Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 158 -Wizards of the Coast OGL 1.1 and the Time of Troubles

Episode Date: January 15, 2023

In this episode I weigh in on the Wizards of the Coast OGL 1.1 fiasco and talk about a period in Faerun's history called the Time of Troubles, when gods were mortal and walked the planet with mortals.   The common theme is a powerful entity doing something insanely stupid and causing upheval and calamity.  Give it a listen and comment below!   #DnD #DungeonsandDragons #Paizo #Pathfinder #Wotc #OGL   Resources: Resigned:  How to Know When It’s Time to Go:  The Avatar Series - a 5-book series about the Time of Troubles    

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. So the gods were forced to walk among their followers on Earth. This includes the gods of every Faerun pantheon, and the immediate effects were dramatic. Thank you so much for listening to the Taking20 Podcast, episode 158, continuing the lore series, this time covering the Time of Troubles. I want to thank this week's sponsor, Tires. Tires seem to cost more and more to fill up every single year. I guess it's just the rising cost of inflation. Hey there. Do you like the podcast? If so, please take a moment to like, rate, and review the

podcast wherever you happen to find it. Spotify, iTunes, YouTube, Google Podcasts, wherever. Every single rating and review goes into the mysterious algorithm and helps others find the podcast. I would greatly appreciate your taking just a few minutes out of your day to give it a rating and review. I've not yet weighed in on the Wizards of the Coast open gaming license OGL version 1.1 mess with you because I tend to take a wait-and-see approach to things like this. For those who have not heard of this, what follows is a gross oversimplification because I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on a podcast. A large percentage of Dungeons & Dragons compatible content is released under the 1.0a version of the Open Gaming License, or OGL.

This license allows for the creation of homebrew adventures, rules, classes, and other products that are compatible with the Wizards of the Coast 5e system. Last week, a new version of the OGL was leaked by content creators who received an advanced copy. This new OGL, version 1.1, contains a number of facets from Wizards of the Coast that are problematic. I won't go into all of it here, but suffice it to say that it gives Wizards of the Coast, the maker of D&D 5e and the upcoming 1D&D, a lot of power when it comes to what it and you can do with any content that exists. Two of the most egregious changes, in my opinion, is that by creating content under OGL version 1.1, you grant Wizards of the Coast the rights to your creation.

They can repackage it and sell it under their banner while giving you no money for it. And, another problematic part of it, OGL 1.1 states that it makes OGL 1.0a null and void, meaning that anything released under the OGL 1.0a potentially could be monetized by Wizards. Let me just first say that the OGL as leaked may not be the final version that gets released. A significant percentage of content providers, large and small, have formally expressed their concerns to Hasbro, the owners of the Wizards of the Coast, myself included. I'm longer in the tooth than many D&D players, and I remember the disaster of 4th edition.

When it came out, they tried to replace OGL 1.0a with something called the Game System License, or GSL. Previous editions of Dungeons & Dragons before 4th edition, including the very popular 3.0 and 3.5 editions of D&D, were released under that version 1.0a of the OGL. This allowed third-party content providers like Kobold Press, Green Ronin, and Paizo to release products that were compatible with that game system. It also allowed for the creation of live-play games, custom homebrewed content that could be sold, and generally allowed Dungeons & Dragons to expand from the niche game among friends to the absolute behemoth that it is today. But in 2008, Wizards of the Coast released 4th edition D&D, not under OGL but under GSL.

It was a disaster. 4th edition flopped really hard, due in no small part to this attempt at a new license. Many third-party producers went away from D&D content entirely. Hell, Paizo created Pathfinder 1st edition, which was more akin to D&D 3.75, rather than try to create content under the GSL. But that was 15 years ago, and to paraphrase Lord of the Rings about this situation, much of what was known was lost, for there were none who remembered it. In a call with investors late last year, Hasbro did say that D&D is quote, under-monetized, and they're looking for ways to get more money out of the players than they do now. Yes, losing access to digital tools and virtual tabletops would absolutely suck

if electronic character sheets stopped working, which they would have to under this new OGL, or they would have to pay Wizards of the Coast money to create digital character sheets. And it would be deleterious to the D&D brand if magnificent third-party producers like Critical Role, Venture Fourth, Dice Camera Action, Kobold Press, Green Ronin, Frog God, countless other content providers had to leave 5e and by extension 1D&D behind. This is a very dynamic situation. As of this recording, I've heard that Kobold Press has recommitted to open gaming and are coming up with a new core fantasy tabletop

rule set called Project Black Flag. They have flat stated that they will not release anything under this new OGL, period, hard stop. Paizo has stated that they have engaged Azura Law, an intellectual property law firm, to craft a new open RPG license that is vendor independent. I believe it's called the Open RPG Creative License, or ORC for short. I don't have a crystal ball, nor am I an oracle of any renown. If I had to bet an amount of money that mattered to me, I believe Wizards of the Coast will reverse field on this within the next, say, six months, and they'll probably continue to allow content to be produced under 1.0a. However, even if they don't, it won't be the death of D&D for multiple reasons.

First, Dungeons & Dragons has a massive market share, and even if half the players and DMs left, they are still the 800-pound gorilla in the room. The simple fact is that there's a percentage of tables that never use third-party content, or virtual tabletops, or even online character builders outside of D&D Beyond. Those tables believe they really won't be substantially affected and likely won't care about any of this. Secondly, I think the vast majority of D&D players who do leave will find other games to play. Other systems will fill the void created by those who leave. Pathfinder, Starfinder, Blades in the Dark, Worlds Without Number, Fate, GURP, 13th Age, Forbidden Lands,

Fantasy Age, and the list goes on and on and on. Finally, if Wizards of the Coast does the unthinkable and stops supporting D&D 5e entirely, it's not like they're demanding that you burn the books that you've bought. You and your friends can continue to run 5e games until the end of time. You don't need a digital tabletop with auto-calculating everything. All you need is a character sheet, some dice, a pencil, and your imagination. It's not a popular sentiment in this day and age of instant reactions and tons of videos and podcasts that have already been released with knee-jerk reactions to what's happening, but I recommend patience at this point.

If Wizards of the Coast surprise me and continue down this road with the final OGL being similar to leaked one, the sun's still going to come up the next day. The tides will still come in and go out as they have for millennia, and people who love tabletop role-playing games will still play them. They just may not be playing 5e or 1D&D. Do I like this direction the leaked OGL 1.1 seems to take the hobby? No, absolutely not. It's anti-competitive, it's anti-collaborative, and most importantly, from my perspective, it limits content creator rights with regard to any product they create, like, for example, third-party rules,

classes, adventures, or even an RPG podcast. The best analogy I've heard about the situation is that Wizards of the Coast realize that the forest of the entire current RPG landscape has its seeds in the original Dungeons & Dragons. Because of that, they want bites out of every apple growing in that forest, and they are willing to cut down all the trees to make that happen. I, for one, have signed the hashtag OpenDND petition at the OpenDND.games website. If you're interested in reading more about that situation, head to that site to read more, and I'll put a link in the resources. Other than signing that petition, I'm going to take a wait-and-see approach

when it comes to things like this. There's not going to be a vitriol-filled, spittle-flying, angry episode from me talking about how Wizards of the Coast are the literal devil and you should burn the books you bought. No, that's not how I roll. If you're concerned,

but have no interest in signing a petition, check out some of the other game systems that are online, or maybe go to your friendly local game store. There are a lot of gaming fish in the sea and trying others will, if nothing else, expose you to new gaming ideas that can only make your game better. Hell, there may be a silver lining to all of this

that a lot of the smaller products like Morkborg and Delta Green and Blades in the Dark may see an onrush of players who want to distance themselves from Wizards of the Coast. And if you're currently a player in one of those other game systems, Pathfinder, whatever, be welcoming to new players and be patient with them. Not to put too strong of a statement on it, but these are gaming, for lack of a better term, refugees looking for a new home. Be welcoming and be supportive, and you might have a new player for life. How will this situation affect this podcast? Not substantially. This will be the last lore episode about Wizards of the Coast properties I'm going to do until this situation fully resolves. I'll just punt those episodes further down the road a bit and give the dust time to settle, and then I'll re-evaluate releasing

those episodes later. So in the interim, you're going to get a lot more system agnostic stuff and lore episodes about Starfinder and Pathfinder, and I even have some lore episodes planned now for Delta Green and a few other properties that are out there, so stay tuned for those. My friends, this too shall pass. It may pass like a kidney stone, but I promise it will pass. Keep an eye on the horizon to see how it resolves, but please do not let this OGL mess kill your joy from tabletop roleplaying games. I love you all, thank you for listening, and now after 10 damn minutes, on to the episode. It's been a while since I did a lore episode specific to 5e's Faerun campaign setting.

Over the break, I looked at my episode history, and my first thought was, oh, I did a 5e episode, this is number 131, about the Orcgate Wars, but that was back in July. Time for another one. This time, with long-lasting repercussions, the Time of Troubles. You may be asking yourself, why do I do lore episodes at all? You may be asking yourself, why do I do lore episodes at all? After all, I don't adventure in Faerun, or Galarian, or Kryn, or the Pact Worlds, or Exandria, or any of the other canon worlds published by any game system. Well, my friend, I want you to remember the DM's best friend.

Steal cool shit and put it in your game. Or as I say, more succinctly, borrow, borrow, borrow, steal, steal, steal. So you're not in the packed worlds. That doesn't mean you couldn't replicate ideas from the gap into your adventures. So you're not on Faerun. That doesn't mean you couldn't have a time of troubles in your campaign world's history where gods walked among mortals. Good ideas can be found everywhere, including lore for existing game worlds. So let's start with the basics of the Time of Troubles. The Time of Troubles was a period about 140 years ago in Faerun when the chief god Eo banished all the gods, good and evil, to walk among mortals for a time. This period is known by many other names, by the way.

The Arrival, the Avatar Crisis, the Gods War, the Time of the Avatars, the Fall of the Gods, and the Intervention of Aeo. Two gods, Bane, the god of tyrannical oppression, terror, and hate, and Merkle, the god of the dead and later god of decay and exhaustion, attempted to steal the Tablets of Fate, which are stone slabs on which the official portfolios of every one of the deities were written. While that doesn't sound like much, the tablets served as the official registration of the different domains that each deity claims complete or partial dominion over. The tablet serves as almost like a legal document, like a car registration, but for domains like healing, sun, fire, death, and so forth. The chief deity Eo was the owner and maintainer of the tablets and helped maintain the balance between law and chaos. In the

year of Shadows, 1358 DR, the evil gods Bane and Merkle stole the tablets and hid them from Eo in Faerun. They believed some of the over-god's power was derived from those tablets and hoped to overthrow him by stealing the tablets. When Eo discovered they were missing, he summoned all the deities and asked for those guilty to hand them over. You know, like a bunch of eight-year-olds. Okay, who took the cookie and the junkie? Who took the cookies? Anybody? Who did it? Anybody gonna volunteer? No? When no one stood forward to admit its stealing of the tablets, Aeo cast down all the gods from the heavens, taking their divine power in the process. None of the gods were allowed to return until the tablets were found.

Aeo tasked another god, Helm, with guarding the celestial stairways which would lead the deities back into their divine realms. And for this, Helm retained his divine powers. Again, like a bunch of eight-year-olds, you banish the kids to their room and place a protector god with a bastard sword at the doorway to keep them from escaping. What? Evidently, Child Protective Services says we're not allowed to do that anymore. That's probably for the best. So the gods were forced to walk among their followers on earth. This includes the gods of every Faerun pantheon, and the immediate effects were dramatic. First, divine magic, which are spells granted to clerics and

paladins by their patron deities, ceased to function altogether unless the cleric was within one mile of their deity's avatar. 2. Arcane magic, a force channeled from the weave by wizards and sorcerers, ceased to be regulated by its steward, Mystra, and became dangerously unpredictable. 3. The characteristically immortal and aloof deities were now vulnerable, although still devastatingly powerful, and dwelling among the civilizations of Faerun. When I talked about the Cataclysm of Kryn, episode 114, I briefly talked about the devastating effects a lack of divine magic can have on a world. Imagine a world where healing can only happen within one mile of certain deity avatars. Even if they scattered across the planet near population centers, that makes travel and adventuring much more dangerous. You're depending on your body's natural healing

as its only source of healing. Diseases run their course, blindness can't be cured, and of course, blessings don't exist. Now imagine this from a cleric's point of view. You've always had your deity on speed dial. Yeah, Iomedae, Lady of Valor, it's me, Kelithorn again. Yeah, hey, what's up? Listen, could I get a bunch of divine healing spells in my mind to use today? Because Raz the Barbarian's a dumbass, and your healing is the only thing that keeps him alive. Yeah, I'm all for justice too, but I just wish his intelligence was higher than five. I can't, oh, thank you so much, Mighty Inheritor, and peace through vigilance. This time when you reach out to Iomedae, though, there's silence.

Absolute dead silence. That would be terrifying for a cleric. Is it you? Did you commit some anathema against your deity's core beliefs? Has she withdrawn her favor from you? If that wasn't bad enough, now arcane magic is unpredictable. That fireball might just release a wave of butterflies. An invisibility spell might make you bray like a donkey. Feather fall might just release a brief puff of smoke. That could be problematic if the ground is rushing at you at, oh say, 500 feet per round. The first two changes

alone threw the world into absolute chaos. People of all species scrambled to find out what was wrong with magic and healing. Clerics of gods other than Ao and Helm in most of the world went into full panic mode, and it took a long time to determine the cause of the catastrophe. Ao's intention behind banishing all the gods was to let them focus more on their worshippers and less on what he felt was their petty inter-divinity squabbles. Now let's consider. The gods were now, despite being extremely powerful, mortal. That meant gods could die, and some of them did.

Mystra, the greater goddess of magic, was destroyed when she tried to bypass Helm and return to the divine realm anyway. Helm took his guard job really seriously. Bane was slain by the demigod Torm in battle, and Torm was annihilated by Bane with his dying breath. Bael, the god of murder, was slain by the mortal Sirik with the sword God's Bane. The god of murder was murdered in what I'm being told is an example of irony. The dragon goddess Tiamat was slain by her nemesis, the Untharian demigod Gilgim, or Gilgiam, however you pronounce that, but she had prepared for this.

Her essence was divided into three powerful chromatic dragons. The most powerful one devoured the other two, recombining them and causing Tiamat to re-emerge in the more powerful five-headed form that we know her from today. She then killed Gilgim, which caused Eo to dissolve the Untharian pantheon entirely, since a large percentage of those gods had died in the Orcgate Wars 375 years ago. See episode 131 for more on that lore event. Hymn, the corrupted avatar of the Master of the Hunt, was hunted and killed by Malar.

The God of Irony must have been working overtime during this time of history. Joaquin, the Goddess of Wealth, attempted to reclaim her divinity but was imprisoned by the demon prince Grazit. It would be ten years before she would be freed by adventurers and her power restored. Other slain deities included Ibrandol, Moander, Raman, Kareska, and then finally, Merkul, the other god that started all this mess by trying to steal the tablets.

They were slain in a duel with a mortal woman named Midnight over the skies in the city of Waterdeep. By no means is this a comprehensive list. Honestly, the exact list of minor deities and demigods who perished may never be comprehensively known. Eo had initially decreed that no god would be restored, but seeing that Torm died fulfilling the obligations of his portfolio, Eo resurrected the deity and elevated his power. Some of the slain deities, by the way, wormed their way back to life. Bane's son, and I am not going to pronounce this right, Iaktu Exvim, was slain to make way for Bane to be reborn. Merkle infused an artifact called the Crown of Horns with parts of his essence,

which became sentient and is currently plotting Merkle's resurrection. So after all the chaos, death, suffering, and destruction caused by the banishment, the two at the center of all of it aren't fully dead. Hell, Bane is just as strong as he ever was. The deaths did leave some vacancies in the power and domain portfolio, which were filled by mortals that Eo selected to extend to godhood. Sirik, who slayed Bael, became a powerful god. Kelimvor became the god of death, but kind of a nicer version if that makes any sense. Midnight, who slayed Merkle, received Mystra's Estance and became the new Mystra. And finally, Finder Wyvernspur, a powerful bard, became the god of the cycle of life.

Lord Eo also lifted the barrier that prevented Mulharandi god-kings from reuniting with their divine selves on the Outer Plains. The physical incarnations of the Mulharandi gods departed Faerun and left governance of the empire to mortal rulers under their guidance ever since. There have been long-lasting effects from the Time of Troubles. There are areas of Faerun where magic still doesn't quite work right, including dead magic zones and wild magic zones. There are some who still hold Helm personally responsible for the calamity and worship of the deity decreased after that.

Also, the worshippers that did remain were persecuted and some even murdered. Aeos kept a low profile before this incident, but since his existence is now known, cults have sprung up to worship him, including one in Waterdeep at their temple called the Sinisher. Now you may be asking, how long did it take to resolve everything from banishment to the gods being let back in? Four months. Four months of absolute chaos. The death of gods, reshuffling of pantheons, and establishing or destroying veils between realms of existence. and establishing or destroying veils between realms of existence. Four months of terror that still has reverberating effects 140 years later. So after all of this, what happened to the Tablets of Fate?

They were eventually recovered, thanks to the efforts of Midnight, Sirik, Kelimvor, and the cleric Adon. To keep this from ever happening again, Eo destroyed the Tablets, which unraveled the laws of realm space, and began a different chaotic time known as the Era of Upheaval, but that, as they say, is another story for another time. So what are the takeaways from events like this? One, if you do want to adventure in a chaotic time like this, and specifically this time where the gods were walking among men? There are three old modules written by Ed Greenwood for AD&D 2nd edition that cover those events and align themselves with novels written about the time of troubles.

They are called Shadowdale, Tantris, and Waterdeep. The modules are long out of print, but the Kindle editions of the books are still available. I'll put a link in the episode resources page. In most cases, the death or disappearance of a deity can create tremendous upheaval in your world. These times of chaos can be the basis of amazing campaigns and the creation of legends. If your characters are low level during this time of upheaval, maybe just surviving is the adventure. If they're mid-level, maybe finding a way to stabilize the effects and the deleterious disasters for a specific city or region. Or if they're high-level, the PCs either restore the original deities to power, help a new power ascend to godhood for good or evil, or maybe even become gods themselves. Third takeaway.

Events like the Time of Troubles should be a reminder that powerful, unseen forces of the world are always planning, always plotting, and always scheming. And fourth. Great adventures can be had by followers of one religion attempting to weaken the followers of another to make their god or goddess more powerful. attempting to weaken the followers of another to make their god or goddess more powerful. In summary, the Time of Troubles had far-reaching effects across the multiverse, caused when the head of the gods may have overreacted just a touch and caused almost all the other gods to lose all their access to the divine realm for a time.

Look at the deities that you have in your world. Figure out what they're trying to accomplish and how those machinations would manifest in your world. Set some plans in motion led by big bads to accomplish some of these deities' goals, and I'll bet you and your players would have fun doing it. Do you have any gaming friends or do you know people who may be interested in learning more about tabletop role-playing games? If so, please consider telling them about the podcast. Send them the link to www.taking20podcast.com or even give them my feedback at taking20podcast.com email address and I'm happy to help them discover the hobby.

Tune in next week when the mention of the crown of horns earlier made me want to talk about an important and often misused type of treasure, intelligent magic items, how to use them in your campaign, and the dangers of doing so. In the meantime, I want to thank our fake sponsor, Tires. You know, I thought about not using tire jokes as part of this episode. I mean, after all, these jokes never gain traction. This has been episode 158, continuing the lore series, this time about the town of Troubles. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game.

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