The last week has been quite a ride! The OGL drama has hit almost all corners of the tabletop industry. But I think the industry will become stronger in the long run. WoTC broke the illusion spell that they were still this hip, cool, indie-loving company. We have now seen behind the spell and witnessed the liches who work behind the fog of war Brand™, just trying to do the most mundane of evil… hoard more treasure.
So we will move beyond that! Or we are trying to.
The future for SagaBorn
We released Sagaborn 1.5 on DTRPG last week. It was not as finished as we wanted, but I wanted it out in people’s hands. This way, if OGL 1.1 came down hard and we had to remove the book, it would still be out in the interwebs, lurking forever. Now that WoTC has given their half-assed and deceptive OGL rebuttal, we know that, at least for now, stuff previously published under OGL 1.0a is safe. I don’t trust HasBro and this statement, but Paizo has committed to fighting in court to keep OGL 1.0a alive. This is on top of their Open RPG Creative License (ORC), but more on that later.
So, this means that I feel safe putting some more time into SagaBorn 1.5. That means I will go through and review some typos and mistakes in the current PDF. I will also do a quick redesign and hopefully add some art. It has already been published, so these will be revisions, meaning it will stay in the OGL 1.0a safe zone.
But I am not done there! I am fully committing to moving over to a system that will forever be out of the grasp of WoTC and any other money-grubbing corpos. I have brought the SagaBorn system down to its bare bones. And I have an idea now of how lite the system can be. Now I am going to wait to see if the Open RPG Creative License (ORC) will be as good as we all hope and then start moving forward with a non-OGL system, tentatively titled – the Open Sagas System. I will not be posting this online anywhere until the dust has settled on the ORC, but if you join our discord, there may be some stuff shared there 🙂
The Open Sagas System
The goal of the Sagas System will be to create a very simple system (always my goal) that is familiar enough for anyone to jump in and play. SagaBorn was already heavily edited and modded, so it ports right over. One significant change is we are moving to a five attribute system:
- Strength
- Agility
- Grit
- Acumen
- Social
See it? Its the SAGAS system 😛
I am excited to make this and hopefully turn the gameplay into just as much social interaction as combat.
It has been a rough week, with a lot of lost sleep, a couple of lost acquaintances (it’s amazing how much our culture believes in teams- us vs. them, no in between), and stress. But now I see I just have to do what I always do. I need to go out and create.
Lots of love, and keep adventuring!
Mike