Sunday, January 15, 2023

Children of Blood & Stone: Because I'd rather not use the DMs Guild

About a year-and-a-half ago I started to seriously consider writing my own short supplements for sale on WotC's DMs Guild. The store was still new and shiny (to me at least), and I figured that literally any cut of money from a $1 PDF was better than the zero I was presently enjoying.

So I settled on putting a pretty modest spin on orcs, got to work, and in a couple of weeks I slapped together what felt like a fairly decent D&D 5th edition ancestry. I also came up with some fun world-building inspired by a deep lore pull from a 4th edition transitionary novel that I'm almost certain nobody ever read, including me. I even got some lovely art to furnish the piece with.

Of course, Furtive being furtive, I stalled out toward the end. Anxiety over getting the product reviewed and edited, let alone getting it approved by the store and releasing it for sale, kept me from getting any farther than creating an account for the site. And so the mini-supplement sat on my Google Drive for over a year, collecting dust next to some spreadsheets and the desiccated corpse of an old Goblin Watch episode.

In retrospect, I'm kind of glad for that.

The recent OGL scandal is pretty bad, but it's only one of a number of things I'm not super fond of WotC for. Corporations are not our friends, after all. Also, since I've become increasingly involved in indie projects over the past year or so, it just doesn't feel personally appropriate to do something like I was originally planning.

So instead of doing any amount of business with the DMs Guild or risking a stern email by selling it on itch.io or some such, I opted to just scribble out the logo and release the whole thing here for free, both in janky-but-mostly-finished PDF form, and divided up into two blog posts accessible below.

If you like my stuff enough to want to support me, you can always go to my Ko-fi instead.

Also, check out the other stuff made by the artist, Coleen! She's a long-time patron of the blog who made my banner and avatar way back when. I wouldn't have made this without her help.


Children of Blood & Stone:




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