[0:00:00] Jay: From active timer battling to zombie slaying, waffling Taylors covers all kinds of gaming and beyond. This week, we were joined by Rob and Tim of Gold Mountain Games to talk about their new TTRPG campaign, the Saltreach Isles, and how they went about creating it. It's important to note that we recorded this episode during the height of the changes to the OG L or Open Games license from Wizards of the coast. This is the backbone of Dungeons and Dragons and Dungeons and Dragons like content, and the changes brought about by Wizards of the coast caused a lot of backlash from the DND community, which we actually talked about in this episode. Also, unfortunately, Squidg was ill when we recorded this episode, so he's not in this one. But I talked with both Rob and Tim afterwards and they are more than happy to come back to the show and talk both Squidgie and myself through the updates as they continue their world building and production of the Salt Ridge Isles. Anyway, in the words of the uncomfortable Squidge, roll the intro music, please. Mr. Podcaster man Jettleman welcome to the podcast. Welcome to the Waffling Taylor's podcast. It's amazing to be connected with you.
[0:01:24] Rob: Thank you.
[0:01:30] Jay: Wonderful. Now, you're both from Gold Mountain Games, which is wonderful company. Putting it I feel like I'm going to use the wrong words here. This is on the unintentional ignorance. I'm sorry, but you put out custom made Dungeons and Dragons fifth edition based campaigns, right?
[0:01:52] Rob: We did.
[0:01:56] Jay: Okay. The elephant in the room already. Okay.
[0:01:59] Tim: Yes.
[0:02:01] Rob: But yes.
[0:02:04] Jay: Cool. Tabletop, RPGs, right.
[0:02:07] Rob: Yeah, absolutely cool. We've got a couple of one shots out and we've also got a settings book. We can go into a bit more detail about that later on, I think, but yeah is what we do.
[0:02:28] Jay: Yeah.
[0:02:28] Tim: And we'd like to approach everything from a very professional mindset. Right. So as much as we're all still fans that are playing the games and really wanting to make this a fully realized company and everything else, we're still working with artists and writers on professional, contract level work in order. To make certain that our visions are as clear and concise and as awe inspiring as possible for the end users once they get the products.
[0:02:54] Rob: Absolutely.
[0:02:54] Jay: Nice. Nice. Okay. Would you mind real quick just introducing yourselves, just so listeners know a little bit about it? I know you both by your first names, but I don't know whether you want to go use pseudonyms or anything on the show. I use a pseudonym, so I'm fine with it.
[0:03:13] Rob: Viola. I'm Rob. I'm the owner and executive director of Goldman Games. I've been playing tabletop RPGs for about a decade. I've been before that, I was massively into the ballgame scene. I set up one of the biggest ballgames clubs in the UK. I've got a ballgame tattooed on me. I've got my favorite fantasy author tattooed on me. I'm a mega geek and tabletop RPGs have been a large part of my life and kind of formed a lot of my friendships and helped me with lots of troubles in my life. And I just think they're great and I wanted to give back some of that. Awesomeness.
[0:04:01] Tim: So my name is Tim. I am one of the directors at Gold Mountain Games. My primary function is the business and the sales. The marketing, the business side of it actually my day job, if you want to call it that. Heavy quotes there is. I work within the gaming industry during the day. I'm actually a sales representative at Cryptocuric Entertainment and I also do contract work for other companies. So it's funny, when Rob actually reached out to me the first time, I was just like, yeah, I want to do some writing. And then we got to talking, I was like, oh wait, no, we need this slot filled more for a lot of folks out there, what I do is the boring corporate stuff, but it's also very necessary stuff for when we get to the point of getting the products out there, really letting them shine.
[0:04:49] Rob: Absolutely.
[0:04:50] Jay: Sure. Nice.
[0:04:53] Rob: I think Tim was a great he's been amazing at kind of coming on and turning my wild ideas into products. So, yeah, it's great.
[0:05:07] Tim: What started off as what would you want to do, just a simple PDF. I was like, no, we're doing books and leatherette bound covers and foil decks. I was like, we can totally do this.
[0:05:19] Rob: Absolutely.
[0:05:20] Jay: Absolutely. It's the premium product, right?
[0:05:24] Tim: Exactly. It's one of those things that being in the industry for as long as I have, I'm nothing against PDFs, nothing against any of that, but for some reason, people take you more seriously when you put physical stuff out into the world. So with that, especially with Rob's dream of what he had, especially for the Salt retis, it just it made more sense to push the physical product route and really give it that tactile feeling to the brand. Not to make it sound all clsy sound bites, but there you go.
[0:05:58] Jay: Oh, I like it. I like it because, like you say, it separates you out from some of the other people who are in that space too. Right? I know that Squidge, who unfortunately can't be with us today, he's very much into the tabletop Resident Evil games, and there's one that he's sort of backed on Facebook, which is just this chap who's doing it in their own time and they've produced a PDF and it's like, this is the first game. Because obviously, you know, Steamford should have just announced they're doing the the first game as well. But this was, you know, two, three years ago, and this chap is just putting together a rule book and a campaign and stuff and maps and tile sets just in their own time, and they just released it as a PDF, which is pretty cool. But obviously, if he had the tile sets as physical objects and printed bound book, it's a little bit more premium, isn't it?
[0:06:51] Rob: Yeah. And I think if there's one thing that the geek community and tabletop community like, it's having a bookshelf full of cool products. You know, I've got 120 plus board games all lined up on a shelf and it's it's a pride of mine, you know, I think I think people like collecting their hobbies.
[0:07:14] Tim: Yeah. We're not going to talk about my side of things. It's awful. It's a lot. It's spilled over into my garage on shelves.
[0:07:26] Jay: Wow. I remember my friend Zach showed me his collection of so he collects the DCC books, the Dungeon Call Classics, and he's got just a bookshelf full of them. And I'm like, dude, okay, let's do that one. He's like, right, okay, which bit of that one?
[0:07:45] Tim: Yeah, depending upon the books. Shout out to Goodman games in DCC. I absolutely love dungeon. Call classics. I'm much more that old school gonzo guy myself. I grew up in the weird campaigns, so for me, when I saw DCC and what they were doing, I was like, that's awesome, keep doing it.
[0:08:02] Rob: Nice.
[0:08:04] Jay: Nice. Okay, so, yeah, if we avoid the conversation of the elephant in the room just yet, we'll come back to that in a moment.
[0:08:16] Tim: Sure.
[0:08:16] Jay: So that everybody who's listening knows we're recording this on Jan 18th, 2023. There's a bit of a lead time before this goes out. So any news that happens after this point, we have no idea about. And I'm going to ask you chaps you're on personal opinions of some stuff later, not necessarily the opinions of Gold Mountain Games, but if you want to say, hey, it's the opinion of the company as well, then that's fine. But I'm going to be asking yourselves, Rob and Tim, your opinions in a moment. You've released a couple of one shots and you've got this new big campaign coming out. Can you speak to the big campaign a little bit?
[0:09:00] Tim: Rob, that is your love child. Go for it.
[0:09:02] Rob: Yes, it is. So we have the salt rich isles. Now assault reach isles is a massive archipelago world. We've got 24 islands ranging from kind of big central, kind of multiple kind of species and empires on them. We've got tiny little islands that have a one group may occupy more than one of them. It came about really from there isn't really a setting for DND, which is what it was written for. There isn't one that kind of takes in the scope and the differences that you get in kind of island nations and archipelagos. And I think it gave us this really interesting mechanism we could use with kind of over time, the islands breaking up from a forget the word now a pangaea, one big continent. So a lot of the world is tied into kind of the evolution of the planet as a whole. We've got gods that aren't really gods. We've got real kind of unique takes on a lot of the species that people would be used to from DND. And we've also added aux, trolls and goblins because I love me a green skin. I think they're all great. My very first warhammer were orcs back when I was like twelve or 13 and I've just loved them ever since. But one of the things I really wanted to do is I wanted to bring them kind of into the modern age.
[0:11:05] Rob: I wanted to get rid of this idea that they are unintelligent roots who kill and maim for fun. That had its place. I think the Middle earth needed its bad guys and the orks were amazing. However, I wanted to do something more interesting with them. So we've got these three species that are the orcs are the ones my favorites and they are cultured. They have deep law and kind of traditions going back into kind of arts crafts. They mine, they have a massive salt flat in the area of the world that they live in and they've got because of that they're really rich. So they've got a lot of jewelry and they do a lot of trade, import and export. And this is like created this really rich culture around them. Now they haven't lost that orkish. They're recognizable as orcs. They fight to get their position in society, but it's not all they are and they are not evil. They are a varied species like any other. So yeah, the species was something I was really keen to kind of adapt and bring into kind of its own setting. Then we've got loads of magic items, over 50 of them, which are kind of again, tied into the land, tied into the culture and the history.
[0:12:57] Rob: They're not just cool items that we wanted to throw on top. There is a reason they all exist. We've got 30 spells which again tied into the life and the actual. There's a reason they all exist and it's monsters. So again, we've got over 50 monsters. I think we're up to 54 or 56 now.
[0:13:27] Tim: Yeah, that sounds great.
[0:13:29] Rob: And then we've got so the sea and the land of Oscarna, which is the main island, which is being featured in the first book. The cities and the towns and villages are all walled and they're all really safe and they are kind of all of the main species. The playable species are peaceful with each other because of the god's influence. This means the outside is dangerous. So you've got horrendous monsters that attack from the sea, you've got traveling the roads is dangerous and there are subclasses which entire deal is protecting the roads and protecting the trade of this island. So that means we've been able to have a lot of fun with the monsters we've got. One of our main things are the salt worms which kind of live within these salt flats, and you've got salt worm larvae up to adult ones, up to the brood Queen, and they're kind of like how the orks it's kind of a rite of passage. If you've killed a salt worm, then you've made it. So, yeah, a lot of the monsters are great. We've got the Swarm, which is like this unrelenting swathe of horrendous monsters that comes out of the sea and attacks the dragonborn area. We've got some great NPCs again, who add this just this level of depth that I felt was missing from a lot of other settings. Everything's tied in together. And we've even got, like, music that's been specifically written for us, which is phenomenal, but it means that when you sit down and you open our book and you play this game, you feel like you're there and there's great immersion in it. And yeah, I'm so proud of it. We've got an amazing team of writers, artists and musicians who have all just come together and watching the conversations in the chat rooms that we have at work, watching an artist come in and take a line that a writer's written and brings that into a character that the musician then comes and kind of takes into a melody that kind of captures that whole image.
[0:16:09] Rob: It's just an amazing thing to be part of, probably. I could carry on for about six weeks talking about this. I've got a massive smile on my face. It's such I really enjoy it and it's great. I really hope other people like it. But Tim, why don't you talk about some of your bits?
[0:16:32] Tim: Yeah. So outside of the production of the actual physical books, I've also done some writing of the book. I actually did what was it, 17 of the monsters? Yeah, I think so. In me, coming from that kind of darker gonzo world of gaming, I had to ask Rob a few times, like, hey, how creepy can I get with this stuff? Right? There's a big part of it because I need you to tell me back. I could go nuts. I handled a lot of the monsters that are kind of the everyday. Again, how many quotes they're monsters like that you would normally see in your standard level of dungeon delving game, like DND 5D, your pathfinder.
[0:17:15] Rob: Right.
[0:17:15] Tim: So, like, that challenge rating zero, up to about challenge rating four. And for me, I really wanted to do everything I could to make certain that they felt like there was a reason for them being in this world other than like, hey, I made a monster throw it against your players. Every creature I wrote has a reason for being there. Some of them are kind of out there. My personal favorite, and I've talked about this quite a bit, staff meetings is the Boulder Toad. So basically, it is a giant toad that has rock like skin. So if it's sitting by itself, completely stationary on a beach, you would never know unless you encountered them before, you would never know that it's a toad until it attacks. Because most creatures on archipelagos and islands, when they hunt, they're opportunist hunters, they don't just go and they go running after the whole party. They'll wait for that straggler, snatch the straggler and head out. So the idea with the boulder tote is that they're typically like ambush predators, right? So they'll pounce, which, again, they got a rock body, they'll crush their victim, snatch it up in their mouth and they'll just go running off to eat them. Because of the fact that, again, being an archipelago world, we are going to have later on, as the books progress, there's going to be rules for shipbuilding and stronghold building and sailing. And one of the things that boulder toads are used for by ships that have money is to load them into the hull and launch them at other ships on catapults, which, of course, then irritates the boulder toad and starts eating people on the other ship.
[0:18:57] Rob: Yeah, I love that idea.
[0:19:01] Tim: I was thinking it's like, what kind of devious jerks would use these creatures in this way, right? And so I was like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. If I was rich and had money and zero morals, I would do this too. It just makes sense. But, yeah, quite a bit. Quite a bit.
[0:19:27] Rob: I was just going to say, one of the other things we've tried to do, and I think we've been very successful with it, is we've tried to be very open and accepting and inclusive with our writing. We have very many kind of NPCs named characters, some of the gods as well. They're male, female, and they them inclusivity is really important to us as a company, right? Whether that's because of life choices, whether that's because of religion, whether that's because of disability, whatever it is, I think it's really important that everyone gets the chance to play who they want to be in a game. So that's kind of that's influenced a lot of our decisionmaking through it, especially because we're not writing a kind of Eurocentric or Western centric setting, we've kind of made sure that we've talked to people from cultures similar to the one in the Saltwich Isles. And so that's been I've learnt some amazing things and we've got one of our writers, actually South American, and there's a lot of influences from their culture within the monsters and some truly terrifying creatures from folklore from around the world that we brought in. So, yeah, that's been really nice as well.
[0:21:20] Jay: There's two things that you've both brought up there that I'd love to spend just a couple of moments talking about. I feel like we could talk forever, and there are much smarter people than I who can talk forever about the nondiverse, non inclusive nature of standard fantasy stuff. Right? You're Tolkiens even before then, right? The whole dwarves and gnomes are a specific group of real people. In D and D, humans are meant to be meant to be white people because they're the most adaptive and all that kind of stuff. It's horrid stuff if you really think about it. But that's for other people to talk about because way smarter than me. Right. But I really like that you're sort of being inclusive with and diverse and bringing all of these ideas to the table and trying to sort of push out of that situation. Because I was watching a number of years ago, I was watching one of the Harry Potter movies with some little ones and they got to gringotts. And I'm like I know which particularly which stereotype they're playing up for these creatures and they shouldn't. Right. But I suppose we have that cultural background of that's where we've come from. But we need to move away from those.
[0:22:40] Jay: One of the reasons I really like Pratt in his writing because he does he takes those conventions and kicks them out of the window and goes, right, let's do this as if they are real people.
[0:22:50] Rob: Absolutely. And I think one of the things we're doing at the moment I don't get too into, but in the background we're writing another system. And part of the work I'm doing on that is we had a long meeting the other day about if we've got these people in the middle who are like the empire, they were going to be humans and then we're going to have like other ones around the outside. But that can't we don't want to do that because we don't want people to have those preconceived ideas. And then you get into this really difficult situation where you're trying to do these other cultures justice. You're trying to show them how they really are. You're not trying to make them bad guys, you're not trying to make them good guys. You're trying to make them realistic and actually trying to see how that's viewed from other people's point of view is something that, as I said, we had a three hour meeting about just this. And trying to find ways that is fair, does just this and doesn't injure people is hard, but it's really important. And I think we kind of have a duty to do that.
[0:24:17] Tim: Yeah. And the other thing is, too is if you look at the realities of what causes I don't want to say evils in the real world, right? But if we were to put a real world analog on it, there's no like one race of human that's inherently evil. There's factions within the human race that have done some pretty abhorrent things over history. So that's kind of the motivation within the books too, right, where it's like, yeah, they're all different species. They have their own cultures depending upon what island they come from. Like orcs on Osconar could be totally different from orcs on another set of islands is because again culturally, but what faction are they aligned with? Right? That's where their viewpoints come in. So it was important for us to kind of look at it from more of a real world perspective, that if we are going to create absolute aholes for bad guys, there's a motivation behind it other than, like, green skin and go charge it. My goal has always been if I'm going to make an enemy in a campaign, I want the players to love to hate them.
[0:25:28] Rob: Yeah, absolutely. There are some great bad guys in films and literature and everywhere. The great bad guys are not bad because of physical things, they're not bad because of anything they can't change. They're bad because they make choices that are bad. And that's what we're doing. And I think that's what a lot of people are doing now. And it's really refreshing and really quite pleasant to see.
[0:26:03] Jay: I really enjoy that. When creators such as yourselves put so much effort into world building, it's been mentioned a couple of times, once off recording and a couple of times on recording. But the warhammer books, I mean, I got into warhammer when I was 1415. There was always chaos. I don't know what that says about me, but one of the things I really liked to do was just to buy the books and read the world building. Right. Because it's so much more than just my units are firing at your units. I'm going to roll a dice and use the adapters to figure out how many of your units I've killed. It's like it gives me a reason to actually understand why this fight is happening. And it sounds like you guys and your team have done a very similar thing. Right. Let's write a whole story. Let's come up with like you were saying, it's an archipelago that split off from a pangaea. That tells me you're that far into the weeds of the detail that you're coming up with. Why does this world exist?
[0:27:04] Jay: Why do these creatures exist? Why do they live over here rather than over there?
[0:27:09] Tim: It makes it easy for the game master to Guam under that too. That's the big piece.
[0:27:14] Rob: Yeah, that's actually a really good point. Our end goal here is to produce a product that a gamers master can pick up, read, and then create their own game. And they've got enough law to pull from, enough ideas to pull from. It's a pleasure to put their own story in our world rather than a challenge to put their own story in our world because you've got some settings which are great, they're really detailed and they've got loads of stuff, but actually fitting your story into it is hard. So we feel like we've trodden that line very carefully between enough information and too much information. So we've got 21 cities, got 23 pages per city, a lot of information, but we've written none of the towns. So you can have a city, you can go there, you can have enough information. But if you want to have a town that is completely your own making, we've given you an example in the cities of what it may be like, and then you've got the space to create your own thing, which I'm quite pleased with. And I think Safety got 24 subclasses in there as well. You can absolutely go and if you want to play a thing, have the mechanics to play that thing. The other thing I just realized, we've got a whole new class in there as well, which is the coalescent. So these guys take cantrips, so they're minor smells and they combine them to do other smells with them. So that's something which came up as you came up with a conversation with a housemate of mine last year. And we were talking about the game we played in, and we came up with this idea and it just kind of blossomed into this really interesting, really versatile class that kind of gets a lot of freedom to make their spells their own. But it's kind of tempered with the fact that they don't get a lot of late game, one of those real game changing spells, but you can succeed in any situation.
[0:29:56] Rob: They're really good fun to play. We've had a lot of fun with the play testers, getting those kind of all the balance right. It's quite a task balancing a new class. But yeah, we've got a great team of play testers who have been doing that for us.
[0:30:13] Jay: Great. Look, we've danced around the elephant in the room for a little while, the OG. A lot of stuff has happened recently and like I said earlier on, I'm asking you chaps your own personal opinions. If you want to make it this is the opinion of the company, the group, then that's fine. But I'd love to know a couple of things about because we talked right at the beginning and said, hey, it's D and D five A, and you.
[0:30:42] Tim: Went, well.
[0:30:46] Jay: Like, leading question, is that because of what happened with the OGL earlier this week into last week?
[0:30:54] Tim: Simple answer is yes. I guess the next question I'm going to have for you naturally on this subject, are we allowed to swear on this podcast?
[0:31:03] Jay: Totally.
[0:31:04] Tim: SJ. You just opened Pandora's Box, by the way. I'm just going to put that out there.
[0:31:09] Jay: That's okay.
[0:31:12] Rob: Yeah.
[0:31:13] Tim: So, OGL rob, do we want to give the Gold Mountain Games version of it, or do we want to go right into our own personal feelings on it?
[0:31:22] Rob: So I think that Gold Mountain Games, we've put out a statement on our social media talking about it. It is out there. If people are interested to go and see it, I think it's quite nice for us to talk about our personal opinions. Mine is probably slightly less angry than Tim's is going to be. So I'll go first. And build up. I'm sad. It's my feeling. Dungeons and Dragons for me, I've got quite a few chronic health problems, and I've had some really dark times in my life, and I relied on DND to get me through them, and it did that job really well. It's brought me closer to my friends, it's brought me closer to my brother, and they've turned around and they've sullied it, and I'm sad. I think they have taken wizard the coast, have taken the community that made Fifth Edition as big and as popular as it is, and they've turned around and they've gone, you don't matter anymore. We're going to take all of your hard work and we're going to do what we want because we don't want other people benefiting off this anymore. And I think that's cruel. I think it's mean and I think it's selfish. And I know they're a company, and I have no issue with them making money.
[0:32:54] Rob: That's what their job is. They're allowed to make money. We live in a capitalist society. Go ahead, but don't on the people who gave you help, and that's what they've done. In a nutshell, that's my feeling, yeah.
[0:33:11] Tim: So I'm going to start off my portion of this by saying that I've been mentioning this quite a bit on different videos I've watched on the subject and different Facebook groups and things that with every statement they come up with and all these, like, apologies that are not really apologies and bullet that comes with it. The one thing I've said over and over and over again when it comes time to how they're treating this whole thing is that the community holds the spirit of Dungeons and Dragons, Wizards of the coast, and hasbro at this point is just parading around with their corpse because they own the brand and the ampersand. I don't think they really understand what it took to even get this game to the level it's even hit now. And I understand YouTube digitization, having folks like Critical Role and all these other celebrity DND players out there promoting the game has built the brand. But I'm 41 years old. I started this hobby in second edition where it's like we were nerds in a basement that were clinging to this one thing that kept us together. It didn't matter if it was running official planescape or forgotten realms at the time, or dark sun with all of its grittiness or homebrew. That's how this community started going to GenCon when it was still in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at the time, and playing in groups where people are using their own homebrew rules and things like that, or their own home brew classes and new monsters, things like that. That's what built Dungeons and Dragons, right? Not some corporate overlords that were like, well, we control all things that are level up dungeon, delving, experiences with a party, right? Like, that's not how this works. And so when you look at. The stuff that third party creators have done. And I'm not even speaking on behalf of Gold Mountain Games at this point. I've got friends all over the industry that are affected by this.
[0:35:17] Tim: It doesn't matter if it's pizza and yeah, they make a few million a year or Cobalt Press and they make a few million a year. Let's look at like the smaller publisher 1985 games, skeleton Key Games. Like, these are folks that are literally teams of two and three that are knocking out more useful content for use in effectively Dungeons and Dragons than what Wizards of the coast has ever done. Especially when we look at like the absolute turds that they put out with Spell Jammer recently. How do you have a game about space? You had every opportunity to make Guardians of the Galaxy for D and D. You didn't even involve how to use a ship. Like, we're in space and you want me to board another ship, jump from my ship into the vacuum of space onto another shit. In what world does this make sense, right? But you look at the old second edition stuff for Spell Jammer, and if that rule wasn't there, there was folks that made it and it was posted on message boards, right? So again, it goes back to that old school feel of it's a community that flesh this stuff out. And when you turn around and you do stuff like this and people are seeing the quality of the things that you're putting out and yeah, they might turn to Cobalt Press, who makes awesome third party content. They may turn to skeleton key games. So they're deck of encounters. Well, these are things that make the Dungeons and Dragons experience better.
[0:36:46] Tim: And they basically came out and said, not only do you now have to bow down and kiss our ring and get our approval, now we're going to ask for your bank statements to see how much you're doing as a company. And if you may pass a certain amount, we're going to take a percentage of your revenue. Not profits, revenue at 25%. That will bury most companies. It will absolutely bury them. Because by the time, if it is right, like, we could do a Kickstarter that makes a million dollars, but if we spend $750,000 of it on development, paying staff, shipping, logistics, fulfillment, there's all those parts behind it, production of the product, we have zero profit at the end of the year by the time that they take their cut. And on top of that too, like the way that they worded it, where it's, oh, well now after you've bowed down and kissed our ring and you've agreed to pay us for making your own content, and then on top of that, we could turn around and just use your without paying you. And then by the way, within 30 days, we'll just cancel your agreement to use a license. It put a lot of people on edge.
[0:37:59] Rob: And then when they came out with an apology, they tried to pretend that multimillion pound company didn't have a legal team that told them what their contract would do. It was the most patronizing thing I think I've ever read. It made me, and most people I've talked to, there's quite a few people even more angry and even more we're all in a bit of shock. Right? I think that's as well. No one could have seen this coming at this level.
[0:38:41] Tim: Well, yeah. And on top of that, too, like, you take the fact that first apology they came out with a few days ago, where first off, they're like, oh, well, this was a leaked draft. I have friends in the industry that got this as an NDA, right? Name a draft that you've ever seen in your life for any document that comes with a legally binding NDA. Like, stop lying to us. There's already enough people that have seen through your bull. You're going to keep doubling down. And that final statement, and there's memes out about it now, like Michael Scott from the Office, their line was, there's going to be people that think because of the outcry, that they won and we lost. They're only half right. They won and so did we. And I'm like, no, you now look like clowns. And this statement just proves that you are completely out of touch with anybody who's in this hobby, outside of people that may have only come into this from the Dungeons and Dragons through DND beyond and have no idea about all this other stuff's perspective, right? There's always those people. But when you look at the hobby writ large, they're so out of touch with what made them what it is that it's shocking.
[0:40:04] Rob: And they tried this all before and it didn't work because everyone universally hates Fourth Edition because it was terrible. Because they tried this before.
[0:40:15] Tim: Yeah, with the GSL, as they called it.
[0:40:18] Rob: It doesn't work. You cannot turn a tabletop role playing game into a microtransaction online only thing, because you need a group of friends to play it. It worked with Magic the Gathering because you only need one other person to play it ain't going to work with DND. No, and don't get me wrong, right, wizard of the coast are going to survive. They're going to keep making money. This isn't the end of wizard of the coast, it's not the end of DND. And I'm kind of pleased with that because I said it's very important to me. But at the same time, they've got a lot of work to do to get back the respect and the patronage of a lot of people. I don't think they're going to do it for years.
[0:41:29] Jay: So based on that, do you think then that this has a wider effect on the tabletop RPG or indeed just tabletop board gaming group community? Do you think this will then cause content creators and gamers and games masters to actually go, do you know what, why don't we check out this thing over here? I mentioned DCC earlier on, right? Do you think people will go to that or do you think that everyone will just say, no, we'll wait for all to come down and then we'll come back to it.
[0:42:05] Rob: I think this is going to be amazing for the tabletop industry. I think that lots of people are going to go, well, I'm off with DND. I'm going to go and look at what else is out there. And like last weekend I was a local theater that one of my friends runs and they put on a whole weekend of other tabletop RPGs as a live stream and we recorded like 30 hours and I think six of that was DND. And there are some awesome games out there from the Pathfinders or the Caller Cathullies and other big ones right down to games no one's ever heard of, but they're great. And I think, yeah, my hope is that this one encourages people to write them and two, encourages other people to look for them because there are some amazing ones out there. And as I said, we're doing one, we're hopefully going to be taking on another system to release the Salt rich aisles with. Yes, I think as crap as this all is, there is a silver lining. Anything?
[0:43:20] Tim: And I think that's it's funny. Overnight Wizards the coast is single handedly responsible for more people checking out other RPGs other than DND, than any marketing team has ever done, ever. Ultimately, we look at what the OGL was for initially and why it was written and why so many people are attracted to the OGL from a business perspective is because you have a built in marketing machine, right? Like everybody knows how to play Dungeons and Dragons if they played a role playing game where if we come up with our own system, we're fighting two battles. It's not just, hey, we have the salt rich Isles, which are super awesome, but by the way, this is a system you've never played before. So you're not only learning about a new world, you're learning about a whole new system where with the OGL, it's hey, you all know the basic six stats to hit armor class and saving throws. You all understand that. You understand levels one through 20 and your hit die and everything else. Like take this, use it and go, right? So there's a lot less effort for folks when it comes time to creating something new to go off the OGL. And that's initially what it was meant for, not this whole, like, oh, it was meant for homebrew and not for megacorporations. Well, let's talk about that megacorporation part real quick. I know that they're addressing Cobalt Press and they're addressing pizza. Those didn't start as massive corporations. They became massive corporations because of the awesome work they did for the OGL, they created such awesome stuff for third party stuff that they became legitimate businesses.
[0:45:05] Tim: Last time I checked, anybody who's in this creation space, that's exactly what we all want. You basically came along and said you delegitimize them.
[0:45:19] Rob: And I think there's a very real problem here in that a lot of the small creators are going to lose money and they've got to pay their mortgages and they've got to send their kids to school and it's a massive cottage industry that the AGL created and it was meant to be, and they were told it was permanent. People rely on it for their livelihoods.
[0:45:55] Tim: I know quite a few and now they're all in limbo.
[0:46:01] Rob: And I think this is all the aspect of going, we've got two bit rubbish apologies, we still don't know what they're doing with it. So all of these people, as you said to him, in limbo, it's a nightmare is what it is. And I said from the owner of a company who we had a live Kickstarter when this was done and we had to cancel it. That was gutting. Yeah, but I'm also angry, I'm also sad, I'm also quite excited for what comes next. But, like, we need an answer, we need to know what we've got to work with because it might turn out that they backtrack on everything and we didn't have to cancel our Kickstarter, but at the time we had to cancel our Kickstarter. And you're like, Come on, this is not fair. We've done nothing that you didn't tell us that we had every right to do.
[0:47:16] Tim: Right?
[0:47:17] Rob: And we're being punished for it. And I think a lot of people feel like that.
[0:47:22] Tim: Oh, yeah, 100%. I know that Pizza is working on the ORC right now, which is the open resource, something I'm probably getting that wrong, but they have their own open document that can be used under pathfinder fantasy age, basic role playing. There's all these companies that have jumped on board under the banner of the ORC. What it really states is that under copyright law, you cannot copyright game mechanics. You can't. What copyright law protects is the methodology in which they're presented. Right? So, like, I can't copy verbatim from the Player's Handbook what they say about strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, charisma. If I do my own write ups on them, they can't stop me, period. You can't stop people from using that. But the other part of that too was the SRD, right? So they keep talking about the OGL and everything else. They've not once mentioned anything about keeping the SRD around, which is a system reference document people are allowed to add into their books in order to catch people up to speed about how to play five B. So taking that out, a lot of people look into it going, well, that's a lot of work to do in order to completely rewrite the SRD. In our own language, which is, fine, we'll do it.
[0:48:49] Tim: But when they were also like, oh, by the way, we're revoking 1.0 A. Now they're like, Hold on a second here. Now you're legitimately with my business. And that's a big side of it. Right? Like, the idea that they came out and were like, oh, well, that's cute. The OGL was originally meant for home brewers, and we won't sue you for home brewing. You've never sued anybody for home brewing unless TSR back in the day was pretty litigious. But you're going to tell me you're going to come and sue me for what happens around a table that involves myself and my five players, that are my friends, that we don't talk about in public or push? What are you saying? You sound ridiculous. And that's the other side of it, too. Anything they've done now to backpedal on their statements, it's like they're digging themselves a deeper hole. Like the damage is already done.
[0:49:41] Rob: Yeah. What I want to see them do is go, we made a corporate decision that didn't take into account the community. We got it wrong, and we are sorry. That's what I want to hear. I don't want to hear them trying to tell us that they weren't trying to do something bad. Like, you're allowed to make a business decision when you're a business. You didn't take into account your community. That's what you did wrong. You need to admit that and you need to say sorry and not try and justify it all. Not try and pretend that you didn't know what a legal document meant. You just need to own up and say you're sorry and then release some good stuff. If they do that, I think they'll win over a lot of people in a year or two.
[0:50:43] Tim: Yeah, totally.
[0:50:44] Rob: I don't think it's coming. Yeah.
[0:50:48] Tim: So in the meantime, we're going to keep working on Salt Reach ISIS stuff. But under what system, that's the big question right now. We're obviously 100%, but 100% behind what the Cobalt Press is doing with Project Black Flag and what Pi is doing with the ORC. So we're in that banner of folks. Obviously, we're not nearly as big of a company, but the idea of it is, even when we get to that point, if we come up with our own system, we want people to be able to use it. If we create something that's that popular, people want to emulate it. I can't think of a bigger form of flattery than that.
[0:51:28] Rob: Exactly. We're still working. We still have stuff going on and our patreon. We still have content being written. All of the last final touches on the book are being done. The artwork, I think we're at 70% done for the artwork now. It's all coming along really well, and we will finish our conversations with these other companies, and we will convert the rules over and we'll be releasing it again as I said there is an element of this that is excitement for me. I think there's something new and we know there's going to be a bigger audience for it now. I think that's cool.
[0:52:20] Tim: Yeah, definitely.
[0:52:23] Jay: I love that we've gotten to a positive note. We've gone through the feelings and the emotions and the situation that we found out of it and that we found ourselves in. But I like that we've ended on this positive note about how you guys are going to continue on and figure out what it means for the future because I like that. So I guess in our closing minutes, because we only have so much time today, what I'd like to do is thank you chaps for being on the show and talking about this because I'm not an industry expert about this. I wanted to dive into this and get a feeling for how you feel because then that gives me an idea of how the community feels and all that kind of stuff. But also it gives me an idea of how perhaps other businesses like yourselves are feeling about this too. But in our final few moments, where should people go to find out more about Gold Mountain Games and what you've got coming up? You've mentioned Patreon there, you've mentioned a couple of other things. Where can people go to find all that? I'll make sure it goes into the show or not so they can click on the links and all that kind of stuff.
[0:53:33] Rob: Wonderful. That would be great. So all of our social media is just Gold mounting games. So we've got Goldmartinggames.com is our website. You can pick up our one shot that was written by Chris McCawley on there we have the Patreon which is Gold Mountain Games and we've got another one shot that was written by Chris McCarthy and Claudia Christian and then produced by us. That's if you back for that. All the money is related to charity. We've got a YouTube, we've got an Instagram, we've got TikTok, we've got a Reddit and a Tumbler. I think that's all of them Facebook as well and they are all just Gold Mountain Games. So you will find us. We've got a couple of episodes of a stream up on YouTube. We've got more of that will be coming once we settle on the system. We've got a little talk show that's going to be that's in the works at the moment. So that should be coming out and that's going to be showcasing other RPGs actually. We've got a lot of stuff coming out.
[0:54:44] Rob: We've got Free Comic or the first twelve things of a free Comic on the Patreon. Then you can back to get the rest of the comic and that's really cool as well. So yeah, lots of stuff, lots of interesting kind of content going up on our social medias as well. So yeah, please do check us out. We really like it. So we hope you do, too.
[0:55:10] Jay: Excellent. Well, what I'll say, chaps, in these final few minutes because, like I say, we're a bit time strapped today is perhaps if you're interested, I'd love to talk to you chaps again as the project continues, and maybe we can get an update or something, and maybe, if you're interested, go through some of our usual segments like Thunder Planes and stuff like that, just to get a feel for how you all are and what your individual tastes are and stuff. Absolutely, yeah. Fantastic. Fantastic. I'll be in touch, for sure. Yeah. Thank you both so much for spending some time with me today. I know that if Scourge could have been here, he would have been. Like I said, he's a big tabletop and board game chap, and I've picked up a lot of stuff by sort of watching him and listening into his views and stuff like that, so we'll have to try and get him on next time, is what I'm getting at. We can all just sort of nerd out for a while.
[0:56:07] Rob: That's amazing. Love it.
[0:56:08] Tim: Yeah, I'm all about that nerd. As long as you don't mind ranting every once in a while.
[0:56:13] Jay: No, that's fine. I may also be able to convince a friend of the show, Zach, to be on, and he can talk for ages about TTRPGs and all that kind of stuff, because he's very, very he got me into DCC, so I'm like following his rules there and stuff.
[0:56:30] Rob: Awesome.
[0:56:31] Jay: Excellent. Thank you very much for Erin.
[0:56:35] Rob: It's been really good fun.
[0:56:36] Tim: It's been awesome. Thank you.
[0:56:38] Jay: You're very welcome. Thank you.