Kobold Press's Tales of the Valiant Announcement

Yesterday, Kobold Press announced the name of the roleplaying game they will release within the next year. There is a detailed announcement on the Kobold Press blog.

When Kobold Press announced last week that they would reveal the name of the new game, I was a little surprised. I thought they had settled on the uninspiring Core Fantasy Roleplaying as the name of the product. It turns out that it's more complicated than that. 

And if you’re just joining us, Kobold Press is committed to releasing Core Fantasy Roleplaying to everyone under an open, perpetual, and irrevocable license. It’s sort of like the SRD, but more thorough.

So "Core Fantasy Roleplaying" will be the name of the mechanics they release in their System Reference Document, while "Tales of the Valiant" will be the name of the game they release as books, presumably with extra lore and GM advice. The phrase "but more thorough" seems to indicate that the Core Fantasy Roleplaying SRD will be more like the SRDs released for other games: at minimum, all the game mechanics text of the core rules (not just one archetype per class), and possibly more such material from supplements as they are published. 

Why call the SRD text by a different name than the game itself? I am not a lawyer, but I suspect one of the reasons may have to do with legal issues. One of the justifications Wizards of the Coast gave for trying to revoke the old OGL earlier this year was to prevent third-party publishers from sullying the Dungeons & Dragons trademark with racist content or other offensive OGL material. Releasing the open content of their game under a different name allows Kobold Press to avoid the possibility that an offensive product using the Core Fantasy Roleplaying rules, with the Core Fantasy Roleplaying logo, would bring ill repute to the separate Tales of the Valiant Game. By the way, this measure demonstrates that there are plenty of ways for WotC to address the issue of offensive content without revoking the original OGL.

Meanwhile, a fuller SRD could be a competitive advantage for Kobold Press against the better funded next edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Both games will use the same core mechanics, so the one that allows players to access more information more conveniently online (especially for VTT use) may have a point in its favor.

Overall, I think this is a smart move by Kobold Press that can position Tales of the Valiant well going forward.

Canongate

In which a current controversy that nobody outside of Twitter cares about prompts the author to resurrect a two-years-dead blog.

The latest temporary tempest in a teapot in the D&D world is a declaration by Jeremy Crawford, the lead D&D rules designer at Wizards of the Coast, that Forgotten Realms novels and  FR game books from older editions are not considered "canon" by the current D&D designers.

The D&D community's reaction was swift, passionate, and unencumbered by actually reading the article in which the statement was quoted. Here's the article: 

Dungeons & Dragons Novels, Video Games, and Other Spin-Offs Are Not Canonical to D&D Roleplaying Game -- Comicbook.com

Of course, what Crawford actually said was that DMs and groups should not feel bound by all these years of setting books and ancillary products, not that those products were invalid. Actual quote from Crawford in the article:

The moment you are at the game table, it’s no longer "our” Dragonlance or "our" Forgotten Realms, it’s your Forgotten Realms, it’s your Dragonlance.... You’re not bound to the stories in the novels, as wonderful as they might be. We hope you take as much inspiration from them as it gives you joy to do so. The same goes for D&D video games or for D&D comics.

This approach actually mirrors WotC's decades-old stance on older material. I remember way back when, on the WotC forums circa 2003, there was an annoying poster on the Forgotten Realms boards who would constantly argue that all of the old 2nd Edition FR box sets were still canon. Eventually, they emailed WotC's customer support staff about the issue and posted the response. The answer they got was that the old books were still "useful" and that DMs should use as much or as little as they wanted. That particular poster pretended that "useful" meant "canon" and continued their haranguing of other posters for doing FR wrong, but the actual reply mirrored what Crawford is saying now.

This approach to "canon" also liberates younger DMs. Should a 16-year-old DM running their first-ever RPG campaign in FR feel that they must read an extensive collection of box sets and novels to run the game "properly"? Should they be haunted by the specter of being constantly corrected by a player who scored a trove of old FR novels from a used bookstore?

There seem to be two groups of people freaking out about this article: grognards and sheep. The grognards feel that WotC is invalidating their childhoods and declaring their favorite modules and box sets obsolete. The sheep feel rudderless without an extensive set of canon to guide their games. One even asked how you were supposed to play in FR without information from the novels. One group fears the dreaded knock of the mythical Canon Police on their door, while the other seems to want to keep a canon lawyer on retainer to give them ideas of how to game.

However, I suspect that this whole thing will blow over within a few days, if not sooner. But I had too many thoughts to get off my chest in a tweet or two, thus this post.