As I’m sure many of you know, Wizards of the Coast, the company that owns Magic the Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, has recently been wrapped up in some controversy regarding its attempt to deauthorize the Open Gaming License 1.0a. This OGL allowed third party publishers to produce royalty free content compatible with Dungeons & Dragons for more than 20 years, allowing many publishers, small and large, to create the thriving world of tabletop RPGs that we’ve long enjoyed.
Needless to say, those creators, as well as fans of D&D broadly, were upset with this destructive decision to deauthorize and put into place a much less open licensing agreement, which would effectively put many, if not most, of them out of business. They pushed back strongly, cancelling D&D Beyond subscriptions and moved towards the wide field of other amazing games.
As a result of this widespread push back, WotC has reversed its decision. They will not attempt to deauthorize the OGL, and they have also released the 5.1 System Reference Document (the basic rules of 5th edition D&D) with a Creative Commons license.
Of course, we are happy that we can continue to support Dungeons & Dragons at Gamers Haunt, by carrying the products and by hosting games! We will also be expanding our offering of tabletop RPGs. Currently we are looking at Pathfinder 2e, Castles & Crusades, Dungeon Crawl Classics, and Old School Essentials, among others. Some of these are already on the shelves, and we’ll be getting more in as we can. We hope to do some introductory one-shots for these in the near future so that folks can get a taste of what they have to offer. Let us know what else you’d be interested in!
If you want to know more of the details, here’s a great article you should read: https://gizmodo.com/dungeons-dragons-will-no-longer-deauthorize-its-open-1850041837