Neopets Terminates Geekify's License, TTRPG in Jeopardy

A tabletop RPG that raised over $427,000 on Kickstarter is now in Jeopardy after Neopets ended its licensing partnership with Geekify. On March 10, Neopets announced that it had ended its license agreement with Geekify, effective immediately. Geekify had made various licensed products for Neopets over several years and was in the process of developing a tabletop RPG for Neopets. This RPG had been under severe scrutiny by both the fandom and the owners of Neopets after a playtest was released that indicated the RPG would be a combat-focused 5E derivative. Neopets ordered that the playtest be taken down and said that it was released without their oversight.

Neopets indicated that backers of the campaign should reach out to Geekify directly about questions regarding their outstanding pledges. Kickstarter frequently notes that pledges are not a promise of goods delivered, and it's unclear whether Geekify will reimburse backers either in part or in full. As of press time, Geekify had not posted an update about the state of the RPG to Kickstarter, although updates for the RPG appear to be temporarily down.

As for Neopets, they noted that interest in a TTRPG appears to be high and didn't rule out a future TTRPG featuring their property. "Regarding the TTRPG category as a whole, we recognise the immense support this project received and the demand for a quality roleplaying experience within the Neopets universe," a statement on the Neopets website read. "We are continuing to explore alternative options to bring a high quality TTRPG gaming experience to the fan base and are looking into solutions to help us accomplish this in the future."

 

[Koloth]

There is no reason to include a section in the rules about how to deal with sexual content if the game is meant to be about raising pets and exploring the world with them and is not, by design, intended to include sexual themes. Certainly, if the IP holder considers their material G-rated and family friendly, I can see how they'd be unhappy with their IP being treated as some kind of sex game (which, from an outsider's perspective, is exactly what a discussion of sex in the game is doing).

Now, this isn't to say that someone who wants to include sexual themes in their game shouldn't do so. At your table, you can do what you want. But, if you decide that's what you want in your game, you are responsible for that decision. There is no reason to expect any and every game to walk you through the process of including such themes if the default expectation is that those themes aren't present.

That said, the impression I get is not that the publisher wanted to turn it into a sex game; it feels more likely to me that they simply have no real clue what they're doing, and they (or their AI assistant) saw safety tool discussions in one or more reference works and added something similar in to this product, without any actual understanding of the context.

For reference, a very quick search confirmed that the neopets site rules include a blanket ban on sexual content, so explicitly offering options for including it the RPG seems pretty self-evidently inappropriate to me. As does fighting bandits as the sample adventure, for that matter, since violence is also forbidden (and, from what I've seen, the original sales pitches indicated that playing the game with no violence at all was meant to be an option, which also makes fighting bandits a completely inappropriate demo adventure).

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For the record, I have no interest in a neopets game and know very little about neopets, but it seems pretty clear to me that what this RPG included was not at all in the spirit of the original site, is not what was pitched to backers, and is not what the neopets community or the IP holder wanted in a game.

It is a rare game design that survives first contact with real players. Very likely that if a Neopets fan sits down in a FLGS to run a legit G rated game, that at least one player will have NO idea what a neopet is or that the neopet genre is supposed to be G rated only. Best to have at least a quick discussion on what the theme of the game is and what is not allowed. So yes, a discussion on sexual and other stuff, even if that mention is "Please, no sexual and other things on that list, keep everything kid G rated."

The purpose of a playtest document is to discover things that are wrong. Given that Neopets and Geekify had a history of producing stuff, seems pulling the license over an initial playtest doc is a bit extreme. Wonder if there is more behind the scenes stuff that wasn't mentioned in the public breakup notice? I stick with my initial lawyer banks comment.