D&D (2024) OAR 10 City State of the Invincible Overlord

General_Tangent said:

I read somewhere that JG was licencing their products out and would be using the funds they received to put towards finishing off the CSIO Kickstarter.

Thing is it looks like my reference has evaporated so I cannot give a source to this .

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That was my understanding from the Frog God Tegel Manor books.

"All Judge’s Guild royalties are contractually required to ONLY support the City State of the Invincible Overlord Kickstarter. See here: Frog God Games for more info."

I am one of those who backed that original CSIO kickstarter before all the implosions.

I have not watched this yet

Of course a YouTube video instead of a text paragraph!

I'll wait for a TLDR.

A quick search of the transcript does not reveal any details about the license.

Some interesting early bits. "[The Invincible Overlord] has a total power over it and the City-State lends itself to adventure because it is not a nice place it is not a utopia not a city on the hill that we should aspire to it's a warning of what happens when you have power in the the hands of one small-minded individual."

As someone who watched, I’ll sum things up. Also, if you click the info box below the video, it will expand with more description, including a “show transcript.”

Bledsaw is only mentioned twice at the 2:00 and 3:40 marks, specifically the original Bob Bledsaw Sr. and not the younger Neo-Nazi ones.

Regarding licensing, they don’t talk about the specific agreement they have with Judges’ Guild and financial compensation. At the 7:07 mark they talk about how their OAR line initially licensed official adventures from D&D’s TSR days.

The closest we get towards acknowledging controversy is at the 12:53 mark.

“My personal opinion is I like to build, you know, bridges rather than walls. I think there’s been a lot of, uh, experiences in the last couple years in America of people building walls amongst each other. I’d rather encourage dialogue, encourage conversation, get people talking, and have people converge on what I hope is a unified perspective for how we can all go forward together in a collaborative way.”

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overgeeked said:

"[The Invincible Overlord] has a total power over it and the City-State lends itself to adventure because it is not a nice place it is not a utopia not a city on the hill that we should aspire to it's a warning of what happens when you have power in the the hands of one small-minded individual."

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Yeah, that moment has a very self-aware feel to it -- they know we're talking here, I'd think -- but also doesn't directly address anything. Here's hoping we get more, and it's not marketing-speak next time.

It's an "immense boxed set" including all of the CSIO supplemental material. It's not clear if there's an archival version of the material in the box or just the adaptations.

They're pointing out that this is the third published D&D setting. It's also a multicultural city, creating a melting pot including what were seen as evil races at the time.

The Lawful Evil Overlord sends adventurers out into the wilderness to fight monsters, etc., specifically to get armed people away from him and too busy to think about overthrowing him.

They had made a wish list when they started OAR, highlighting "really important" adventures, and CSIO "fits into that basket exactly."

It will be made "open and acceptable to a new generation of gamers," which is interesting phrasing.

They're going to continue doing OARs, they say, because they think they're important.

This is the result of "three years of behind the scenes solid work."

“My personal opinion is I like to build, you know, bridges rather than walls. I think there’s been a lot of, uh, experiences in the last couple years in America of people building walls amongst each other. I’d rather encourage dialogue, encourage conversation, get people talking, and have people converge on what I hope is a unified perspective for how we can all go forward together in a collaborative way.”

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Thinking that racists are a) acting in good faith, and b) can be reasonably and/or constructively debated is a very dumb, very dangerous idea, that often results in... looks around at all of this

I'm also not a fan of this thinking because it puts the onus on non-racists to somehow be responsible for changing the thinking of these people.

I'm not calling Joe Goodman dumb, but I think this is misinformed at best and disingenuous at worst.

I'm all for walling bigots off from polite society until they learn to be decent people. I am not at all interested in building a "bridge" with Holocaust denial.