Hello,
I haven’t posted in a while, but that’s because I’ve been working on something related to the site. It’s my own TTRPG, called Swords & Shields (or Armor & Axes).
This is a humble project, I don’t anticipate that it will top D&D in sales at some point. I mainly just wrote it for me. But it will be available on itch.io, and here is that address: https://rpgcorner.itch.io/swords-shields-or-armor-axes. It’s still in development. It’s just going to be a text document sort of like the free basic rules download you can get for 5e. It’s about fifty pages.
I’m not even sure if it works yet though, and that’s what this post is about. I’m going to playtest it here on the blog and do some write ups about those adventures.
That was really the inspiration for me creating my own game, because I started to wonder about copyright issues, and just ethical considerations about using things from published materials here on this site. I know that D&D has an open license, for example, but I’m not sure all games do, and even the last post about the scenario from Dragonbane using the Arkand setting expansion got me wondering about whether I could even chronicle all of those adventures on my blog.
I’m actually not 100% sure either way. Characters and settings in fiction are generally protected by copyright. So you can’t publish on your blog, for example, stories about the ongoing adventures of Aragorn in Middle-earth. That character and that setting are part of the IP controlled by the Tolkien estate. I also couldn’t write stories and set them in Hogwarts.
I don’t know if that’s the case with Arkand. I think I would probably use The Forgotten Realms, but I’m not sure. Every novel I’ve ever seen set in The Forgotten Realms seems like an officially licensed book.
I can discuss TTRPGs, and report on what I like and disliked about playing them, but I’m really not sure how much depth I can go into about their world’s and characters.
And frankly, it’s not all that interesting for me to do so anyway. It would contribute more, I think, to just come up with my own stuff.
Which doesn’t mean that I won’t continue to cover other TTRPGs, I actually have backed the Sword World campaign on Kickstarter and recently received the Twilight Sword physical rewards in the mail from that campaign, and I plan on discussing both of those games at length on this blog.
It’s just that I don’t know whether I can blog about the “replays” or something like that. And, like I said, I think it would be more interesting for me to try to come up with my own ideas and settings. I’m not sure anyone really cares about my solo adventures in Baldur’s Gate, for example.
Anyway, this is just an update. I’ll start writing up some playtesting entries shortly.
Thanks for reading.