• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Crushing Krisis

The Newest Oldest Blog In New Zealand

  • DC Guides
    • DC Events
    • DC New 52
    • DC Rebirth
    • Batman Guide
    • The Sandman Universe
  • Marvel Guides
    • Marvel Events
    • Spider-Man Guide (1963-2018)
    • X-Men Reading Order
  • Indie & Licensed Comics
    • Spawn
    • Star Wars Guide
      • Expanded Universe Comics (2015 – present)
      • Legends Comics (1977 – 2014)
    • Valiant Guides
  • Drag
    • Canada’s Drag Race
    • Drag Race Down Under
    • Drag Race France
    • Drag Race Philippines
    • Dragula
    • RuPaul’s Drag Race
    • RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars
  • Archive
  • Contact!

Personal

Breaking News: D&D continues support of Open Gaming License (OGL 1.0), releases their core rules SRD under Creative Commons

January 27, 2023 by krisis Leave a Comment

Huge news breaking in the past hour: In a totally shocking reversal, D&D and its parent companies Wizard of the Coast and Hasbro have abandoned plans for a restrictive update to the Open Gaming License (OGL) that would revoke the existing OGL v1.0. Even more shocking, they have released their “System Reference Document” for free under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License!

Image by ScalyDragon from Pixabay

I first wrote about these changes and the depressing effect they have on TTRPG creators and players alike a few weeks ago.

The OGL v1.0 is the license that allows 3rd-Party creators to publish products that use the rules and core concepts of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition.

Now, D&D has gone beyond re-affirming their support for that license by offering free and irrevocable access to their entire 5th edition core ruleset – called the System Reference Document (SRD) under Creative Commons.

The now freely-available information not only includes rules of play, but standard spells, and classic D&D monster state blocks. You can access the massive 400+ page document here.

This is a massive shift, not only compared to the proposed restrictive OGL v1.2, but compared to what anyone imagined was possible a few months ago.

In the words of D&D executive producer Kyle Brink from his announcement post:

This Creative Commons license makes the content freely available for any use. We don’t control that license and cannot alter or revoke it. It’s open and irrevocable in a way that doesn’t require you to take our word for it. And its openness means there’s no need for a VTT policy. Placing the SRD under a Creative Commons license is a one-way door. There’s no going back.

Our goal here is to deliver on what you wanted.

Of course, many 3rd Party producers have already announced creating their own open gaming platforms, like Paizo and Kobold Press. However, D&D has undercut those plans by making the 5e rules available in Creative Commons in perpetuity. That changes the playing field for smaller creators, who can continue to create content that will sell to 5e fans with total security.

Gizmodo has more context on this breaking news story.

Filed Under: games, news Tagged With: Dungeons & Dragons, Open Gaming License, TTRPG, Wizards of the Coast

Dolly told me I’m doing okay

January 22, 2023 by krisis Leave a Comment

Last night, Dolly Parton reminded me that things come to me easily when I work the hardest. Just like Paul McCartney.

Also, our unconscious brain is the original A.I. engine.

Image by Chen from Pixabay

Except, I guess it’s a paradox to call the human brain artificial intelligence? Also, come to think of it, that first sentence was kind of paradoxical too.

Maybe I should back up a step. Maybe several steps.

I am mystified by people who run. Especially those who enjoy running or who can run quickly. I’ve always hated running and it seems to hate me right back. The process of my body lurching forward into a sprint has never once satisfied me. Every second I am running is a second I’d rather not be running.

Over the past year I’ve done a fair amount of running. More than 150 kilometers, at least – which certainly more-than-doubles my lifetime mileage.

Do you know what happens when you run a lot, even when you hate every single second of doing it? Eventually, it gets easier. I stopped getting as out of breath as I did at the start of the year. I stopped getting side stitches after a few months. After a while, I started getting marginally faster on every 5k route through my neighborhood.

Let me tell you: there is no kind of reward for running that is better than the running being over more quickly.

I look a break from running over the long, soggy New Zealand winter and spring. When I started running again in the past month, I feared I was right back to where I started. I was going to hate being slow and breathless and full of cramps. That was true the first few weeks. Then, something surprising happened. Without really trying, one day I checked my stopwatch at the end of my route and realized I had shattered my personal record by 30 seconds. Nothing about the run had seemed remarkable. I hadn’t even hated it any more than I hate any other run.

Things come to you easily when you work the hardest.

That’s also true for mental exertion. [Read more…] about Dolly told me I’m doing okay

Filed Under: stories Tagged With: Dolly Parton, dreams, Madonna, Paul McCartney, running, songwriting

A Surprise Farewell to Prime Minister Ardern

January 19, 2023 by krisis Leave a Comment

I was head down all day today burning through work work and comic guide work without loading a single website or social network, which allowed for the comparatively occurrence of E sharing breaking news with me (rather than the other way around).Washington Post - New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern resigns ahead of election

“Have you seen the news?” she asked as we all sat around the table after finishing dinner. Her tone of voice was portentous.

My mind raced. We don’t follows news on sports or royals, nor are we all that mindful of celebrities and influences. E certainly wasn’t bringing me any fresh developments from the world of drag or the Marvel United Kickstarter.

I loaded the Washington Post homepage, fearing the worst – more gun violence in the states, or a bad political development. There was nothing apparent “above the fold.”

“No, what am I looking for?”

I saw it just as she said it. It was the next story that appeared as I started scrolling down the page:

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern resigns ahead of election

(For my American readers: the simplest explanation of a Prime Minister is that they work a lot like the Speaker of the House. The party or parties who control the government nominate one of their own who was elected as a regular representative to be the head of their party, which also makes them the head of government. The people have no control whatsoever – which, come to think of it, isn’t such a bad thing.)

I have mixed feelings on this news. [Read more…] about A Surprise Farewell to Prime Minister Ardern

Filed Under: politics Tagged With: Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand

mall-based time travel

January 17, 2023 by krisis Leave a Comment

Yesterday, the kid and I made nearly a full day excursion to the Queensgate Mall to buy clothes and various other supplies for the upcoming new school year.

There are many things about New Zealand that delightfully feel retro to me. For example, it’s exceedingly common to see cars with all manner of advertising wraps on them for local businesses that clearly proclaim a phone number but no internet URL.

Nowhere else in New Zealand is that feeling magnified more than in a shopping mall. By the time we left the states malls had either begun to wither and die, or had becoming echo chambers filled with only the biggest brand outlets – each one a copy and paste of the next. The surviving malls feel like they lost their identities. There weren’t any weird little stores like the ones I remembered from my youth – before you could find anything you could imagine on Amazon and have it shipped to your doorstep in under 48 hours.

Walking into a mall here transports me back to my 1990s youth. I’m not sure how to explain it. It’s not just the absence of Amazon. New Zealand has startling few of the kind of “we sell everything” big box retailers that altered the American shopping landscape before Amazon’s ubiquity.

Are you old enough to remember when Circuit City started carrying $13-dollar CDs, but then Best Buy swooped in with more floor space and more electronics and $12-dollar CDs? Or when going to your local Clover, Sears, and K-Mart got superseded by going to even bigger Targets and Wal-Marts, which added things like furniture, groceries, and automotive sections?

Do you also remember how their side effect was killing off not only downmarket shops, but upmarket department stories? Or when massive category retailer warehouses like Bed Bath and Beyond started popping up as shopping destinations of their own?

Those types big stores really don’t exist in New Zealand – those apex predator brands whose entire raison d’etre is to choke out the local market. Or, at least, I think they are confined to Auckland or Christchurch, because Wellington does not have them. The only big-box-ish, category-spanning store we have here is The Warehouse, which feels a lot like early American versions of Target – right down to their signature color red. [Read more…] about mall-based time travel

Filed Under: thoughts Tagged With: New Zealand, shopping

The D&D Open Gaming License / The Dangers of Playing with Other People’s Toys

January 13, 2023 by krisis 1 Comment

This week everyone is talking about Dungeons & Dragons, but it’s not for a good reason.

Last week, a revision to the longstanding D&D “Open Gaming License” leaked. I’ve written about the OGL before, but in short it’s the persistent legal agreement that allows independent creators to use the core rules and concepts of D&D to create their own 3rd party material. While that ostensibly exists for people who want to sell their own 3rd-party D&D supplements, it also acts as a safety net for anyone homebrewing their own content.

Many outlets have written at length about the newly-drafted version of the OGL – i09 reporter Linda Codega broke the story at Gizmodo last week. The draft institutes a number of restrictions, including tightening the ability to distribute digital content, enforcing royalty-sharing on big earners, and instituting some potentially-invasive rights to reproduce creator content.

Understandably, both creators and players are in an uproar – after all, every D&D player is also a co-creator of their campaign’s story! Even if they never intend to publish or profit from their storytelling contributions, there’s a pervasive feeling of “this affects all of us” solidarity from the D&D community.

Another reliable leak mentioned that D&D owners Wizards of the Coast (WotC) and Hasbro would be looking at digital DNDBeyond subscription cancellations as an early metric of the community’s response to the OGL changes. A leak coming from within the DNDBeyond team makes a lot of sense. WotC and Hasbro bought DNDBeyond last April from Fandom for $146 million dollars. The DNDBeyond team don’t have a long-term allegiance to the Hasbro corporate overlords and they are watching the stellar good will they’ve amassed as a community platform being quickly eroded by this decision.

As the DNDBeyond team may have feared (but also secretly wished for), this new leak immediately lead to a cascade of hundreds of players posting proof of their subscription cancellations on DNDBeyond forums and on Twitter.

I was one of those players.

Tomorrow is my bi-weekly D&D date with my best friends from the states and I am currently the Dungeon Master of our campaign. That means today ought to be spent finalizing maps and building out potential encounters for my custom campaign that has taken a hard left turn from the official campaign in Storm King’s Thunder.

Instead, I’m spending the day wondering if it’s worth putting in the effort to tell stories in a fictional world that is just another capitalist playground. [Read more…] about The D&D Open Gaming License / The Dangers of Playing with Other People’s Toys

Filed Under: essays, games Tagged With: bowie, capitalism, Dungeons & Dragons, ethical consumption, friends, John Lennon, Michael Jackson, Open Gaming License, Rick & Morty, The Beatles

  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to page 3
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Go to page 777
  • Go to Next Page »

Primary Sidebar


Support Crushing Krisis on Patreon
Support CK
on Patreon


Follow me on Twitter Contact me Watch me on Youtube Subscribe to the CK RSS Feed

About CK

About Crushing Krisis
About My Music
About Your Author
Blog Archive
Comics Blogs Only
Contact Krisis
Terms & Conditions

Crushing Comics

Marvel Comics

Marvel Events Guide

Spider-Man Guide

DC Comics

  • Breaking News: D&D continues support of Open Gaming License (OGL 1.0), releases their core rules SRD under Creative Commons
    Breaking news! Dungeons & Dragons made the shocking announcement that they're keeping OGL v1.0 and releasing SRD 5.1 under Creative Commons! […]
  • Marvel United Multiverse Civil War Box KickstarterMarvel United: Multiverse has a Civil War in their new expansion box (and uses it to solve their Young Avengers problem)
    All out war breaks loose in CMON's Marvel United Multiverse Civil War expansion set, adding several classic Avengers and a new PVP play mode. […]
  • The Reading Order Guide to Excalibur - image from Excalibur (1988) #1Updated: Guide to Excalibur
    My updated Reading Order Guide to Excalibur adds several new collections, including big Epic Collection news! […]
  • X-Factor Math & Maps: Collected Issue Counting and Future Omnibus Mapping
    it's time for mathing and mapping X-Factor! How much of X-Factor been collected from its start in February 1986 to the team's most-recent appearance Dec 2021? And, how could it all fit into Omnibus? […]
  • The Guide to Unstoppable WaspUnstoppable Wasp, Nadia van Dyne – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order
    The definitive issue-by-issue comic book collecting […]
  • Marvel United Multiverse Age of Apocalypse - Kickstarter Exclusive BoxMarvel United: Multiverse enters the Age of Apocalypse! (plus, predicting the 10 most-likely expansion boxes)
    CMON's Marvel United: Multiverse - Age of Apocalypse brings more mutants to the game! What are the 10 next expansions we might see soon? […]
  • The Guide to Unstoppable WaspNew for Patrons: Guide to Unstoppable Wasp, Nadia van Dyne
    Who is The Unstoppable Wasp, and how did an elegant retcon from writer Mark Waid make her a different character than the MCU's Hope van Dyne? […]
  • Champions (2016) #1 variantGuide to The Champions – now available to the public!
    My Guide to The Champions is now available to everyone! Learn why Marvel abandoned this team concept after its 1977 cancellation until 2016. […]
  • Dolly told me I’m doing okay
    Do you know what happens when you run a lot, even when you hate every single second of doing it? Eventually, it gets easier. But, Dolly Parton doesn't always offer you encouragement when you shatter your personal record. […]
  • RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15, Episode 4 – Snatch Game, Review & Power Ranking
    The double-size Season 15 Snatch Game gave us 14 celebrity impressions and a surprising amount of successes, though queens struggled with their "Beautiful Nightmare" runway prompt. […]
  • Marvel United: Multiverse makes more mutants, plus Inhumans enter the fray with War of Kings!
    The Marvel United: Multiverse campaign debuts a War of Kings box, and I tally a few hundred missing mutants they could add to the campaign. […]
  • Werewolf by Night – Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order
    The definitive issue-by-issue comic book collecting […]
  • Washington Post - New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern resigns ahead of electionA Surprise Farewell to Prime Minister Ardern
    It felt like Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was personally keeping my family safe with her decisive actions on gun violence and COVID policy. Now that era is coming to a close. […]
  • Marvel United Multiverse Kickstarter Campaign ImageCMON’s Marvel United returns to Kickstarter with Marvel United: Multiverse!
    Board game publisher CMON is back on Kickstarter with a third wave of their delightful Marvel United game - and this time, it's multiversal! Their new campaign is for Marvel United: Multiverse! […]

Layout copyright © 2017 · Foodie Pro Theme by Shay Bocks · Built on the Genesis Framework · Powered by WordPress

Links from Crushing Krisis to retailer websites may be in the form of affiliate links. If you purchase through an affiliate link I will receive a minor credit as your referrer. My credit does not affect your purchase price. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to: Amazon Services LLC Associates Program (in the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain), eBay Partner Network, and iTunes Affiliate Program.