BoardGameGeek fired its advertising manager of nearly 20 years today after an email exchange with a game publisher went viral on Reddit. The story broke this morning and is the most discussed item in the tabletop community right now.

Falling Whale Games submitted an ad campaign to BGG on May 7 for their Gamefound crowdfunding project Possess Me, Satan, a social deduction game for five to sixteen players in which one participant is secretly possessed by the ghost of a murderer. The premise is standard social deduction territory with hidden roles, ghost hunting, group accusation, and a horror theme and a provocative title.

After hearing nothing for over a week, Falling Whale followed up on May 15. What came back was not a standard rejection. Advertising manager Chad Krizan wrote that he could not “in good conscience” approve the ads, explaining that his personal firsthand experiences with demonic possession made the subject matter impossible for him to promote. He wrote, in part, that he had seen Jesus heal people from severe occultic abuse, that the theme of the game depicted a terrible reality, and that he would urge the developers to consider pulling the entire project.

Falling Whale published the email exchange. Within six hours, BGG founder Scott Alden posted on the forums: “Due to a situation in which BGG’s Advertising Manager responded inappropriately in a business email to a designer, I have decided to let him go.”

The story has predictably split the tabletop community. Critics of Krizan call the email unprofessional, intrusive, and a misuse of a business correspondence channel to evangelize a client. His defenders point out that a man with two decades of service to the hobby was fired within six hours of a Reddit post because he expressed a sincere religious conviction in a private email and declined a campaign on personal grounds.

Both of those things can be true simultaneously, and the speed of Krizan’s firing says something worth noting because of the way Board Game Geek has traditionally caused problems for Christians and conservatives. A man who spent twenty years building advertising relationships for the largest board game database in the world was terminated in less than a business day because his email went viral on Reddit. BGG did not investigate, consult legal counsel on a measured response, or issue a warning. The mob moved fast and BGG moved faster.

Possess Me, Satan has raised just over $14,000 from approximately 250 backers on Gamefound and has 30 days remaining in its campaign. The controversy has almost certainly helped its numbers.

This is not a surprise from BoardGameGeek. The platform has spent years banning users for expressing right-of-center or Christian viewpoints in forum discussions, while its moderation culture reflects the progressive consensus of its staff without apology. A user on BGG who questions gender ideology in a game’s promotional materials gets banned. A user who expresses concern about occult themes in hobby content gets banned. The pattern is documented and consistent. BGG does not treat religious conviction as a protected perspective deserving accommodation. It treats it as a problem to be managed.

Under US employment law, religious belief is a protected class. A company that terminates an employee for acting on sincere religious conviction faces real legal exposure. Krizan’s email was unprofessional. Whether it constituted terminable conduct under employment law, or whether BGG simply moved fast because the social media pressure was loud, is a question his attorneys are probably already asking.

The hobby community that lectures the industry about inclusion and treating people with dignity had a Christian man’s twenty-year career ended before lunch. The game that triggered it will sell more copies by the end of the week than it would have without the controversy.

What does it say about BoardGameGeek’s stated values that a twenty-year employee’s career ended in six hours because he expressed a sincere religious belief? Let us know in the comments.

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NEXT: WotC Is Becoming A Brand Licensor And The Justice League TTRPG Is The Latest Proof.

Brazilian publisher D20 Culture and Warner Bros. Discovery Global Consumer Products announced last week that Justice League Unlimited: The Roleplaying Game — the first official DC universe TTRPG in almost two decades — will launch on Gamefound in July 2026, co-authored by Mark Waid. It is rules-light, narrative-focused, and set in a post-Absolute Power DC universe.

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The story here is not the game itself. It is what the game represents in the broader context of where Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast are positioning Dungeons & Dragons.

The trajectory over the past three years is consistent. In January 2023, WotC attempted to revoke the Open Game License that had allowed third-party publishers to build businesses around D&D for over twenty years. The backlash was immediate and severe. Pathfinder publisher Paizo launched the ORC license as an alternative. Kobold Press, one of the most prolific producers of D&D-compatible content, began developing its own independent system. Hundreds of creators who had effectively advertised D&D for free walked away. The OGL attempt drove companies toward creating their own systems, fragmenting the ecosystem WotC had built.

The personnel losses followed the reputational damage. WotC’s end-of-2023 layoffs cut 20% of the global workforce, gutting the D&D writing and creative team. Swen Vincke of Larian Studios, accepting Baldur’s Gate 3‘s Game of the Year award, noted that “of the people who were in the original meeting room, there’s almost nobody left.” WotC President Cynthia Williams resigned in April 2024. Additional layoffs hit the D&D team again in October 2024.

Larian Studios walked away from Baldur’s Gate entirely, leaving Hasbro holding the rights to the most commercially successful D&D game ever made with no developer capable of continuing it. Hasbro’s internal response was to lay off most of the people who built the BG3 relationship in the first place. WotC announced it would find a new developer for Baldur’s Gate 4. That developer has not been publicly named. The game remains years away.

What WotC has done effectively in this period is licensing. The estimated $90 million in licensing fees from Baldur’s Gate 3 became one of the few genuine bright spots in Hasbro’s financial reports during a period of broader company losses. Magic: The Gathering licensing deals with Fortnite, Stranger Things, and assorted pop culture brands generate consistent revenue with minimal creative output required from WotC staff. The Hasbro financial reports increasingly lead with licensing revenue rather than publishing output as the engine of WotC’s profitability.

The Justice League TTRPG is not a WotC product. It is being built by a Brazilian publisher, D20 Culture, under a Warner Bros. Discovery license. WotC’s fingerprints are nowhere on it. That is the point. The TTRPG space that D&D once dominated through the OGL ecosystem, where WotC set the terms and third parties built around them, is now producing major licensed games entirely outside of WotC’s system. Justice League Unlimited is running on its own ruleset. So is the upcoming Invincible RPG. So is the MCDM RPG. So is Pathfinder 2E, which gained market share directly from WotC’s OGL debacle.

The speculation in the TTRPG community, which is documented as early as mid-2024 in D&D Beyond forums and elsewhere, is that WotC intends to stop being a publisher of D&D and become a licensor of D&D. In that model, the brand is leased to external studios, the creative output is outsourced, and Hasbro collects fees while running a leaner internal operation. The layoffs of the D&D creative team, the failure to secure a BG4 developer, the pivot toward digital platforms, and the reliance on licensing revenue all point in the same direction.

D&D as a brand remains powerful. The 2024 core rules revision sold, the Ravenloft and Arcana Unleashed 2026 release slate has genuine product to offer, and the 50th anniversary in 2024 drove measurable engagement. But the company that defined the TTRPG industry for fifty years is quietly exiting the business of making the game in favor of monetizing the name.

The Justice League TTRPG is a fine product. D20 Culture does good work — their Foes of Middle-earth funded in under ten minutes. Mark Waid co-authoring gives it legitimate creative pedigree. None of that changes what it represents: another major TTRPG launched in a space WotC once owned, built entirely without WotC’s involvement, succeeding on the strength of a license WotC no longer controls.

Is Wizards of the Coast still a game company, or is it becoming a brand management operation? Let us know in the comments.

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NEXT: Mass Effect Board Game Designer Eric Lang Is Telling Gamers Not to Support Companies With “Bigotry”

Eric Lang posted to Facebook this week with a message that had a specific target.

“I also encourage not financially supporting games or Kickstarters from creators with a public platform and history of bigotry,” Lang wrote. “Especially transphobes, in the year of our lord 2026. F--- TERFS always.”

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Lang did not name FryxGames or designer Jacob Fryxelius directly. He did not need to. The post arrived in the context of a years-long boycott campaign against Terraforming Mars, one of the most popular and critically acclaimed board games ever published, targeting the company’s CEO Enoch Fryxelius over social media posts from 2020 that included sharing content from gender-critical activist Posie Parker and expressing support for Sweden Democrat leader Jimmy Åkesson. Enoch deleted the posts and issued a general apology. The boycott calls have continued regardless.

Lang calling for a financial boycott of companies with “a history of bigotry” while positioning himself as the industry’s moral arbiter is worth examining given his actual track record.

Fandom Pulse has covered Lang’s career extensively. He leveraged his identity for career advancement at Cool Mini Or Not, where he eventually had to step down. In October 2024, Lang co-designed the Mass Effect: Priority Hagalaz board game and added pronoun designations to the character sheets. When players left negative reviews on BoardGameGeek citing the pronoun inclusions, Lang publicly called them “f---ing manbabies” who “can’t handle looking at pronouns on a character sheet.” BoardGameGeek subsequently removed the negative pronoun-related reviews from the ratings. Lang then posted on Bluesky: “I’m so proud of Mass Effect, and so endlessly tired of the F---ING MANBABIES who try and tank our BGG rating because we took 10 seconds to add pronouns to the squadmates?” He deleted the X post but left the Bluesky version up, writing: “Deleted the stupid post because, well, you know why. I hate deleting posts that I stand behind, but f--- it. Twitter sucks so f---ing much.”

More recently, Lang was accused of using Chinese slave labor in his manufacturing chain. His response to the designer who raised the accusation: “Consider kissing every square inch of my Black a**.”

Lang posted on Facebook last week warning gamers about tariffs: “Hey, Maybe don’t come at game industry people demanding education about tariffs RIGHT NOW.” The man lecturing the hobby about ethical purchasing decisions was telling his own customers to stop asking questions about where the products are made.

The campaign against FryxGames and Terraforming Mars follows a familiar pattern. Enoch Fryxelius expressed opinions in 2020 that were standard center-right Swedish political positions: skepticism of transgender ideology, support for a mainstream conservative party, and defense of a commentator popular in that country. He was not Jacob Fryxelius, who designed Terraforming Mars. He was not the game’s artist. He was the CEO of the family business. The posts were deleted. An apology was issued. None of it mattered to the boycott crowd, which has continued circulating the screenshots at every opportunity.

Terraforming Mars remains one of the highest-rated board games ever made. The audience for the game has, in the majority, separated the product from a CEO’s social media activity from six years ago. That is a reasonable position. It is the same position the gaming press takes toward designers on the left who express political opinions in public, including Lang himself, whose pattern of insults toward customers and accusations against competitors does not appear to have affected his career opportunities.

Lang is entitled to his opinions. He is also entitled to encourage people not to buy products he disagrees with. The audience is equally entitled to note that the designer calling for boycotts based on “bigotry” is the same person who called his own customers manbabies, told an accuser to kiss his behind, and leveraged his race for industry positions.

Do Eric Lang’s calls to boycott FryxGames carry credibility given his own track record with the hobby community?

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NEXT: The $900 Fake Magic Card: How a Facebook Marketplace Scam Exposed a Vulnerability Every Collector Faces

Bill Fridge, a Magic: The Gathering content creator and streamer, went live recently to walk his audience through one of the more painful collector stories in the MTG community — a near-perfect counterfeit card purchased for $900 from Facebook Marketplace that hit every failure point in the peer-to-peer collectibles market at once.

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Fridge had been pursuing the card for approximately nine months. It had been rising in value since its September release, and he’d done what any speculator does: identified an asset he believed would appreciate and moved when the price looked right. “If I sell these Magic cards I can afford to buy this at a very good price,” he explained on stream. “I thought I made a good investment. And since I got it, it went up like $200 in price.”

The seller looked clean by every available check. His Facebook profile showed years of activity, personal photographs with his girlfriend, and a professional LinkedIn presence. The platform’s AI vetting system flagged him as a trusted seller with multiple five-star reports and 17 years of account standing. “When I saw it, I pulled it out. I looked at it, I was like, ‘Oh, this is a beautiful card,’” Fridge said. “Based on everything the guy had on his Facebook page, I had no reason to think any otherwise.”

They met in person. The seller provided an address. The exchange happened face to face.

The counterfeit only revealed itself under close examination after the transaction. Fridge found three separate tells. The first was physical: the edges where the card was die-cut showed slight upward curling characteristic of proxy printing machines rather than Wizards of the Coast’s manufacturing process. “They kind of cut up right and that happens in proxy cards the way they die cut them. Very, very barely see it.”

The second was ink density. Held against legitimate cards from his collection, the printing was measurably lighter. The third and most definitive was a jeweler’s loupe test on the card’s back design — specifically the letter T. “There’s like some red dots that are on the green dot on the back. You can see the red dots if you like do a jeweler’s loop and zoom in. I use my phone to zoom in on the T and the T on the back will have these little ridges on the bottom of the T and all the other cards had them clear as day and this one was not clear. It was very muffled.”

The quality of the fake made it worse. “It looks so real, too. It’s like very well done. It’s the worst part about it.”

Fridge messaged the seller explaining his concerns and asking whether the seller knew the card’s authenticity was questionable. The response was immediate: the seller blocked him and removed him from the conversation.

“I was like, ‘Oh, he must know. He must know what happened,’” Fridge said.

Fridge contacted the payment platform to report the fraud and open a dispute. The platform suspended his account instead. The account held significantly more than the $900 transaction.

He had sent money through a friends and family transfer — the same feature he uses to pay his mother, sister, and roommates. That habit extended, fatally, to a Facebook Marketplace exchange with a stranger. Friends and family transfers carry no buyer protection. There is no dispute mechanism. The money moved and didn’t come back.

“I did friends and family like a dumbass,” Fridge said. “I just felt like everything lined up and I could trust the guy and I just wasn’t thinking.”

The fraud investigation is more complicated than a typical online scam because Fridge is not dealing with an anonymous seller. He has the man’s name, LinkedIn profile, apparent employer, and the physical address where they met. He looked this person in the face.

“I have the dude’s information. Like, I assumingly know where he works. I found his LinkedIn. I found everything,” Fridge said. “Which wise it doesn’t add up that he would scam like that.”

The ambiguity is what makes it so hard. The seller claimed to have obtained the card from a local game store, Mox Boarding House. If true, the seller may not have known the card was fake, and the counterfeit entered the chain of custody somewhere upstream. The immediate block when Fridge raised the issue suggests otherwise.

Filing a police report is the logical next step. Fridge acknowledged it while questioning its practical value: “I have the dude’s information and stuff, but even that feels like a lot — am I wasting police time doing it?” Interstate fraud at $900 falls under federal jurisdiction when conducted across state lines, which peer-to-peer marketplace transactions frequently do. A report creates a paper trail whether or not it produces immediate results.

MTG counterfeits have become sophisticated enough that fakes pass casual inspection from experienced collectors. The card Fridge bought required a jeweler’s loupe and direct comparison against authenticated copies to identify. Visual inspection alone gives buyers near-zero protection against high-quality proxies.

Platform AI vetting systems assess behavioral patterns and account history — not the authenticity of what’s being sold. A seller who has conducted dozens of legitimate transactions before pivoting to counterfeit cards passes automated screening cleanly every time. The 17-year account standing that reassured Fridge was real. It said nothing about the card in the seller’s hand.

Friends and family payment transfers remain the sharpest vulnerability in private transactions. Sellers who request this method explicitly are eliminating the one mechanism buyers have for recourse — which is exactly why they request it. That request should function as a hard stop. Legitimate private sellers accept payment methods with dispute mechanisms because they’re confident in what they’re selling. Sellers who insist on friends and family are pricing in the possibility of a problem.

Fridge closed the stream hoping his account would be restored after identity verification. “My whole life is messed up,” he said. “I took a risk picking this up the way I did. I thought it was a calculated risk. I was wrong.”

What protections should peer-to-peer marketplace platforms be required to provide collectibles buyers?

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NEXT: Games Workshop’s Female Custodes Are Sitting on Shelves and the Store Data Shows Why

Games Workshop’s decision to introduce female Custodians into the Adeptus Custodes produced one of the hobby’s most sustained community controversies. Months after release, a YouTube investigation attempted to answer the question engaged players have been asking: are the models actually selling?

The video By The 40K Empress, titled “90% REJECT THEM: Investigating The Femstodes Retail Reality,” comes from a 40K content creator who spent several weeks gathering community reports, running polls across YouTube and X, and obtaining store-level sales data from industry source Chainsword 40K. The creator acknowledges throughout that without official numbers from GW, everything stays in the territory of informed inference. What the investigation produces is the most systematic community-level attempt to answer the question available.

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A supermajority of Magic: The Gathering Arena developers announced their union last week, affiliated with the Communications Workers of America. They called themselves United Wizards of the Coast. They gave Hasbro until May 1st to voluntarily recognize it. Hasbro said nothing.

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Disney Lorcana launched at Gen Con in August 2023 with two-hour lines and sold-out shelves within hours. Ravensburger had underestimated demand badly enough that the first set, The First Chapter, was nearly impossible to find at retail for months. Scalpers moved product at double and triple the manufacturer’s suggested price. Local game stores couldn’t stock enough to run organized play events. The game was everywhere and nowhere simultaneously.

By early 2025, Lorcana had sold over one billion cards. The launch was the most successful product debut in Ravensburger’s history. The First Chapter booster box topped TCGPlayer’s sealed product sales chart for December 2023 by dollar volume. Lorcana hit number three overall in TCG sales in its debut year, an extraordinary achievement for a brand-new game entering a market dominated by decades-old franchises. Then the speculators left.

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Wizards of the Coast debuted Magic: The Gathering’s upcoming Hobbit crossover set at MagicCon: Las Vegas this past weekend. Within twenty-four hours, the flagship card of that reveal, which is a a new version of The One Ring illustrated by veteran MTG artist Dan Frazier, was confirmed as a traced copy of artwork created by artist Marta Nael for the 2023 Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth set.

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Frazier and WotC issued a joint statement on May 2. The artist did not soften it.

“I made a mistake, and I feel awful,” Frazier wrote. “I especially feel for Marta, whose work I adore. In trying to create an iconic version of The One Ring, while looking at references online, I ended up using Marta’s Ring as a reference and painted over it to try to depict the item fans hold dear to their hearts. In doing so, I didn’t make it my own. I’m reaching out to Marta privately to apologize artist to artist. I love creating art for Magic, I’ve loved being a part of this artist community for more than 30 years, and I’m sorry I’ve let my fans down.”

WotC’s portion of the statement acknowledged its own review process failed to catch the issue before the card was shown publicly: “Dan Frazier is a titan of the art industry and of Magic: The Gathering. He has created so many iconic pieces of art for the game that he will forever be a part of our game, and we value his contributions tremendously. With that in mind, we’re disappointed our review process didn’t catch the issue. Like Dan, we have already reached out to apologize to Marta Nael for not catching the use of her art in this piece. None of this was intentional, but we’re going to make it right as much as we can. On digital versions of the card, we will credit both Dan Frazier and Marta Nael. We will also make sure Marta is compensated for her work here.”

Note the qualifier: digital versions. The physical cards have already been printed. Nael’s name will not appear on them.

The community’s reaction came fast. Donato Giancola, one of the most respected fantasy illustrators working today and a longtime MTG contributor, posted on Facebook: “Wizards of the Coast just released a very sorry excuse for the most important card in their upcoming Hobbit set. They just digitally sampled the previous One Ring card from the Lord of the Rings set and flipped and deleted the Elvish Runes. I doubt Dan Frasier had any real say in how this came about. So much for the One Ring being unique. Welcome to Wizards of the Coast’s Digital Only Universes Beyond, photocopied art.”

Former MTG podcaster Joey Pasco was direct: “This is pretty messed up. As pointed out by Donato Giancola on FB, it seems the new printing of The One Ring is just a flipped cutout of a previous borderless printing (artist credit: Marta Nael) with the runes removed, then plopped onto a Dan Frazier background.”

Frazier’s agent confirmed that the artist was not shown the final version after several requested changes were implemented, which raises a question WotC has not answered: if Frazier did not approve the final card, who did? And how did an image that is visibly a mirrored, rune-stripped version of a three-year-old card pass through an internal review process at a company that made the original set?

Frazier has contributed art for 188 cards over the years, including the original five Moxen in Alpha. His standing in the MTG art community is not in dispute. The statement makes clear he bears responsibility for using Nael’s work as a direct reference. It also makes clear WotC’s review process is broken, because a company that produced Tales of Middle-earth in 2023 should have recognized its own card’s ring when a new version of it arrived for The Hobbit set in 2026.

The first major takeaway is that WotC’s team somehow did not catch this, despite having made a set based on the same franchise three years prior, and it made it all the way to being displayed at a major event within months of the set’s release.

The second takeaway is structural. WotC’s remedy is digital credit and compensation for Nael, which is more than nothing. But the physical cards carry only Frazier’s name. Every copy of The One Ring from The Hobbit set that moves through the secondary market will do so without acknowledging the artist whose work made it possible.

This is not the first time the MTG art pipeline has produced a situation that damaged a creator. It likely will not be the last. The review process that failed here is the same one responsible for approving every card that ships to print. WotC called this a moment to recognize that humans make mistakes. That is true. It is also a moment to ask why a company with thirty-plus years of experience and a review team specifically tasked with catching problems like this one sent a traced card to a major convention reveal without anyone noticing.

Does WotC’s response make this right? Or does Marta Nael deserve better than a name that will never appear on a physical card?

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Epic Fantasy hasn’t been this hard-hitting since Tolkien. In a world where humanity is akin to a Roman legion, a great darkness arises. Read A Throne Of Bones today.

NEXT: Daggerheart Is Building a Romantasy Campaign Inspired by Tabletop BDSM Smut With the D&D 2024 Team at the Helm

Darrington Press this week unveiled the cover for Daggerheart: Hope and Fear, the first major expansion for Critical Role’s tabletop RPG. It ships August 25. But the expansion itself is not the story. The story is what Darrington Press is building around it, and who is building it.

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The biggest story in tabletop this week has been framed as a triumphant defection. Acquisitions Incorporated, the 17-year-old actual play series that predates Critical Role and built its reputation running official Dungeons & Dragons content at PAX conventions, announced at PAX Unplugged 2025 that it is abandoning D&D entirely. The new campaign runs on Daggerheart, the TTRPG published by Critical Role’s Darrington Press. The TTRPG community celebrated. What most of that coverage missed is who is running Daggerheart.

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Jeremy Crawford and Christopher Perkins are the lead designers on Daggerheart at Darrington Press. Both men left Wizards of the Coast in mid-2025. Both were the primary architects of D&D 2024, the edition that drove Crawford to declare the game needed to be less white, removed orcs from the Monster Manual because depicting them as monsters was deemed racist, gender-swapped Dryads and Hags away from their traditional mythological depictions, and added a safe space mechanic to the Dungeon Master’s Guide requiring players to make an X with their arms to halt any game session that made them uncomfortable. That last feature was pulled directly from BDSM community safe word practice and inserted into a tabletop roleplaying game aimed at teenagers.

Fandom Pulse covered Perkins’ and Crawford’s departure from WotC last June. Crawford said at the time, “I’ve always believed that great games invite everyone to the table, and that’s exactly what excites me about joining Darrington Press.” Perkins said joining felt “a bit like coming home.” Neither addressed what they were leaving behind. Both left as the 2024 edition’s failure in the market was becoming impossible to ignore.

The problems they left behind at WotC are documented. Under their stewardship the game lost its core players. White male gamers, historically the plurality of D&D’s fanbase, were told by executive producer Kyle Brink in 2023 that “guys like me can’t leave soon enough for this hobby.” Brink is now gone too. The 2024 edition’s sales did not recover the ground lost from the 2023 OGL betrayal, when WotC attempted to revoke the open license that had made D&D the foundation of the entire TTRPG ecosystem for twenty years.

Now those same designers are building Daggerheart. The system launched in May 2025. It has a growing roster of actual play shows, a PAX presence, and this week the prize of Acquisitions Incorporated using it as its campaign platform. Crawford is GMing the first arc. Perkins takes over after that.

WotC launched its own actual play response the same week. Dungeon Masters, which premiered April 22 on YouTube, features Jasmine Bhullar as the GM. Bhullar’s casting, as Fandom Pulse noted in our April 21 article on the show, tells you everything you need to know about who WotC built this show for. The cast skews toward the same ideological demo that drove the 2024 edition’s design. The prior WotC actual play series, Dice, Camera, Action, collapsed in 2020 after cast controversies. The lesson WotC took from that was apparently to launch another one with a similar casting philosophy.

The real story underneath the Acquisitions Incorporated announcement is not that D&D players are finding a better home. It is that the people who damaged D&D have taken their brand relationships and their design philosophy to a new address and are building the same house again. Crawford and Perkins did not leave WotC because they had a change of heart about what tabletop gaming should be. Perkins said explicitly that Darrington Press felt like “coming home.” Critical Role’s audience is exactly the demographic their D&D 2024 decisions were designed to court. They are not escaping the ideology. They are doubling down on it with a fresh IP and a roster of actual play partners who were already aligned with them.

Daggerheart may well be a better-designed system than D&D 2024. That is a low bar. But players considering whether to follow Acquisitions Incorporated onto the new platform should know who set the table they are sitting down at.

Does the Daggerheart team’s D&D 2024 track record change whether you’d try the game?

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Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.

NEXT: Wizards of the Coast Launches Official D&D Actual Play Series, And The Cast Tells You Everything You Need To Know

Wizards of the Coast announced Dungeon Masters on April 16, premiering April 22 on YouTube. The show is WotC’s first official long-form actual play series, set in Ravenloft, and designed to preview content from the June sourcebook Ravenloft: The Horrors Within. New episodes drop weekly. Content from each episode goes on sale through D&D Beyond immediately after it airs.

The cast: Jasmine Bhullar as Dungeon Master, with players Mayanna Berrin, Christian Navarro (13 Reasons Why), Neil Newbon (Baldur’s Gate III), and Devora Wilde (Baldur’s Gate III).

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The official Cyberpunk Trading Card Game Kickstarter closed April 17 at $26,953,978 from 47,676 backers. That makes it the most-funded tabletop campaign in Kickstarter history and the third highest-funded project in any category the platform has ever seen. The two campaigns above it are a UV printer ($46.7 million) and Brandon Sanderson’s four secret pandemic novels, which raised $41.7 million in 2022 and still hold the all-time Kickstarter record. In the tabletop world specifically, nothing has come close. The Cosmere RPG, also based on Sanderson’s work, held the prior tabletop record at $15.15 million. The Cyberpunk TCG passed it on April 1 and nearly doubled it by the close.

WeirdCo, the Seattle-based publisher behind the game, developed it in direct partnership with CD Projekt Red. The campaign launched March 17, hit its $100,000 goal in minutes, and spent the following month smashing every tabletop milestone on record.

The game that almost wasn’t

To understand why 47,000 people handed over an average of $565 each for a card game, you need to understand what CD Projekt Red spent five years rebuilding.

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The oldest continuously published science-fiction roleplaying game is crossing over to the world’s most popular ruleset, and tabletop gamers are showing up in force.

Mongoose Publishing announced Traveller 5E in November 2025, and the BackerKit campaign launched in late March 2026 under World’s Largest RPGs. As of March 31, the numbers tell the story: $76,949 raised from 237 backers against a $1,977 goal, roughly 3,890% funded with 45 days still on the clock.

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Traveller first launched in 1977 when Marc Miller and Game Designers’ Workshop released the original little black books. It stood apart from fantasy RPGs immediately: no levels, no traditional classes, and a hard science-fiction universe where characters could die during character creation through its lifepath system. The game ran through Classic Traveller, MegaTraveller, Traveller: The New Era, Marc Miller’s Traveller, and the 2013 Traveller 5th Edition. Mongoose Publishing has held the license since 2008, and their 1st and 2nd Edition runs remain fan favorites. Now, nearly fifty years after launch, the game is being rebuilt for 5E.

GDW and TSR veteran Timothy Brown is heading the project alongside a team of Traveller and 5E designers, working in full coordination with Mongoose. The campaign is not a straight rules conversion. The team is reimagining the core Mongoose line as a new 5E-compatible product line packaged as a four to five book slipcase set running potentially over 2,000 pages.

The core box delivers lifepath character creation, a new Psion class, nine subclasses, 14 career backgrounds, gear, over 100 robots including playable androids and cyborgs, 65-plus starships, full ship creation and combat rules, world generation, 45-plus alien animals, and over 85 vehicles. Stretch goals add a deck-plan book, metal dice, a magnetic referee screen, miniatures, and special-edition metal slipcase versions. Digital versions are headed to DriveThruRPG, with physical shipping slated for October 2027.

For longtime fans of the game, this is exactly what it looks like: a portal to bring 5E players into the Traveller universe without asking them to learn an entirely new system first. Whether it converts them into Mongoose Traveller players down the road is the real question, and a good one. Traveller rewards the players willing to go deep with it.

The campaign is live now at backerkit.com. Forty-five days remain and it’s already made nearly a quarter of a million dollars, showing fans’ enthusiasm for the game is still very well alive.

Are you backing Traveller 5E? Let us know in the comments.

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Survival of the fittest just became a lot more dangerous. Space Fleet Academy Year Two delivers the hard sci-fi action Paramount refused to give you with Starfleet Academy. That’s why we’re still here while the show is gone. Read it today!

NEXT: Andy Weir Apologizes To Alex Kurtzman, But He Didn’t Backtrack On The Low Quality Of New Star Trek

Gary Con 2026 produced one of the more surprising moments in recent Dungeons & Dragons history. Luke Gygax, son of D&D co-creator Gary Gygax, held a press event at the convention where he revealed that Dan Ayoub, the new head of D&D at Wizards of the Coast, personally apologized to him twice for how his family was treated by the company. Luke got emotional on camera delivering the news, saying he never believed he would live to see the day when the names “Gygax,” “Greyhawk,” and “Dungeons & Dragons” would be combined again in an official capacity.

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The news was reported by D&D enthusiast Kevin Lamb on X, who covered the press event in detail.

Ayoub himself appeared at GaryCon and addressed longtime fans directly. “I’m standing on the shoulders of giants,” he said. “I love our past and where we came from, and I want to make sure we’re honoring and bringing as much of that back as we can.”

That is exactly what the fanbase has wanted to hear for years. The question is whether it means anything.

Luke’s Vision for Greyhawk

Luke had plenty to say about what he actually wants to bring to the new official Greyhawk supplements. He loves 5th Edition for expanding the player base but was direct about its limitations: “I love 5E for expanding the customer base, but this new fangled Dungeons & Dragons is too easy!” He wants to write alternate rules that make Greyhawk more “Gygaxian,” adventures that are genuinely dangerous rather than cakewalks, and a game that rewards problem solving rather than making characters feel like superheroes walking around in tights and a cape.

He also wants to feature his childhood character Melf “the right way.” Luke was never happy with how Melf has been portrayed in either the character art or the fiction. He even had issues with the original LJN toy, which was never actually based on Melf to begin with. That toy was Peralay from Quest for the Heartstone, a completely different character, and it looks nothing like Melf. For the record, Melf does not have blond hair.

On the subject of a potential D&D film, Luke said he’d want David Harbour to play his father. When the crowd asked who should play Luke, he laughed: “The guy who played Reacher, or uh, John Cena, yeah, those guys are probably the closest.”

Lamb’s assessment of Luke himself was generous and worth reading in full: “I do think that Luke is a genuinely kind and good guy, and believes that this is the very best thing he can do to honor his dad’s legacy, keep the family name in the ongoing pop culture consciousness, and do justice to the setting he grew up with. And for that I’m happy for him and hope that he is pleased with the results.”

The Fanbase Is Not as Easy to Win Back

The goodwill toward Luke does not automatically transfer to Wizards of the Coast, and Lamb made that clear.

“It doesn’t seem like anyone will be coming back to WotC as long as content disclaimers are attached to beloved older products and until a direct, specific, humble and sincere apology is made for Jason Tondro publicly posting that ‘grognards aren’t worth listening to.’ No wishy-washy ‘we realized we alienated some fans in the past’ or ‘we learned something, fans learned something, we’re all winners’ or any nonsense like that.”

The grievances are specific and documented. Former WotC executive Kyle Brink publicly bragged that white people could not leave the hobby fast enough. Tondro, the lead designer on The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons, then made his contempt for longtime fans equally public, calling them “not worth listening to” after Elon Musk and much of the gaming internet responded angrily to the book’s foreword attacking Gary Gygax and the original creators.

As we reported, Tondro’s foreword warned readers that the original D&D materials contained “a virtual catalog of insensitive and derogatory language” and framed specific creative choices by Gygax as deliberate misogyny. When the backlash came, rather than engage with the criticism, Tondro dismissed the entire upset fanbase. “Early in the book’s development the marketing team asked me what sort of critiques we should expect and prepare for,” he wrote in a Facebook post that later circulated widely. “And I and the editors agreed the problem was going to be from progressives and people from underrepresented groups who justly took offense at the language of original D&D.” He followed that by saying he considered the grognards “not worth listening to” and had not anticipated their outrage.

Brink has since left the company. Tondro has not.

Lamb addressed Ayoub directly on this point: “I love that you’ve got Luke’s endorsement, Dan Ayoub, but a private apology only to him is only part of what needs to happen to truly mend the rift.”

What Fans Are Actually Asking For

Lamb laid out a concrete list of what repair looks like, and it is worth reading in full rather than summarizing.

He wants a direct apology that specifically condemns Tondro’s sentiments and assures fans that Tondro will never be allowed near legacy content or future commemorative releases again.

On The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons itself: “I was absolutely disgusted by the vile and patently untrue accusations made by Jon Peterson and Jason Tondro against those who wrote and played the earlier editions in the opening Forewords of the ‘Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons’ book. The fact that they literally trashed the very creators and contents that the book was supposed to be celebrating was one of the worst decisions that WotC ever allowed. Please consider recalling all unsold copies and completely scrubbing the names of Peterson and Tondro from the book, replace their libelous text with a proper and respectful introduction, and re-release it.”

He also called out the omission of Gods, Demigods, and Heroes from that volume as “a glaring and totally uncalled for omission.”

Beyond that, Lamb asked WotC to commission Jeff Easley to paint all-new covers for each of the orange spine AD&D hardcovers, plus the Fiend Folio, which never received that treatment, and rerelease them with premium binding and corrected text, minus the typos carried over from the earlier print-on-demand scans.

“That would be awesome,” he wrote, “and combined with a corrected ‘Making of’ book would be huge steps in the right direction.”

Where Things Stand

Dan Ayoub’s words at GaryCon are the right words. Luke Gygax’s emotional response to a private apology and a chance to work on official Greyhawk content again is genuine and earned. Nobody should take that away from either of them.

But the damage to WotC’s relationship with its longtime fanbase was not done privately. It was done publicly, on social media, in published forewords, and in interviews. Kyle Brink celebrated the exit of longtime fans. Jason Tondro dismissed them as unworthy of a response. Those statements are still out there. Tondro still works there.

A private apology to one member of the Gygax family is a start, but it is not a finish.

What do you think of WotC’s overtures at GaryCon? Is Luke Gygax’s endorsement of Dan Ayoub enough to bring you back to the table, or does WotC still have more work to do? Let us know.

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Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.

NEXT: 7th Sea Third Edition: A Beloved RPG Gets Another Shot at Redemption

A swashbuckling roleplaying game that raised over a million dollars, collapsed under its own ambition, sparked cultural controversies, and was sold off to pay debts is getting another chance. Studio Agate’s Kickstarter for 7th Sea Third Edition has already raised $282,913 against a $34,526 goal with 1,781 backers and 27 days remaining. For fans who watched the second edition implode in slow motion, the numbers are both encouraging and cautiously familiar.

The game has been here before.

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The Original Game

7th Sea launched in 1999 from Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG), designed by John Wick and Jennifer Wick. The setting was Théah—a fictional analog of Renaissance-era Europe where swashbuckling heroes fought corrupt nobles, secret societies manipulated world events, and sorcery ran through noble bloodlines. The nations mapped loosely to real-world counterparts: Avalon for England, Castille for Spain, Montaigne for France, Eisen for Germany.

The game used AEG’s Roll and Keep system—players rolled a pool of dice and kept a number equal to their relevant trait, adding kept dice together to beat a target number. It was elegant, fast, and created the kind of cinematic action the setting demanded. A swordsman with high Finesse and a mastery of the Aldana school could carve through a room full of mooks while barely breaking a sweat. The system rewarded competence and made players feel like heroes.

The companion card game, also called 7th Sea, launched simultaneously and became a significant success in the collectible card game market. The two products fed each other—card game players discovered the RPG, RPG players collected the cards. AEG built a substantial community around the Théah setting.

John Wick was working within AEG’s structure at the time, one designer among many at a company that produced multiple game lines. The game was his creative vision, but AEG owned the property. When the card game eventually wound down and AEG moved on to other projects, 7th Sea went dormant. Wick spent years working on other games—Houses of the Blooded, Legend of the Five Rings supplements, and various indie projects—while the rights to his most famous creation sat with his former employer.

The Million Dollar Kickstarter

In 2016, Wick acquired the rights back from AEG and launched a Kickstarter for 7th Sea Second Edition. The campaign was a phenomenon. It raised $1,315,994—a record for tabletop RPGs at the time—from 11,483 backers. The enthusiasm was genuine and overwhelming. Fans who’d loved the original game wanted more Théah. New players were drawn in by the setting’s swashbuckling appeal.

Then the stretch goals started.

As the money poured in, Wick and his company John Wick Presents kept adding books, supplements, and expansions to the campaign. Nation books for every region of Théah. Books covering Khitai—the game’s analog for Asia and the Pacific Rim. Additional sourcebooks, adventures, and setting material. By the time the campaign ended, the scope of promised deliverables was enormous.

Too enormous.

The production challenges were compounded by a decision that alienated a significant portion of the existing fanbase: Wick scrapped the Roll and Keep system entirely. The new system was a narrative-focused, success-counting mechanic where players rolled pools of d10s and assembled sets of ten from the results. Failure was essentially removed from the game—heroes always succeeded, the question was only what it cost them.

Forum discussions from the period capture the reaction. As one RPGnet poster noted, Wick “was in love with a few particular design ideas from his other systems and aped those rather than 7th Sea 1e.” Another described the system as rolling “to see how many decisions you get to make during the current scene. Success or failure is never in question.”

The system had defenders. Some players appreciated the narrative focus and the cinematic feel. But longtime fans who’d loved Roll and Keep felt the game had been replaced with something unrecognizable. The setting was still Théah. The characters were still swashbuckling heroes. But the mechanical DNA was gone.

The Cultural Controversies

The Khitai expansion, covering Théah’s analog for Asia, India, and the Pacific Rim, drew criticism from progressive quarters who accused the game of misrepresenting Asian and South Asian cultures. The accusations ranged from cultural appropriation to outright racism, with critics arguing that Wick’s fictional analogs flattened complex cultures into stereotypes.

Wick and his team pushed back, arguing that all of Théah’s nations were fictional analogs rather than direct representations, and that the same logic applied to the European nations as to the Asian ones. The controversy didn’t go away. It added to the general atmosphere of chaos surrounding the second edition’s troubled production.

The combination of delayed books, a divisive new system, cultural controversies, and mounting financial pressure proved fatal. John Wick Presents laid off most of its staff. The Khitai core book was eventually delivered, but four promised supplements—covering Agnivarsa, Fuso, Han, and Shenzhou—were never produced. The company went bankrupt.

Chaosium’s Acquisition and Handoff

Chaosium, publishers of Call of Cthulhu and RuneQuest, acquired 7th Sea from Wick in 2019. The acquisition was framed as a rescue operation—Chaosium would fulfill the outstanding Kickstarter obligations and give the game a stable home.

Chaosium is a company that has moved firmly in a progressive direction in recent years, adding LGBTQ content and diversity initiatives to their game lines including Call of Cthulhu. Their stewardship of 7th Sea reflected that orientation.

Wick joined Chaosium as creative director for 7th Sea initially, but parted ways around 2023. The Khitai core book was delivered, but the four remaining supplements were ultimately cancelled. Chaosium announced they would not be fulfilling the rest of the Kickstarter, offering refunds instead.

In July 2025, Chaosium handed 7th Sea to Studio Agate, a French independent studio based in Paris. Agate had been producing French translations of 7th Sea and had run a successful English Kickstarter for The Price of Arrogance, an official campaign for the second edition. They knew the property, they had a track record with the community, and they had the creative team to take it forward.

Studio Agate’s Third Edition

The current Kickstarter, titled 7th Sea 3rd Edition: A New Journey, is described as “a new era for the iconic TTRPG: modernized Roll & Keep, Théah ten years later, shaped by the community.”

The key phrase is “modernized Roll & Keep.” Studio Agate is bringing back the dice mechanic that defined the original game. The community’s frustration with the second edition’s system has been heard. Whether the modernized version captures what made the original Roll and Keep satisfying remains to be seen, but the decision to return to it is the right one.

The setting advances Théah’s timeline by ten years, allowing the third edition to build on the second edition’s lore while establishing its own identity. The Kickstarter page emphasizes community involvement in shaping the game’s direction—a deliberate contrast to the second edition’s top-down creative decisions that alienated the fanbase.

The campaign has funded at 819% of its goal with nearly a month remaining. That’s strong momentum, though the numbers are modest compared to the second edition’s million-dollar haul. The community is interested but cautious. The enthusiasm is real, but so is the memory of what happened last time.

The Delivery Question

Studio Agate has a better track record than John Wick Presents. They’re a small, focused studio that has delivered on previous projects. They’re not promising the moon. The Kickstarter’s scope appears measured compared to the second edition’s stretch goal explosion.

But the tabletop RPG Kickstarter landscape is littered with cautionary tales. Promising campaigns have collapsed before. Stretch goals have a way of multiplying. Production challenges are real. And the 7th Sea community has been burned badly enough that skepticism is warranted.

The RPGnet discussion thread captures the community’s ambivalence. Some backers note that Agate “still hasn’t delivered their last campaign” before launching this one. Others point to the 819% funding as evidence of genuine enthusiasm. The consensus seems to be cautious optimism—people want this to work, but they’re not betting everything on it.

What This Could Be

7th Sea at its best is one of the great RPG settings. Théah is rich, detailed, and distinctive. The swashbuckling tone, the secret societies, the sorcery systems tied to noble bloodlines, the naval combat—all of it creates a game that feels unlike anything else on the market. The original Roll and Keep system was elegant and satisfying. When everything worked, 7th Sea delivered exactly what it promised: cinematic heroism in a world of intrigue and adventure.

The second edition proved that the setting could survive a bad system—people kept playing it, kept writing for it, kept caring about Théah even when the mechanics frustrated them. That’s a testament to how good the original creative vision was.

Studio Agate has the setting, the system direction, and apparently the community support to make a third edition work. Whether they can deliver on the promise is the only question that matters now.

The game has died twice. Once quietly, when AEG moved on. Once loudly, when the second edition collapsed under its own weight. A third death would probably be permanent. But if Studio Agate can deliver a focused, well-produced third edition that brings back Roll and Keep and respects what made the original special, 7th Sea could finally get the second chance it deserved.

Théah is worth saving. The question is whether this is the team to save it.

What do you think? Can Studio Agate deliver where John Wick Presents failed, or has the 7th Sea community been burned too many times to fully commit again?

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Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.

NEXT: Game Night Picks YouTuber Fires Back at Rodney Smith Allegations, Implies Possible Legal Action Over “Misinformation”

The owner of Game Night Picks, Chaz Marler, released a detailed rebuttal to allegations made by Rodney Smith of Watch It Played, denying claims of fraudulent advertising practices and accusing Smith of publishing private analytics data without consent. The response comes weeks after Smith’s explosive document accused Game Night Picks of using YouTube’s paid promotion tools to artificially inflate view counts while charging publishers per-view fees.

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Yesterday, we reported on a BlueSky-driven cancel mob attacking Alderac Entertainment Group’s COO, Ryan Dancey, over some innocuous and accurate comments about the future of AI in game design. Now, despite being a legend in the industry with incredible experience, it seems the anti-AI activists have taken a real human scalp and gotten him fired in the newest example of board game cancel culture.

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The board game cancel mob is one of the worst out of any industry, and gets very little coverage from the outside because the industry is so small, while blowing on their bad behavior risks being blacklisted and tarred and feathered by this group. Yesterday, they set their sights on Ryan Dancey, of whom you can read about his tame comments acknowledging the future of AI in board game development, as it’s already being adopted by most sane companies.

This situation involves Alderac Entertainment Group, which is owned and lead by John Zinser, one of the most cowardly and pro-cancel culture activists out there, who’s taken what was once a great and innovative company, and turned it into something that produces basic-tier level “variant” games with generic themes in recent years, hiring some of the worst of the worst of these elements and catering toward the radical activist group within the board gaming industry. Zinser threw the author of this blog under the bus when the Game Manufacturers’ Association attacked over my wanting to make a board game without their permission, prompting race grifters like Eric Lang and woke influencers like Rodney Smith of Watch It Played to lead a cancel mob.

The situation escalated yesterday with Dancey posting an update to his prior post to LinkedIn after his original statements went viral with the cancel pigs:

Though phrased very politely, the crux of it is John Zinser fired and canceled him over simply positing what AI might do, and will do, in a few years. Zinser posted his own corporate-speak update on BlueSky for the mob:

Even so, the mob in his comments wasn’t satisfied with the scalp, ever moving the goalposts:

Apparently, this has to do with Wingspan designer Elizabeth Hargrove, who herself is a radical activist. What happened between them involving a personal matter isn’t clear, but SJWs only want to cancel.

The real tragedy of this and AEG and John Zinser’s shortsightedness in this matter is made clear because of who Dancey is. While people might not know the name as a household one, he’s a person largely responsible for why D&D and Magic: The Gathering built their businesses into juggernauts and became a success.

Ryan Dancey played a pivotal role in reshaping the business side of Dungeons & Dragons at Wizards of the Coast, helping transform it from a struggling legacy property into a modern, ecosystem‑driven franchise. After Wizards acquired the near‑bankrupt TSR in 1997, Dancey took charge of D&D’s business and marketing, overseeing the development and launch of 3rd‑edition D&D and restructuring the RPG division to improve profitability and operational discipline. His key insight was that D&D’s real value lay not just in its core rulebooks but in the broader community of players and publishers around it, so he championed a strategy of openness rather than tight control, a great thing for human developers and players.

To unlock that potential, Dancey largely conceived the Open Game License (OGL) and the d20 System Trademark License, which allowed third‑party companies to create compatible products using the System Reference Document while still tying them back to the D&D brand. This move reversed TSR’s earlier stance of aggressively policing fan content and instead encouraged a boom of compatible supplements, adventures, and even standalone RPGs, which expanded the overall market and drove more players toward official D&D products. By turning D&D into a platform rather than a closed system, Dancey helped rebuild goodwill with fans and created a self‑reinforcing cycle where third‑party success fed demand for core books, organized play, and licensed settings.

On the Magic: The Gathering side, Dancey’s contribution was more indirect but no less important: he helped position Magic as the financial engine that could subsidize and stabilize D&D’s long‑term growth. As Magic exploded into a global hit, Dancey and other Wizards executives used its strong margins to fund ambitious RPG projects, including the costly overhaul of D&D into 3rd edition and the expansion of organized play programs. He also pushed for clear separation between the two brands, keeping Magic as a collectible card game juggernaut and D&D as a roleplaying ecosystem, so each could pursue its own licensing and tournament strategies without cannibalizing the other. In this way, Dancey helped ensure that both Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons could grow into larger, more sustainable businesses under the same corporate roof.

With pioneering like this, and clear care for the human designers and developers to create innovative games, it’s someone AEG would want in their arsenal, especially as a Chief Operating Officer. This is a person with a clear business vision, something many lack in board gaming.

However, a small mob of cancel culture activists is more important to Alderac Entertainment Group. One can’t feel bad for them when their entire company eventually gets replaced by AI anyway.

What do you think about this? Leave a comment and let us know.

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NEXT: RUMOR: D&D 6th Edition Reboot Incoming As Hasbro Scrambles To Save Dying Franchise

AEG or Alderac Entertainment Group was once known for their top-of-the-line collectible card games and RPGs like Legend of the Five Rings, 7th Sea, and Deadlands: Doomtown. In recent years, the company has shifted to what they consider accessible board games, trying to appeal to the more casual gamer and to the DEI-infested industry with their antics, but now the entire industry has turned on the company after its CEO made a statement positing what AI might be able to do in the future.

Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG) is an American tabletop‑game publisher founded in 1993, originally to publish the gaming magazine Shadis. It was started by Jolly Blackburn, who left a few years later; the company was then led and largely owned by John Zinser, who helped steer it into the broader gaming market.

Eventually, they became known for their Legend of the Five Rings card game and RPG, along with a lot of other very creative CCG games, but they pivoted to the more generic board game market several years back. Today AEG is a privately held, California‑based company that markets itself as a “small but focused” board‑game publisher, producing hits like Tiny Towns, Mystic Vale, Thunderstone, Istanbul, and Space Base. The company emphasizes design‑driven, broadly appealing games and often uses crowdfunding and partnerships to bring new titles to market.

Part of their transition has, of course, involved Zinser and company moving hard to the left, virtue signaling to the woke activists in gaming and calling out and attacking anyone who’s family-oriented on the right to make sure the industry at large kept applauding them over the years. This move was unfortunate, as Zinser was always known as a long-time Republican in the industry, and seemed like a naked attempt to try to save his skin when the industry took out their pitchforks for anyone to the right of Mao.

Now, AEG’s current CEO has violated the narrative of the creative arts industry activists by making a statement positivng a use of AI:

This prompted complete outrage from the board game industry, as the establishment in the creative arts publishing is supposed to all 100% oppose AI in some Don Quixote-level running at windmills exercise in futility, just so they can feel better about themselves.

Suzanne, a former Dice Tower Contributor who’s been a massive proponent of cancel culture to the point of getting one of the largest retailers banned from Gencon out of personal animus, amplified the virtue signaling against AEG:

One of AEG’s own designers gave his take on how “sad” he/him is:

Another board game designer who lists he/him in his profile said:

A man who pretends to be a woman in order to sell his games on Kickstarter chimed in:

Shannon Applecline, who wrote a recent RPG history that lambasted original D&D creator Gary Gygax called for a boycott over the comment:

John Zinser, AEG’s owner who attempted to cancel the purveyor of Fandom Pulse for board game reporting in order to appease these people, tried to cover himself once again:

Like usual, his statements did little to appease those who were in the cancel mood, including another man who pretends to be a woman who organizes boycotts against Harry Potter-themed games because of his hatred of JK Rowling.

AEG is in a position where they could just lean into it and tell these people to buzz off, which is what any company should do. But it appears as if they might be so far down the rabbit hole that they’ll be forced to disavow AI forever, which means other companies will simply leap ahead of them in terms of logic and consistency for games, which will put them at a competitive disadvantage as the years go by.

Surely, AI won’t be able to come up with a creative masterpiece like “Point Salad,” could it? Why should they be afraid?

What do you think of this cancel mob brewing in board gaming?

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NEXT: RUMOR: D&D 6th Edition Reboot Incoming As Hasbro Scrambles To Save Dying Franchise

The RPG Pundit has broken news of a potential bombshell development in the Dungeons & Dragons world: Wizards of the Coast is allegedly preparing to launch a sixth edition of D&D, abandoning the disastrous 2024 edition that has driven fans away in droves. Even more intriguing, the rumor suggests that legendary creators Ed Greenwood and Tracy Hickman are being brought back to help salvage the franchise.

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“I had said that was going to be one of the possibilities of how Wizards of the Coast was going to handle Dungeons and Dragons in the future,” RPG Pundit explained in his video breaking the news. The source of this information came through a leaker who RPG Pundit considers credible: “It’s somebody that I consider to be trustworthy in this and that I believe would not make something like this up.”

The timing of this rumored reboot is particularly telling given the spectacular failure of the 2024 edition. The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide infamously incorporated BDSM fetish community practices in the game for safe spaces, having players make an X with their arms if they feel triggered by a situation, and requiring a DM to stop the game and address the player in question.

The 2024 Player’s Handbook is filled with imagery of BIPOC and female characters at a margin of more than five to one for white male characters, about the direct opposite of the demographics who play the game. Dungeons & Dragons came under further scrutiny after it was revealed that senior designer Jason Tondro penned a forward to a history book on Dungeons & Dragons, calling Gary Gygax misogynistic and accusing him of cultural appropriation.

This prompted Elon Musk to raise the question as to how much Hasbro costs for him to buy the parent company of Wizards of the Coast and save Dungeons & Dragons from all of these woke controversies.

The new 2024 Monster Manual has made a lot of woke changes, including removing orcs but also adding gender ideology elements to creatures like hags, succubus, and sphinxes. Fans have been vocal in complaining about the mistreatment in the game.

Former World of Warcraft lead designer Mark Kern aka Grummz posted about all of the troubles this edition of D&D is having so far, saying, “Half Elves GONE from new DnD Player’s Handbook! DnD 2024 has done so much damage to Dungeons & Dragons thanks to Wizards of the Coast woke designers: - Removes Half-Elves from the game (due to it being somehow racist...what, are they about racial purity now??? How is that not even more racist?). - Removes Half-Orcs (same reason). - Removes Orcs as monsters from the Monster Manual. (Because they think Orcs are black people, but it’s okay, they made them Mexican in their new art instead!). None of this was offensive to anyone. Their virus infected brains are out of control and spinning racism where there is none.”

The Legendary Creators Return

According to RPG Pundit’s source, Wizards of the Coast has approached Ed Greenwood and Tracy Hickman to work on the sixth edition. Greenwood, creator of the Forgotten Realms setting that has been D&D’s default campaign world since the late 1980s, brings unparalleled world-building expertise. His creation of Faerûn and its intricate pantheon, geography, and history has shaped how millions of players experience D&D.

Tracy Hickman, along with his wife Margaret Weis, created the Dragonlance setting and authored the legendary Chronicles trilogy that introduced Raistlin, Tanis, and other iconic characters to fantasy literature. Hickman’s work on classic D&D modules like Ravenloft demonstrated his mastery of adventure design and atmospheric storytelling.

RPG Pundit noted the curious nature of this recruitment: “Ed Greenwood and Tracy Hickman were both asked to come and work on the sixth edition product.” However, he expressed skepticism about what role these creators would actually play: “I’m not sure what he would actually have to really contribute on that respect, you know. So, um, unless he’s only asked to like do a little blurb in like the setting section of the DMG because they’re going to use the realms, you know, that might make some sense.”

RPG Pundit suspects the real motivation is purely marketing: “There is also a real possibility, what I’m getting to here is that there’s also a very real possibility that all three of these guys, if you include Luke Gygax, are there exclusively to sell their name, right? The only thing that Wizards wants from them is those names, right?”

A Desperate Attempt at Legitimacy

The rumored involvement of these legendary creators represents a transparent attempt by Hasbro to recapture the trust of longtime D&D fans who have abandoned the game under current leadership. By associating the new edition with names that evoke D&D’s golden age, Wizards hopes to signal a return to the game’s roots after years of ideological corruption.

RPG Pundit was blunt about the likely reality: “They want to be able to put on the credit section of the book or maybe even in the cover, who knows, right? They want to put Ed Greenwood, Tracy Hickman, and Luke Gygax, right? Or maybe even just Gygax or something just to show the guy, damn it. Right? That’s what they want. They want to do that because then they know nerds are going to see those names.”

This cynical calculation assumes that fans will overlook the current design team’s incompetence if they see familiar names attached to the project. The strategy treats Greenwood and Hickman as nostalgia bait rather than as creative forces who could actually improve the game.

RPG Pundit pointed out the fundamental problem with this approach: “Neither of them has enormous, um, enormous skills in the game design part of things, right? Both of them are mainly known for the worlds they made. They’re mainly known for the settings they made, right? And for the stories they told.”

He continued: “Ed Greenwood has practically no real experience as a game designer, as a rules designer, or things like that, right? So he would serve no useful purpose in that sense.”

Even Hickman, who has more game design experience, “is not known as like some mass, at least not, you know, like Gygax or Monty Cook or the RPG pundit, right? a guy who, like, knows people who know how to make a game, right?”

The Current Team’s Incompetence

RPG Pundit’s assessment of Wizards’ current design team was devastating: “You’ve got like they just hired another chick. Gez, I wish I remembered to have checked her name before starting this video. This woman, who is basically connected to young adult science fiction stuff, like basically the entire industry of publishing has been taken over by feminist women, millennial women who worked on young adult novels.”

He described how this takeover occurred: “They took over the mainstream publishing and then, in turn, went on to only put their people everywhere, right? And now it’s being expanded to other areas. That’s what’s basically happened with fifth edition is that it became it it was taken over by YA publishing people right that were that are that are the same you know the the feminist intersectional trans bloggers right and uh vegans and all that they’re they’re a cabal they’re a sect and now they’ve expanded into here right and those people know nothing about anything right and they ruin everything they touch.”

The comparison between the current team and the legendary creators is stark: “Hickman would immediately be probably the most experienced and probably um, yeah, the most experienced and the most suitable game designer uh, in the entire team if he was part of that team because I know what the rest of the team is, right?”

Why This Matters Now

The timing of this rumored sixth edition reveals Hasbro’s panic over declining D&D sales and the franchise’s damaged reputation. The 2024 edition was supposed to capitalize on D&D’s resurgence following the success of shows like Stranger Things and Critical Role. Instead, it alienated the core fanbase while failing to attract the “modern audience” that Wizards claimed to be targeting.

RPG Pundit explained the strategic calculation: “They’re hoping that that’s going to work and and I think most likely all three of them will be purely there for that for the name just to have the name on there so then they can say look and it was you know we had additional material uh additional advice pres presented by uh you know Tracy Hickman and you know Dragon Lance remember Dragon Lance how cool Dragon Lance was right we’re going to we we made Dragon Lance in fifth edition and completely ruined it. Remember that. No, don’t remember that. Don’t remember that. Look, Tracy Hickman. It’s Tracy Hickman over there. Right. That’s what they want to do with these guys, I think.”

The rumor of Luke Gygax’s involvement adds another layer to this nostalgia play. As Gary Gygax’s son, Luke carries the weight of D&D’s creator, even though RPG Pundit noted that “Luke is friendly with because he does the OSR thing because it works for him, too. But he fundamentally is not on that side, right? He is on the side of, you know, allowing these ideological terrorists to come in and do whatever they want with the game.”

The OSR Alternative

RPG Pundit’s analysis highlighted how the Old School Renaissance (OSR) movement has already provided what D&D fans actually want: “We already know what D and D is, and we know that all of the best D and D games ever made were not made by Wizards of the Coast, right? And all the best games made in the last few years weren’t made by Wizards of the Coast.”

He pointed to his own work as an example: “The number of OSR games I could give you that would be better than 5.5 edition, right? That would be miles away from these guys. There are tons of them. And of course, there are better games than 5e itself that I helped make, right? remember that I was one of the guys that worked on 5e, and I made it, and I made it to be super popular, right?”

RPG Pundit’s involvement in the fifth edition’s development gives his criticism particular weight. He helped create the edition that became D&D’s most commercially successful version, yet he acknowledges that “it’s not my favorite game and it’s not the it is the it was the bestselling D&D edition of all time for exactly the thing I made it to be, right? But um that doesn’t mean that it’s the best version.”

What Sixth Edition Needs (But Won’t Get)

RPG Pundit outlined what a successful D&D reboot would require: “The thing to do here if you want to like save Dungeons and Dragons is to go back to making something that is going to have as much of a classic feel and a classic look, and that is going to have the peak appealing aspects of the previous edition, a fifth edition. I mean, not 5.5. Forget that one completely, right? Um, and give it a kind of a new edge, right?”

Instead, he predicted disaster: “What you don’t want is to recreate. Oh, no. Now we’re going to use like dice pools, and we’re going to have this, and that, and like to invent all this stuff that is not tied in any way to the D&D traditions of how the game is designed. um that would be disastrous, right?”

The current design team’s track record suggests they’ll pursue exactly the wrong approach: “These guys, these guys are are it’s impossible that they’re going to be able to make anything worthwhile. And it’s highly probable that they’re going to make stuff that is that most gamers are going to see as a travesty, an absolute travesty. Worse still than 5.5 cuz now they’re going to be like, ‘Oh, well, but this is the thing, guys. Now we can do whatever we want, right? That we don’t have to follow any of the rules, you know, which is exactly the wrong thing to do right now.”

The Verdict

This rumor, if true, represents Hasbro’s recognition that the 2024 edition has failed and that drastic action is needed to save the D&D brand. The involvement of legendary creators like Greenwood and Hickman signals an attempt to recapture the magic of D&D’s golden age, even if those creators are being used primarily for marketing rather than actual game design.

RPG Pundit’s assessment was measured: “I would rather. Yeah, I would rather that official D and D was really good, made by good people who knew what they were doing, who respected traditions, not a bunch of alphabet soup psychopaths, right? Um, but people who are actually proper gamers, right? And who made a proper game of D and D. If they did that, that would be great.”

But he acknowledged the reality: “We don’t have that, and it’s unlikely we’re going to have that anytime soon. So, we’ll have to just deal with things as they are, not as we wish they would be.”

For OSR players and fans of classic D&D, the sixth edition rumor changes little. The games that capture the spirit of Gygax’s original vision already exist outside of Wizards of the Coast’s control. Whether Hasbro can salvage D&D’s reputation by associating it with legendary creators remains to be seen, but RPG Pundit’s analysis suggests that without fundamental changes to the design team and philosophy, even Greenwood and Hickman’s names won’t be enough to save a franchise that has been systematically destroyed by ideological corruption.

The question isn’t whether faithful D&D exists - the OSR has already answered that. The question is whether Wizards of the Coast will finally admit that their approach has failed and allow the people who actually understand D&D to fix what they’ve broken.

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