2024: The Year in Roleplaying

2024 was the semicentennial for the roleplaying industry: 50 years! Which is starting to add up for those of us who were there from early on. (I can only count my first game to back in 1982 or so, but the eight years between that and the origin of the roleplaying industry are becoming less and less as the decades stream by.) Yet somehow that anniversary felt on the one hand uninspiring and on the other hand like the beginning of the end (for D&D at least, as a traditional tabletop game). Here’s why …

Happy 50th Anniversary to Dungeons & Dragons. Wizards of the Coast celebrated the 50th anniversary with a new 2024 edition of D&D 5e (2014), which with an 11-year span is now on the verge of becoming the longest lived major version of D&D ever. Their update of the D&D rules broke new ground while simultaneously staying close enough to 5e to not invalidate everything that had come before; it’ll probably be called 5.5e in the years to come, though 5.24e and 2024e are also being bandied around at the moment. Wizards also recognized the game that started it all with The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons (2024), a prestige hardcover that includes Blackmoor details, letters, a 1973 draft of D&D, and the 1974-1976 set of OD&D books, all with commentary by historian Jon Peterson.

But.

Wizards has been unable to do anything without controversy in recent years. Part of that is the culture war burning down America, as they try to find the balance between a 1970s game and a 2020s world. But the other part is an increasingly corpocratic culture that appears to continually put profits above the desires of their customers.

So, Wizards produced a new edition of D&D for the 50th anniversary. (Yay!) But only the Player’s Handbook (2024) and Dungeon Master’s Guide (2024) are scheduled for the anniversary year, with the Monster Manual (2025) out past the 51-year mark. (What!?) Then Wizards started filing copyright claims against YouTubers doing walk-throughs of the new rule book. (Shades of TSR threatening its fans almost exactly 30 years earlier.)

Meanwhile The Making of OD&D fired off a battle about whether Gary Gygax was a sexist, primarily because of just half-a-page in Project Lead Jason Tondro’s Preface that brought up sexism, cultural appropriation, and slavery in a single breathless paragraph. Do we need to discuss the cultural and personal context of what was written in the 1970s? Definitely. But that single paragraph (plus an even lighter mention by Jon Peterson in his own introduction) has managed to entirely overshadow the biggest revelation ever of the origins of our field. Rob Kuntz, one of the few survivors from those early days at TSR, gave the whole controversy legs with an angry response. Months later, Elon Musk got involved, saying that no one should be allowed to criticize Gary Gygax, that Wizards should burn in hell, and that maybe he’d just buy Hasbro. (Sigh.)

None of this equalled Wizards’ controversies of 2023, when they first tried to rescind the OGL to increase their profits, then sent goons after one of their customers. But it was an unfortunate set of blemishes on what should have been a celebratory year. But maybe Timothy Brannan went to the deeper problem: Wizards’ attention to the 50th anniversary was ultimately somewhat disappointing!

Oh, and there would be plenty of other opportunities for Wizards to bloody their nose in 2024, even aside from the trials and travails of the big 50.

It’s A Digital World (After All). One of the big fears that people had about D&D 2024 was that Wizards was going to push the game entirely from the tabletop into the digital realm. And, there’s a good reason to be afraid of this: Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks has said that over half of D&D’s profits are now coming from D&D Beyond. This has resulted in a lot of skullduggery that left the average D&D player looking a bit askance at the digital future.

To start with, Wizards seems to be defining digital books as the default way to purchase D&D and is even trying to juice those sales with bonus digital content for their new virtual tabletop (which doesn’t exist yet). It’s a clear statement of priorities: digital over physical. Meanwhile, players are learning exactly what it means to have their material digital instead of physical. First, Wizards announced that they were removing the ability to buy ala carte items in Beyond, something that was previously possible, allowing players to buy just the feats and other elements specific to their character as microtransactions: you now buy a whole book or nothing. Then, players reading through changelogs realized that Wizards were arbitrarily deleting 2014 content from the character builder. Wizards reversed the latter decision, but the messaging was clear: Wizards gets to decide what and how you buy things if you want to play digitally, and they can take it away at any time.

Obviously, D&D Beyond is having growing pains. Tabletop fans worry that it’s a threat to traditional tabletop play because Wizards can rent-seek on the platform in a way that they can’t at your dinner table. And, Wizards of the Coast is willing to make very unpopular decisions about how the platform manages sales to improve their bottom line. But, D&D Beyond is clearly a value-add to a lot of players, especially in the wake of the COVID pandemic. I’m not convinced that there’s a balance that avoids opening digital-first players up to Hasbro profit mongering, but we can certainly hope there is!

Though virtual tabletops combine (convenience) advantages with (centralized corporate) disadvantages, that’s much less true about Wizards of the Coast’s other big digital push: AI.

In 2023, Wizards of the Coast’s interaction with AI fell into a familiar pattern: they decried the technology and promised they’d never use it, then it would show up in a book or an ad, and they’d apologize. There was more of the same in early 2024. But then in March, Chris Cocks revealed that despite all of their previous public statements, Hasbro was actively working with AI: “We’re doing some stuff around AI that’s really interesting. As I said earlier, we’re trying to do a new AI product experiment once every two to three months.” Several months further, he went ever further, stating, “the themes around using AI to enable user-generated content, using AI to streamline new player introduction, using AI for emergent storytelling, I think you’re going to see that not just our hardcore brands like D&D but also multiple of our brands.” He claims Hasbro is going to do it in an ethical manner and fairly compensate creators in a way that the mass-plagiarism machines rolled out by OpenAI and others haven’t. But he also made the stunning claim that “there’s not a single person who doesn’t use AI somehow for either campaign development or character development or story ideas”, so likely what he says needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

The ball is clearly rolling, because Wizards had an ad out for a Principal AI Engineer in May and Google is paying websites to post PR about how great Wizards’ AI will be for players, using some of the same tired claims about accessibility that almost killed NanoWriMo.

One of the most ironic things about Wizards’ increasing push into digital D&D is that it happened simultaneously with Larian’s decision to abandon D&D computer games following their groundbreaking work on Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023). Can Wizards possibly find the same digital success as their licensee? They seem determined to try.

What About D&D’s Competitors? For all the controversy that Wizards of the Coast courted in 2024, none of it compared to the PR disaster of January 2023. When Wizards tried to yank the rug out from under the OGL in 2023, they generated a huge wave of animosity and moreso competition. Work on those competitive products continued into 2024, but the big question is going to be whether anyone has the least chance to be even a nuisance to D&D. (History says no: even Pathfinder, which pretty much enjoyed the best circumstances possible during the last great rebellion against Wizards of the Coast, seems to have dropped back into its own niche in the PF 2e era.)

• Daggerheart (Darrington Press). The first of three stream-adjacent games, Matthew Mercer’s Daggerheart promises to be a game of “long-term campaign play and rich character progression”. That doesn’t do a lot to differentiate the games, but nonetheless it feels like one of the options to actually threaten D&D (or at least be a nuisance) due to the power of streaming. It’s available for preorder with planned release in 2025.
• DC20 (The Dungeon Coach). A late-comer, DC20 raised over $2M on Kickstarter this summer, again thanks to a streaming connection. Its pitch was for “Epic Combat, Intuitive Gameplay, and Characters as Unique as Your Group”. It’s planned for delivery in October 2025.
• Draw Steel (MDCM). The last steam-adjacent game is Matt Colville’s MDCM RPG, which raised over $4.5M on Backerkit. It’s supposed to “makes building adventures and fighting monsters fun.” (Supporting GMing has generally been a focus for Colville.) Its intent is to have PDFs available in June 2025, with print books to follow.
• Shadowdark (The Arcane Library). Most of the upcoming batch of FRPGs were intended to replace D&D in the wake of the bad OGL publicity. Shadowdark instead chanced into it: designer Kelsey Dionne was looking at a pre-print of Shadowdark when Wizards attacked the OGL and threw everything into doubt. That timing was one of the elements that allowed Dionne to raise $1.3M on Kickstarter. (A shrewd business sense and strong design helped!) Shadowdark focuses on “old school gaming” with “new school mechanics.” Because of its head start, the game was fulfilled at the very end of 2023.
• Tales of the Valiant (Kobold Press). When Wizards announced their attack on the OGL, Kobold Press almost immediately raised the “black flag” in protest. That became the Tales of the Valiant kickstarter, which raised $1.1M in June 2023. PDFs went out in summer 2024 and the print book was fulfilled this last month, making it the first FRPG created in response to the OGL crisis to see print. Additional Kickstarters have followed for a GM’s Guide (5,711 backers; $461,868) and a setting and adventure path (3,231 backers; $352,457). But, Tales of the Valiant just hasn’t received the same attention in 2024 that it did in 2023 (when it was just an idea but when everyone hated Wizards of the Coast). Certainly, the follow-up Kickstarters were strong, but that’s more likely due to Kobold’s deserved reputation for producing quality products than any continued backlash against Wizards. Ultimately the question will be if any of the post-OGL crop of FRPGs can escape Wizards’ shadow.

In short, It’s taking 2-3 years for the FRPGs created because of Wizards’ OGL fiasco to come to fruition. We’ll see more of them next year. But it’s obvious that they don’t have the same relevance that they did when the future of D&D-adjacent games and supplements was in question.

And with the full report & response to Wizards of the Coast’s actions of the last two years done, it’s time to turn to a more somber topic.

RIP, 2024. As ever, we lost some notables in 2024.

• JH Brennan was a spiritualist, occultist, and author who made an early impression on the RPG industry with two Yaquinto RPGs: Man, Myth & Magic (1982) was one of the earliest RPGs with a strong historic foundation, while Timeship (1983) helped to open up the time-travel genre of gaming. However, his most successful RPG-adjacent publication was likely the series of Grailquest (1984-1987) gamebooks, which were a joyful series of YA books with an Arthurian setting.
• Jennell Jaquays was one of the greats of the early RPG industry, primarily thanks to her creation of innovative “non-linear dungeons” such as The Caverns of Thracia (1979) and Dark Tower (1980). A full memorial covers more of her work.
• James M. Ward was one of TSR’s more prolific designers and later managers. Some of his best-known works included Metamorphosis Alpha (1976) and Gamma World (1978) as well as Deities & Demigods (1980), which contained work by him and Rob Kuntz. A short memorial includes insights from some who knew him.

Among the others that we lost in 2024 were James Carpio (Solarian, Top Secret: New World Order), Amber Cook (Free RPG Day, Roll20), Steve Maggi (Traveller, the last name I added to my memorial list in This is Free Trader Beowulf), James A. Moore (World of Darkness, horror writer), Wade Racine (Cyberpunk, World of Darkness), Terry Robinson (Mage: The Podcast), Kelly Villemaire (First Encounter zine), and James Wade (LIVE/WIRE, RPGA). There were probably many more.

Return of the Classics. Though year by year we are bidding farewell to many of the creators and other peoples who founded and expanded our industry, we can also continue to remember them thanks to their games, which live on. I’ve written about how well classic games and settings have done almost every year since I started writing this yearly report, and if anything 2024 was better than most—likely due to the big anniversary.

That started out with the successful crowdfunding of a trio of classic ’80s properties. Ars Magica (1987), the FRPG game of wizards that brought Mark Rein-Hagen and Jonathan Tweet into the industry, raised $841,123 on BackerKit for a new “definitive edition” of its rules. The classic Mayfair DC Heroes (1985) similarly raised over $400,000 courtesy of Cryptozoic, though that total was juiced by the inclusion of several sourcebooks. Even Chaosium’s little ElfQuest (1984) topped $200,000 as their newest “Classic” remastering. (They’ve been doing great quality remasters for several years now, ever since a “Classic” remaster of RuneQuest II back in 2015. The series has most recently included a direct-to-DTRPG remaster of the Sun County supplement for RQ3, which contains a historic foreword by me.) The reprints of DC Heroes and ElfQuest forty years on are especially amazing because it’s so easy to fracture and lose rights to games based on licenses, so kudos to Cryptozoic and Chaosium for managing to bring them back.

Chaosium also released Pendragon 6e, Greg Stafford’s final edition of his classic RPG (1985), without even needing a Kickstarter. It was one of the first RPGs in the industry to really show how much System Does Matter, so it was another important Classic to get back in print. Similarly, it’s great that Steve Jackson Games is bringing the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks (1982+) back to the US. They’ve been available in recent years, but only through expensive UK imports.

Moving up from 80s classics to the 00s, Troll Lord Games is right in the middle of their rollout of Gary Gygax material that was lost for a decade and a half due to legal battles over Gary Gygax’s will. That’ll kick off with a new publication of The Hermit, which was Kickstarted back in 2023. It was a supplemented this year with a $300,000 Kickstarter for a whole archive of World Builder books. Then next year should finally see the continuation of the Castle Zagyg project, though Yggsburgh is already back in print. (And though I say that’s all work from the ’00s, Zagyg is of course a reimagination of Gygax’s classic Castle Greyhawk from the ’70s.)

Not all Classical returns are simple. Gary Gygax’s lost decade and a half proved that. An even odder situation arose in 2024 with what was purported to be Dave Arneson’s last work, an adventure called Age of the Wolf. After the Arneson Estate said the work was not sanctioned, they questioned whether it was by Arneson at all!

50 years on, death, probate, lost licenses, and simple bankruptcy all threaten the reprinting of classic RPGs, so it’s been great to have so many of them returning this last year.

GDW Strikes Back. Speaking of Classic returns, some of the properties once owned by classic RPG publisher GDW got a big boost in 2024. That began with Traveller, which Marc Miller passed on to Mongoose Publishing as a “succession” plan, so that it could remain strong far into the future (as Greg Stafford’s game have, which Miller mentioned as an inspiration) and not fall into disuse and disarray (as had been the case for Gary Gygax’s later properties before the 2023 court decision). 2300AD (which is currently being published by Mongoose as a Traveller setting) and Twilight: 2000 (which is currently licensed to Fria Ligan) also came to Mongoose late in the year.

When GDW shut down back in 1996, their games generally went back to creative founders, based on an agreement at the time of GDW’s creation, so there are still a couple of other games out there: Dark Conspiracy is with Dark Conspiracy Enterprises (though Lester Smith is looking into the viability of purchasing it himself) while Space: 1889 is held by GDW co-founder Frank Chadwick (and was recently updated by Strange Owl Games as Space 1889: After). However, Mongoose is really looking like GDW’s successor for their biggest and most successful properties (Traveller and the Cold War–driven Twilight: 2000).

I’d like to think that my own This is Free Trader Beowulf (2024) is part of this GDW resurgence, as it tells the entire history of Traveller from GDW to the modern day. I wish I’d known about the purchase when I wrote it though! (The purchase apparently went through after I finished my full draft of the book, but before I finished trading edits back and forth with Mongoose, but the plan had been to keep it secret until Traveller’s own 50th anniversary in 2027. Alas!)

Anyhow, it’s a pretty complete history all the way up to the newest era of Traveller, with Mongoose taking over.

The OSR Rocks. Speaking of success, the OSR has been riding high in recent years, with the Kickstarters of Dolmenwood, Mothership, and Shadowdark all breaking the $1M threshold on Kickstarter in the last few years. It’s been exciting to finally see these come to fruition: Shadowdark (2023) released in the very last days of 2023, then Mothership (2024) appeared this spring after a bit of a delay. (The culprit was apparently a second child; all sympathies can be sent to Sean McCoy.) Dolmenwood (2024) isn’t totally out yet, but backers have received final PDFs and the books have been printed. The question now is how these superstar books will change the face of the OSR in the years to come.

Although not quite as high flying, Daniel Fox’s Zweihänder deserves a bit of ink too. Fox Kickstarted a new Reforged edition of the game this year that brought in more than $160k, which is likely the most successfully OSR/retroclone that isn’t based on D&D. (Zweihänder is all Warhammer Fantasy.) More notably, Fox was able to reclaim control of his game in October. Corporate hijinx is certainly one way that classic games can get lost, and Zweihänder has moved through four different companies at this point, one of them a big corporation, so it’s great that it’s safely back somewhere that’s likely to support it and keep it in print.

Community Content Rocks Too. The growth of the OSR is a story that spans from the ’00s to ’20s. Community content has been on an even quicker road to major success, ever since DriveThruRPG and Wizards of the Coast spun up the Dungeon Masters Guild in January 2016. Not quite ten years on we saw a recognition of that: the ENNIES replaced their classic “Best Organized Play” category with a new “Best Community Content” category. (The first winners? A pair of supplements for Chaosium’s Miskatonic Repository, Los Hobos and the Wolves of Carcosa and The Well of All Fear.)

But Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall. Though the 50th anniversary was on average a pretty good year for roleplaying, the same can’t be said for the wider world, which continued to be rent not just by a very controversial election in the United States, but also by wars in both Palestine and Ukraine that have resulted in accusations of war crimes.

The #Gamers4Harris site created by Mike Selinker (of TSR, the RPGA, Wizards of the Coast, and now Lone Shark Games) was relatively non-controversial: over 1,100 game designers signed up to show their support for Kamala Harris. However, Selinker’s decision to scrub the site immediately following the election to avoid harassment of the signers clearly demonstrated the acrimony and polarization in today’s United States.

There was much more controversy over the Israel-Hamas War that has resulted in a serious humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. Ever since the region exploded after the terrorist attack on October 7th (2023), discussion has been very charged, with intolerance toward almost all views of the conflicts. Three different conventions ended up in the middle of this. First, the CRIT awards took an anti-Zionist stance and got banned from Gen Con as a result. Then Big Bad Con requested the phrase “From the River to the Sea” be pulled from a description of an event and a boycott was threatened until BigBadCon detailed their support for Palestine and also discussed the difference between anti-Zionism and anti-semitism. Conflicts over the conflict weren’t even limited to American conventions: in German game designer Matteo Menapace, co-creator of Daybreak (2023) found himself banned from Spiel des Jahres events immediately after his game won an SdJ award due to a pineapple sticker he wore that denied the existence of the state of Israel.

The Israeli assault on Palestine continues and is likely to continue to cause conflicts in 2025, but the loss of Harris to Trump is likely to have even bigger repercussions in the next year, and that’s primarily because of one policy: tariffs. Meredith Placko at Steve Jackson Games has written about how tariffs will dramatically increase the price of gaming products. That’s because the vast majority of it is produced in China right now, and China is Trump’s chief target. I know people who refused to pledge for the recent DC Heroes Kickstarter because they were pretty sure Cryptozoic would be unable to fulfill it at the set costs if tariffs went into place.

TL;DR? If you’ve got an open Kickstarter for a game, and Trump does enact the tariffs he says he will on China, expect to see a big bill to ransom your products and expect some Kickstarters to fail entirely. More widely, expect to see the cost of games double if Trump enacts the 100% China tariff he claims: RPGs and board games will break through the $100 ceiling in a hurry, and we’ll never see them below again. (The hope is that he’s just using this as a bargain chip, but time will tell.)

And I say that tariffs are the big political-fueled issue that will affect the industry in 2025, but I don’t expect it to be the only fallout. If Trump continues his attacks on the ACA, that could have a huge impact on the industry’s freelancers, many of whom depend on the ACA for health insurance (myself included). There could be lots more we’re bemoaning by the time 2025 rolls to an end.

Kickstarters of Course. Ever since RPG Kickstarters enjoyed a big surge in the wake of COVID, we’ve seen between 7 and 11 Kickstarters cross the million-dollar mark every year, and that was again the case in 2024.

The big, big news is obviously Brotherwise Games’ $15 million-dollar Kickstarter for an RPG based on Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere (which sadly marks the end of Crafty Games’ Mistborn RPG, which sold off its final physical copies at the end of 2024). That’s the biggest RPG Kickstarter ever, surpassing Magpie Games’ 2021 Kickstarter for Avatar Legends, which raised $9.5M—though Cosmere didn’t manage to hit Magpie’s amazing backer count of 81,567, which is still the top for a tabletop RPG.

It should be no surprise that a Brandon Sanderson game set in the new RPG record: his “Four Secret Novels” Kickstarter in 2022, which released four previously unannounced novels that Sanderson had written during lockdown, still holds the all-time Kickstarter record at $41M. His new RPG is now #3 (with the Pebble Time watch Kickstarter coming in between at $20M).

Looking over the list, three of 2024’s top RPG kickstarters were licensed products, three were 5e supplements, and the last one was produced by a popular Youtuber. If there’s a lesson for Kickstarting success in the 20s, it may be right here. In fact, a popular Youtuber should probably produce a licensed property for D&D 5e and see what happens.

Surprisingly, almost all of this million-dollar crowd-fundings continue to happen on Kickstarter. Backerkit continues to get increased usage from people across the entertainment sphere. Sanderson himself did a crowd-funding for a leatherbound Cosmere book (and a fifth secret project) on Backerkit, raising $23M. But Matt Colville’s phenomenal Draw Steel RPG was the only 2024 project to break the million-dollar barrier, and that (like Sanderson’s) was clearly based on star power. (It’s also still comparatively hard to search for records of fundings on Backerkit, so there might be some missing!)

Will that change? Perhaps we’ll see in 2025.

Tariffs allowing.

See you next year!