabletop RPGs as a service, and that’s what Hasbro was trying to do. Profit itself is no longer enough. Investors want growth, so they made a play that some people in suits thought would work like it does in every other vertical because they had no idea what their customers wanted or what made the property they bought stand out.
It was not the game that made Dungeons and Dragons so great. It was the free marketing and support of content creators, including Critical Role and other shows, as well as Kobold Press and other creators. Hasbro failed to do even the minimal amount of research about their customers and it has and will continue to cost them.
So those are good notes from JD.
00:015:34 Closing Remarks
Back in college lo these many years ago, I was a history major, which was not terribly useful for getting a job later in life. But what it did do was provide the gift of perspective, where if you think about it and you have a bad day, you say, well, at least you know, this isn’t the Black Death or many other historical catastrophes that occurred throughout human history. It also is good for providing lessons where you can look at the failures of the past and say to yourself, are we repeating this? Is this something I want to do, because someone tried this once before and look how badly it ended? In this case, I think we’re right. I think JD is right and that Hasbro’s failure here will be studied by future generations of business students as an example of how not to engage with your customers.
So that’s it for this week. Thanks for listening to The Pulp Writer Show. I hope you found the show useful. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review on your podcasting platform of choice. It really does help. Stay safe and stay healthy and see you all next week.
