Books I Read In ’23: Part 5—Planescape & Friends

The Story So Far

Planescape was…

Hang on, let me back up a bit. Okay, maybe a little further.

Dungeons & Dragons has this concept called Alignment. On the surface it’s a simplified way to describe how a character acts, filtered through a very Gygax-style overly-complex solution. You have two spectrums: Good vs Evil, and Lawful vs Chaotic, with a Neutral step in between for each, making a 9-space 3-by-3 grid. So you get things like Chaotic Neutral, Lawful Good, Neutral Evil. Like a lot of concepts from the original flavors of Dungeons & Dragons, it’s both overly-complex and overly-limiting. You’re supposed to pick one for your character that informs and limits how they act. Everyone picks “Chaotic Good”, the adventurer alignment: “I’m helpful but don’t tell me what to do”. But it sort of seeps into the cracks of the rest of the game. Monsters have alignments. Spells work with them. There used to be secret languages for each alignment.

And then, at the back of the First Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook, there’s two absolutely madcap pages labeled “Appendix IV: The Known Planes of Existence.” In this, Gygax outlines the cosmology out beyond where the game world normally takes place. The “real world” exists on something called the “Prime Material Plane”, which is surrounded by both the Outer and Inner Planes.

A Plane is something like the nine realms from norse myth, or an alternate dimension, but governed by different rules. The Inner Planes are primal forces: positive and negative energy, the elements. The Outer Planes, however, build outward from the alignment chart. 15 “Planes” extend outward from the Prime Material, one for each of the alignments (other than Neutral-Neutral), with a half-step between each. These are the outer dimensions where supernatural and god-like beings live, each tied to an Alignment. You can squint and see what real world mythology they’re each tied to—there’s Valhalla, there’s Dante’s Inferno, Limbo, Olympus, Christian Heaven, Hades, and so on. It’s a perfect distillation of the D&D ethos—all mythologies are included and equal, there’s a complicated chart, and you can fight them.

To round out the cosmology, the Inner Planes were connected to the Prime Material by the Etherial Plane, and the Outer Planes were connected by the Astral Plane. There’s an implication that there are more than one Material Plane, representing… parallel universes? All this was illustrated with a diagram out of an alchemist’s rantings, or a two-dimensional version of that orrery from The Dark Crystal.

Then, a couple of years later Jeff Grubb turned this into an entire book called The Manual of the Planes. This blew those two pages out into something approaching an actual setting. Each plane, outer and inner, got a full description, and there were monsters, encounters, rules for how spells worked. As a key detail for later, this book added a 16th “true neutral” plane, the Plane of Concordant Opposition, which acted as the center of The Great Wheel of the planes, with the other planes extending out from it, which also had an impossibly tall unclimbable spire at the center. (The axel of the wheel?)

What was all this for? The Planes solved, basically, three problems in D&D:

1. Mostly, this described where the deities that clerics got their spells from physically lived. It was a universal explanation for where supernatural or paranormal entities came from. Gods, Demons, angels, elementals, ghosts: they come from a plane. And, it did this in a way that didn’t elevate one particular mythology or religion over the others. All real-world religions and supernatural creatures had a place to go, which you could use or ignore as you liked.
2. It was where high level characters went when they needed a new challenge. Too powerful to clear out yet one more keep on a borderland? Travel to the Outer Planes and treat Dante’s political satire as an endgame dungeon.
3. It provided a way to move between campaign settings. Want to use your Grayhawk characters in a Mystara game? Lemme tell you the good news about astral portals.

Maybe most critically, this was also the blanket answer for where demons (chaotic evil) and devils (lawful evil), came from. (The Abyss and The Nine Hells, respectively). Because of course, this was the height of the Satanic Panic in the mid-80s, and having a place in the game that was specifically where Satan lived was a bad look. When the 2nd edition of AD&D arrived in 1989, all this got swept under the rug.

While this kept all the weird mythology stuff out of the sight of the Mrs. Lovejoys of the world, this left the game without a place for high-powered characters to loot, or a way to travel between settings. The solution to this was the original Spelljammer. Spelljammer replaced the mythological outer realms with a science-fantasy “boats in space” approach. The different campaign settings were now planets, each in their own solar systems. Each solar system was enclosed in a “Crystal Sphere”, each of which in turn was floating in an infinite sea of “Phlogiston”. “Spelljammers” were magic-powered ships that could travel between the spheres. Implicitly, this was all taking place inside the old Prime Material Plane, leaving the old cosmology unmentioned but still usable.

By the mid-90s, the “satanic panic” was down to more of an “impish concern”, and Spelljammer hadn’t sold super-well. There was a desire to “bring back” the old planes cosmology. Rather than do this as a standalone esoteric sourcebook, the decision was made to promote the planes to a “real” campaign setting.

But also, AD&D’s simulationist, rules-heavy, combat oriented approach had fallen out of style. It wasn’t “The Game” anymore, not the way it had been a decade earlier, and there were a mounting number of games that weren’t just looting castles one ten-foot square at a time. There was a cambrian-style explosion of new games at the start of the decade—Over the Edge, Ars Magica, Feng Shui, to name some examples—built around figuring out the minimum viable number of rules for a game like this, and refocusing on the “role playing” part of RPG.

But the big one was Vampire: The Masquerade. Less rules, more roleplaying, dark urban fantasy. And, relevant to our current purposes, each character chose a “clan”, each of which was based on a Vampiric archetype (the dracula ones, the nosferatu ones, the anne rice ones, the lost boys, and so on). The clan wasn’t a character class so much as a set of hooks for roleplaying, an archetype for what your character acted like, not what they could do. It was that alignment chart, all grown up.

And this all dovetailed with everything else that was going on in nerd subcultures in the 90s, by which I really mean the goth scene was on the rise and The Sandman was huge.

And so, the mission: put D&D back at the forefront of RPG design, reboot the Planes as a gameplay location, with characters joining Vampire-style thematic groups while journeying across landscapes that looked like Sandman cover art.

The result: Planescape.

It immediately had a distinct feel as soon as you looked at it. The art was unlike anything on any other RPG product, a sketchy near-cartoony surrealist look that was immediately evocative; something between a goth Dr Seuss and Brian Froud’s concept art for Labyrinth. The logo had a weird spiky lady in it that looked like a mythological character from a mythos you’d never heard of. Even the fonts and page layouts were distinctive. The message was clear—this wasn’t a D&D book, this was a Planescape book.

The distinctivness continued once you flipped it open. (Or rather, slid open the box set). One of the signature features inside was “The Chant”, a set of slang and dialect that planar natives used; it only sounded strange to you on account your being a clueless berk, but don’t worry, you’ll be a savvy cutter no time. Unlike the house standard voice in other products, Planescape was written in a casual tone, the voice of an experienced adventurer welcoming you out of the prime and into the big leagues of the planes.

All the Planes got new names. These were their real names, you understand, the names back in the old Appendix IV were what the uneducated primes called them. As such, the “Plane of Concordant Opposition” became “The Outlands”, and the top of the infinite spire we now find Sigil, the City of Doors, a city built on the inside of a giant stone torus; which was also called the Cage because the only way in or out is via a planar portal or gateway. Sigil acts as the player’s home base, the place you bang around between adventures.

The city is ruled? controlled? by the enigmatic Lady of Pain—the spiky face in the logo. But she’s more of an absentee landlord than micromanager, so the city is run by The Factions. There are fifteen of them, roughly corresponding to the fifteen Outer Planes. But, they also all have a distinct philosophy. Like the vampire clans, it doesn’t take a lot of work to map the factions to their real-world counterparts—there’s the socialists, the fascists, the atheists, the libertarians, the discordians. (It was the 90s. Vampire had those guys too.)

Like in Vampire, every player had to pick a faction, and like vampire they were written so that everyone reading immediately had a favorite, but everyone had a different favorite. There weren’t “good ones” or “bad ones”, just a spectrum of stuff different people thought was cool. (Vampire is always cited as the direct inspiration, but I suspect the Factions also owed as much to the Houses and Clans from Battletech.)

This foregrounding of philosophy extended outward through the game: the rules posited that while the Prime Material Plane was governed by physics, the “physics” of the Outer Planes was philosophy, that belief and ideas were what underpinned those realities. The lead developer, David "Zeb" Cook, described the setting as “Philosophers with Clubs”.

It was fun, and different, and expansive without being overwhelming. While a lot of D&D specifically can feel like a copy of a copy of a copy of either Tolkien or Howard, this was something else, something absolutely unique, something D&D had that nothing else did.

The usual complaint from people that didn’t like it was that it was a better read than it was a game; which was occasionally fair: there are NPCs who communicate entirely through rebuses, which is great to read about but really, really hard to roleplay. (“It, uhhhh, puts up a rebus that, ah, can you roll, okay it means ‘you need to keep moving, citizen.’”). But if it was your jam, it was your jam.

It also served as the setting for one of the best-regarded D&D computer games, Planescape:Torment. Torment tended to be a lot of people’s first encounter with the setting, especially after the setting went out of print but the game stayed around in places like Steam or GoG. (That’s a gun I just hung over the mantle, by the way.)

It was glorious. In case this isn’t coming though from the fact that I’m over seventeen-hundred words in and haven’t talked about the new book yet, the Planes are my absolute favorite thing in D&D, and I think Planescape is the single best thing the old TSR ever published.

When 3rd edition came along at the turn of the century, Planescape, along with all the other boxed-set campaign settings got put in the attic. Both 3rd and 4th edition did anemic Manuals of the Planes that gestured at planar adventuring, but mostly left Sigil and Planesape as an easter egg or sidebar. The 5th Edition PHB has four pages at the back labeled “Appendix C: The Planes of Existence”, which is a surprisingly comprehensive summary of the built up material to date, but like the old original Appendix IV, was more teaser than gameplay resource.

As the fifth edition game trundled on, “new Planescape” was a persistant rumor. Which bring us to today, one the last new products released for “Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition (2014)” before “Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition (2024)” is released: the long rumored New Planescape.

Planescape 5e

The new Planescape follows the same format as last year’s Spelljammer: a slipcased set of three books: a setting overview, a monster manual, and an adventure. It solves one of new Spelljammer’s biggest shortcomings, in that the adventure and setting book are now 96 pages instead of 64, so the combined page count is the same as one of 5e’s larger standalone books, meaning it’s not cramped the way Spelljammer was. Also, they make the very savvy call to focus entirely on Sigil and the Outlands, leaving the rest of the planes alone.

So here we are! 45 pages detailing the insides of Sigil! Write-ups on the factions! A two-page spread for each gate down in the Outlands! A two-sided poster map! Modrons on the cover art! Finally, right?

I’ve got really mixed feelings about it.

Let’s start with this: The berks put the chant in the dead book. The “pirate talk / thieves cant” slang was one of the signature features of the original, solidly establishing that this took place somewhere else. There was always a vocal minority of people that didn’t like it, but those people didn’t like anything else about it either. And it’s just… not here. The text of the books is written in the same neutral house style as all the other 5e books. There’s no glossary of “planar slang” at the end. In the adventure, the first NPC you meet on the streets of Sigil uses essentially the entire slang dictionary in one sentence, and then someone else shoos them away with with an apology for the crazy person, and from that point on everyone else sounds just like every other D&D NPC, which is to say, just like Jack Kirby’s Thor. Reading it, there’s an immediate chill, as you realize that the setting whose signature feature was being different from everything else has been brought back, but lost something along the way..

The same thing applies to the art. Planescape used to have a distinct, stylized art style—there was no mistaking a Planescape book for something else. And here, everything is done in the same house style as the rest of 5e. It’s good art. It’s really good art. But there’s the Lady of Pain on the cover, looking like every other piece of 5th edition cover art. Seeing characters or locations from the old game rendered in the modern, standard art style was strange, like seeing someone you went to high school with after years and years and discovering they’d had some ill-advised plastic surgery. “They looked fine before, why did they do that to themselves?”

The distinctive fonts are gone, the text and layouts looking just like every other 5th edition book. Even the old logo is gone, replaced by an unadorned “PLANESCAPE” in big capital letters in the same brand font.

But okay, so the detailing is gone, what about the core content?

Let’s talk about the Factions. There’s only twelve of them now, some old ones, some revised, weirdly decoupling them from the outer planes. And they’re optional. There’s one new Character Background which is basically “belongs to a Faction” with a list of what skill gets a bonus based on what Faction you pick. There’s even a sidebar on how to make your own faction, which is cool, I guess, but broadly misses the point. The faction writeups clearly think of them as groups the players will interact with, but not join. Some of them are clearly bad guys now. You’re not really expected to pick a favorite. (And my old favorite isn’t there anymore, which is the real lemon juice squeezed into this papercut.)

And then there’s the included adventure, “Turn of Fortune’s Wheel.” There’s a mystery that takes the players on a tour of the Gate Towns along the edge of the Outlands, which is a great structure to get a buffet-style sampler plate of the planes without having to leave the Outlands. There’s a multi-planar casino! The central mystery is actually interesting. It even serves as a stealth sequel to the 1997 module The Great Modron March.

But yeah, this is where I start a paragraph with the word “but.”

Because the title of the box set is not “Planescape”, it’s “Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse”, and “multiverse” means a different thing in 2023 than it did in 1997. So for the adventure you roll up three versions of your characters—the versions played by Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland, if you will—and your character “glitches” between them. It’s not a terrible mechanic, and kind of a cool premise, but that’s not the kind of multiverse we were talking about?

And, this is where I sort of chuckle and shake my head, the adventure has the exact same beginning as Torment. And I mean, exactly the same: you wake up on a slab in The Mortuary with amnesia, and there’s Morte the talking skull giving you a hard time. The central spine of the plot is to find out who you were, and why you keep coming back to life when you die. It’s the same set of ideas as Torment, just less interesting.

And I get it. I get it. Here in the twenties, if someone under 40 has played Planescape, they played Torment. And more importantly, they played the first 20 minutes of Torment, because a slightly buggy crunchy AD&D CRPG from the late 90s is basically unplayable today. Not technically, DosBox has you covered, but too much time has passed for those mechanics. So all most people know about Planescape is that there’s a weird morgue with a talking skull in it. So, yeah, you put that in. Sure you do.

So we end up with the “go anywhere do anything” setting going the same places doing—literally—the same things. It’s got that big franchise relaunch style where it spends a bunch of time covering old ground, gesturing at things going “hey, remember this?” Even when it drops the occasional deep cut, like an oblique reference to the original Planescape finale, Dead Gods, it manages to feel more patronizing than anything. The title of the second chapter of the adventure is “Philosophers with Clubs”, although the content of that chapter contains neither, but hey, ‘member when Zeb Cook said that?

And I haven’t even mentioned the walking castle thats blatantly just “Howl’s Moving Castle.”

Its’s high quality, well done. I found it all genuinely upsetting.

To be clear, theres nothing in here that's actually bad. It is, to coin a phrase, "perfectly cromulent", a solid-if-uninspiring update of an out-of-print setting to current corporate standards. The game my kid is in at jr high dropped everything they were doing and moved to this the second it came out. Walking though portals to fight new kinds of monsters is still cool when you're twelve, no matter what the art looks like. And, believe me, I understand there's a difference between "biggest release of the year for the most successful product line from a multi-billion dollar company" and "crazy swing for the fences from a nitche company that's going out of business."

But, I don’t understand the point of doing a new Planescape if you’re going to make it the same house style as everything else. Why not just do a new Manual of the Planes? The mechanics were never the point, what little of them there were. It was all about style and vibes, and all the style and vibes are gone.

And you know what? That’s my whole review. They took the most distinct, unique setting they ever had and sandblasted it until it was the same as everything else. Why bother? Why bring it back if this is what you were going to do?

Maybe this is just old guy grousing, and kids who find this for the first time in their teens will spend the next two decades dreaming about Sigil like I did. I hope so?

(This is where I casually mention inside some parentheses that DriveThroughPRG will do you a print-on-demand copy of the original for thirty bucks.)

However, Hasbro’s new Planescape isn’t the only game in town for extra-planar adventures in D&D…

Path of the Planebreaker by Bruce R. Cordell, Monte Cook, Sean K. Reynolds

Monte Cook was on the original Planescape team, then was one of the co-designers for D&D 3rd edition. He’s been running his own company for most of the 21st century, these days mostly knocking out new games based on the system he designed for his signature game, Numenera.

However, he also has an almost supernatural ability to release a product for D&D right before Hasbro does a version of the same thing, so last year just before the new Planescape was announced he did his own “Planescape for 5e”: Path of the Planebreaker.

A cursed moon—The Planebreaker—crashes from plane to plane, traversing the whole of the multiverse. The trail it leaves behind can be used as a road to travel the planes, assuming you have the right key.

The book outlines dozens of planes that the Planebreaker has crashed through, and in keeping with Monte Cook’s style, they’re all weird as hell. The Planebreaker itself, and the city of Timeborne on it, is a very cool “home base” location. It’s a very Monte Cook product: weird places? Check. Mysterious plot hooks-a-plenty? Check? Cool magic? Check. More than anything, this really fills the niche the planes used to have of “weird places high level characters can go and loot”. It’s the ideal sort of product to click into an existing game to blow out the horizons. The Planebreaker appears in the sky, shenanigans ensue.

You can tell everyone working on this knows how the D&D Great Wheel cosmology works, and while this doesn’t interact with it, it doesn’t contradict it either. These are the weirder planes further out from the ones near Sigil.

Great stuff, I really enjoyed it.

The Book of Ebon Tides by Wolfgang Baur & Celeste Conowitch

Meanwhile, Wolfgang Baur, who was also on the original Planescape team, also started his own company, Kobold Press (after writing the single best book for 3rd edition D&D, The Book of Roguish Luck, for Monte Cook’s old company). Legend has it that he pitched a Plane of Shadow book for the original Planescape back in the 90s which went nowhere. Two decades on, he finally wrote it: Book of Ebon Tides. And look, that’s pretty much the whole review: “Wolfgang Baur finally wrote his Shadow book.”

It’s pretty amazing. Here, the Plane of Shadow is reimagined as a dark counterpart of the real world filled with fay courts and shadow creatures; it’s Midsummer Nights Dream set in the dark world from A Link to the Past. Weird forests. Shadow goblins. Shadow magic. And you can play an anthropomorphic bear. This is the kind of book where every single page has something on it where you go “wow, that’s cool.” There’s a whole flock of character options, new races, new spells, every characer class gets a new shadow-themed subclass. The Book of Roguish Luck had this very cool “shadow thief” class for 3rd edition, and I was really hoping this would have an updated version. Oh yeah, that’s in here. And then some.

It’s full of hooks for Kobold’s home setting of “Midgard”, but that stuff is easy to strip out or sand down, and this also could click incredibly easy into any other campaign. I tend to buy books like this so I can loot them for other games, and I am going to be looting this one for years. It’s the kind of book that makes you want to scrap the game you’re currently running, drop it on the table, and tell your players, “so, we’re doing this now.”

Young Adventurer’s Collection: Places & Portals

The Young Adventurer’s Collection is a series of books Hasbro has been putting out aimed at younger readers that introduce the concepts of D&D without any of those pesky rules getting in the way. They’re perfect if you’re say, a mid-40s RPG nerd with a tween-aged kid whose really into this whole D&D thing but needs a softer onramp than the PHB. Places & Portals is the latest, covering, like it says, other places you can go. It hits the high points of the planes as a concept, but mostly I bring this up because it also has a chapter on Spelljammer. When the Spelljammer box came out last year, there was some debate about whether the “Doomspace” in the included adventures was really supposed to be Dark Sun in disguise? Well, Places & Portals came out first, and has has the same map of the Astral Plane as the Spelljammer box, except the solar system labeled “Doomspace” in Spelljammer is called “Athasspace” here. As a long time fan of that setting, I love that they collapsed the dark sun and dropped Athas into a black hole. Perfect ending, no notes.

Journeys through the Radiant Citadel

But lets loop back around. Before the new Planescape, before the new Spelljammer, Hasbro put out a book called Journeys through the Radiant Citadel. This was one of the adventure anthologies they do every other year or so, and has thirteen short adventures, most of which could work as a one shot. The signature feature of this book, though, was that it was entirely done by people of color.

The Radiant Citadel is an ancient magical city floating out in the Etherial plane (positioning this as both an anti-Spelljammer and anti-Planescape), and each adventure takes place in one of the locations the Citadel has a portal to. Are these locations other planes, other worlds in the prime material, somewhere else? The book is ambiguous about this, to its benefit. There’s no overarching cosmology here beyond “the universe is vast and wondrous.”

These locations and adventures all draw from world mythologies and traditions other than the warmed over Tolkien/Howard we were talking about. But they’re not just “the asian one” or “the indian one”, they’re all riffs and combinations of ideas, pulling from a far wider pool than D&D traditionally has. They all feel new. Each adventure is a tiny gem, sketching out a world outside the confines of the few pages they have. And these aren’t just dungeon crawls with a different skin, there are puzzles, negotiations, diplomacy. Most of the adventures center around arriving in a new place, figuring out how that world works, and then using that knowlede to solve a problem or help somebody. It’s probably the best book Hasbro put out for 5th edition. Yes, it's better than the new Ravenloft.

Forget the editorial failures of the new Spelljammer or the sandblasted new Planescape: this is what D&D should look like in the twenties. This. This is what I wanted from Planescape, this is what attracted me to the old Planescape as a teenager. A glorious mashup of world cultures and mythologies, evocative art, neat ideas, adventurers going to weird places and doing cool stuff.

In conclusion, the new Planescape is fantastic: it’s called Journeys through the Radiant Citadel. Strongest possible recommendation.

What Might Be A Faint Glimmer Of Hope In This Whole AI Thing

As the Aftermath says, It's Been A Huge Week For Dipshit Companies That Either Hate Artists Or Are Just Incredibly Stupid.

Let’s look at that new Hasbro scandal one for a second. To briefly recap, they rolled out some advertising for the next Magic: The Gathering expansion that was blatantly, blatantly, AI generated. Which is bad enough on its own, but that’s incredibly insulting for a game as artist-forward as MTG. But then, let’s add some context. This is after a year where they 1) blew the whole OGL thing, 2) literally sent The Actual Pinkertons after someone, 3) had a whole different AI art scandal for a D&D book that caused them to have to change their internal rules, 4) had to issue an apology for that stuff in Spelljammer, and 5) had a giant round of layoffs that, oh by the way what a weird coincidence, gutted the internal art department at Wizards. Not a company whose customers are going to default to good-faith readings of things!

And then, they lied about it! Tried to claim it wasn’t AI, and then had to embarrassingly walk it all back.

“Not Great, Bob!”

Here’s the sliver of hope I see in this.

First, the blowback was surprisingly large. There’s a real “we’re tired of this crap” energy coming from the community that wasn’t there a year ago.

More importantly, through, Hasbro knew what the right answer was. There wasn’t any attempt to defend or justify how “AI art is real art we’re just using new tools”; this was purely the behavior of a company that was trying to get away with something. They knew the community was going to react badly. It’s bad that they still went ahead, but a year ago they wouldn’t have even tried to hide it.

But most importantly (to me), in all the chatter I saw over the last few days, no one was claiming that “AI” “art” was as good as real art. A year ago, it would have been all apologists claiming that the machine generated glurge was “just as good” and “it’s still real art”, and “it’s just as hard to make this, just different tools”, “this is the future”, and so on.

Now, everyone seems to have conceded the point that the machine generated stuff is inherently low quality. The defenses I saw all centered around the fact that it was cheap and fast. “It’s too cheap not to use, what can you do?” seemed to be the default view from the defenders. That’s a huge shift from this time last year. Like how bitcoin fans have mostly stopped pretending crypto is real money, generative AI fans seem to be giving up on convincing us that it’s real art. And the bubble inches closer to popping.

Re-Capturing the Commons

The year’s winding down, which means it’s time to clear out the drafts folder. Let me tell you about a trend I was watching this year.

Over the last couple of decades, a business model has emerged that looks something like this:

1. A company creates a product with a clear sales model, but doesn’t have value without a strong community
2. The company then fosters such a community, which then steps in and shoulders a fair amount of the work of running said community
3. The community starts creating new things on top of what that original work of the parent company—and this is important—belong to those community members, not the company
4. This works well enough that the community starts selling additional things to each other—critically, these aren’t competing with that parent company, instead we have a whole “third party ecosystem”.

(Hang on, I’ll list some examples in a second.)

These aren’t necessarily “open source” from a formal OSI “Free & Open Source Software” perspective, but they’re certainly open source–adjacent, if you will. Following the sprit, if not the strict legal definition.

Then, this year especially, a whole bunch of those types of companies decided that they wouldn’t suffer anyone else makining things they don’t own in their own backyard, and tried to reassert control over the broader community efforts.

Some specific examples of what I mean:

• The website formerly known as Twitter eliminating 3rd party apps, restricting the API to nothing, and blocking most open web access.
• Reddit does something similar, effectively eliminates 3rd party clients and gets into an extended conflict with the volunteer community moderators.
• StackOverflow and the rest of the StackExchange network also gets into an extended set of conflicts with its community moderators, tries to stop releasing the community-generated data for public use, revises license terms, and descends into—if you’ll forgive the technical term—a shitshow.
• Hasbro tries to not only massively restrict the open license for future versions of Dungeons and Dragons, but also makes a move to retroactively invalidate the Open Game License that covered material created for the 3rd and 5th editions of the game over the last 20 years.

And broadly, this is all part of the Enshittification Curve story. And each of these examples have a whole set of unique details. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of words have been written on each of these, and we don’t need to re-litigate those here.

But there’s a specific sub-trend here that I think is worth highlighting. Let’s look at what those four have in common:

• Each had, by all accounts, a successful business model. After-the-fact grandstanding non-withstanding, none of those four companies was in financial trouble, and had a clear story about how they got paid. (Book sales, ads, etc.)
• They all had a product that was absolutely worthless without an active community. (The D&D player’s handbook is a pretty poor read if you don’t have people to play with, reddit with no comments is just an ugly website, and so on)
• Community members were doing significant heavy lifting that the parent company was literally unable to do. (Dungeon Mastering, community moderating. Twitter seems like the outlier here at first glance, but recall that hashtags, threads, the word “tweet” and literally using a bird as a logo all came from people not on twitter’s payroll.)
• There were community members that made a living from their work in and around the community, either directly or indirectly. (3rd party clients, actual play streams, turning a twitter account about things your dad says into a network sitcom. StackOverflow seems like the outlier on this one, until you remember that many, many people use their profiles there as a kind of auxiliary outboard resume.)
• They’ve all had recent management changes; more to the point, the people who designed the open source–adjacent business model are no longer there.
• These all resulted in huge community pushback

So we end up in a place where a set of companies that no one but them can make money in their domains, and set their communities on fire. There was a lot of handwaving about AI as an excuse, but mostly that’s just “we don’t want other people to make money” with extra steps.

To me, the most enlightening one here is Hasbro, because it’s not a tech company and D&D is not a tech product, so the usual tech excuses for this kind of behavior don’t fly. So let’s poke at that one for an extra paragraph or two:

When the whole OGL controversy blew up back at the start of the year, certain quarters made a fair amount of noise about how this was a good thing, because actually, most of what mattered about D&D wasn’t restrict-able, or was in the public domain, and good old fair use was a better deal than the overly-restrictive OGL, and that the community should never have taken the deal in the first place. And this is technically true, but only in the ways that don’t matter.

Because, yes. The OGL, as written, is more restrictive that fair use, and strict adherence to the OGL prevents someone from doing things that should otherwise be legal. But that misses the point.

Because what we’re actually talking about is an industry with one multi-billion dollar company—the only company on earth that has literal Monopoly money to spend—and a whole bunch of little tiny companies with less than a dozen people. So the OGL wasn’t a crummy deal offered between equals, it was the entity with all the power in the room declaring a safe harbor.

Could your two-person outfit selling PDFs online use stuff from Hasbro’s book without permission legally? Sure. Could you win the court case when they sue you before you lose your house? I mean, maybe? But not probably.

And that’s what was great about it. For two decades, it was the deal, accept these slightly more restrictive terms, and you can operate with the confidence that your business, and your house, is safe. And an entire industry formed inside that safe harbor.

Then some mid-level suit at Hasbro decided they wanted a cut?

And I’m using this as the example partly because it’s the most egregious. But 3rd party clients for twitter and reddit were a good business to be in, until they suddenly were not.

And I also like using Hasbro’s Bogus Journey with D&D as the example because that’s the only one where the community won. With the other three here, the various owners basically leaned back in their chairs and said “yeah, okay, where ya gonna go?” and after much rending of cloth, the respective communities of twitter, and reddit, and StackOverflow basically had to admit there wasn’t an alternative., they were stuck on that website.

Meanwhile, Hasbro asked the same question, and the D&D community responded with, basically, “well, that’s a really long list, how do you want that organized?”

So Hasbro surrendered utterly, to the extent that more of D&D is now under a more irrevocable and open license that it was before. It feels like there’s a lesson in competition being healthy here? But that would be crass to say.

Honestly, I’m not sure what all this means; I don’t have a strong conclusion here. Part of why this has been stuck in my drafts folder since June is that I was hoping one of these would pop in a way that would illuminate the situation.

And maybe this isn’t anything more than just what corporate support for open source looks like when interest rates start going up.

But this feels like a thing. This feels like it comes from the same place as movie studios making record profits while saying their negotiation strategy is to wait for underpaid writers to lose their houses?

Something is released into the commons, a community forms, and then someone decides they need to re-capture the commons because if they aren’t making the money, no one can. And I think that’s what stuck with me. The pettiness.

You have a company that’s making enough money, bills are paid, profits are landing, employees are taken care of. But other people are also making money. And the parent company stops being a steward and burns the world down rather than suffer someone else make a dollar they were never going to see. Because there’s no universe where a dollar spent on Tweetbot was going to go to twitter, or one spent on Apollo was going to go to reddit, or one spent on any “3rd party” adventure was going to go to Hasbro.

What can we learn from all this? Probably not a lot we didn’t already know, but: solidarity works, community matters, and we might not have anywhere else to go, but at the same time, they don’t have any other users. There’s no version where they win without us.

License failure

There are plenty of examples out there of a large company not understanding the community around an open license, but I’m almost impressed that Hasbro’s OGL shenanigans have managed to basically speedrun the SCO vs Linux case, the creation of the GNU project, and Tivo inspiring the GPLv3, all in, what, 2 weeks?