Hitting Pause
You may have noticed that Thematic Toolkit: Hazardous Knowledge has vanished from drivethrurpg.com/. You’re also going to notice a slowdown in new PMG releases for a while.
How long? I’m not sure. Why? Licensing limbo caused by sensible reactions to WotC’s behavior during January’s OGL crisis. Just to be clear: nobody has threatened or insinuated, much less actually performed any legal or other adversarial action against me personally or PMG as a company. This is borne out of a desire to do things correctly and fix them when I’ve gotten them wrong. Read on for the specifics.
When the OGL crisis happened back in January, EN Publishing was one of the numerous companies swept up in the consequences of it. Originally, the now-removed Publish tab of https://www.levelup5e.com/ contained the LUSRDs and pointed to the spell and combat maneuver sections of the tools site for those types of content. (For those unaware: Level Up has a collection of SRD documents called LUSRDs rather than a single one like D&D does, which it just calls the SRD.)
After the whole OGL crisis in January, EN Publishing decided to move their LUSRDs to https://a5esrd.com/ and as part of that, they no longer refer to the tools site. As I understand it, on the advice of their legal counsel, they’re in the process of improving the wording of their LUSRDs to make them iron-clad and increase the degree of separation from WotC’s IP. If you know me at all, you know I am 100% on board with that. In my opinion, it was a decision I support and am grateful for. I want nothing to do with WotC going forward, and I will be glad for the wall of separation from D&D those documents will provide. Some of the new ones are already up. In fact, as of this writing, 8 of the planned 12 LUSRDs drawing on the Adventurer’s Guide are available. This is a slow process, though; as Morrus has stated, they’re running everything past legal, and as I’m sure most folks reading this are acutely aware, A5E has a lot of words!
Unfortunately, the LUSRD documents that contained the classes didn’t make the transition to the new site, and the spells ones will be brand new when they’re released, so there’s currently nothing I can actually point to that’s available for the purposes of the OGL. In light of that, I have decided to pull down the latest Thematic Toolkit which includes a reference to an A5E-specific spell; the reason I’m not pulling anything else is that the prior releases were either published under the old rules and should therefore be okay or are original material that doesn’t need to specifically quote text from the LUSRDs (as in the case of Spells from the Forgotten Vault), though obviously that references the artificer class by name (only), so if someone from EN Publishing asks me to remove it, that will also come down. I doubt that will happen; there is a previous LUSRD file that references the artificer (I have a copy); the spells are the real issue here, as they’ve never had an SRD document that lists them.
Regrettably, there’s a chance this delays MoAR Complete; that will reference spells for the elementalist and wielder classes that don't currently appear in any LUSRD or the general O5E SRD. There’s also a hefty collection of archetypes (somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 in total) that should be able to point back to a widely-available LUSRD. Those old SRDs still exist, but I’d really prefer to point to something easily-downloaded. Moreover, while I do trust EN Publishing, I don’t trust WotC, so if I’m going to have something providing artificer archetypes, I want an SRD I can point to that says “no, really, this isn’t for your artificer class, WotC.”
However, I want to stress something: as of right now MoAR Complete isn’t delayed by anything in this post because it isn’t done yet. I would estimate that I’m somewhere in the general neighborhood of 60% done with the first pass of the layout file and I am going to want to review the heck out of it before I make it available for purchase anyway. This is going to have a print option, so I want to catch everything possible before release; I can fix PDFs, but I obviously can’t digitally update an already-printed book! Any errors that slip through will be stuck there. Some extra time to fine-tune and review will not go amiss.
If we’re fortunate, the LUSRDs we need to reference will drop before everything is finished. If we’re not that lucky, MoAR Complete will still release once the necessary LUSRD documents have appeared, but we might be waiting a while.
I realize this is frustrating and disappointing news to receive (it is to write) but if you feel compelled to be annoyed with someone, pick either WotC (for putting us all in this jam in the first place) or me (for not more carefully checking the new SRDs before we even got started on MoAR Complete) but please don’t get mad at EN Publishing. They are doing the best they can for the good of the industry with very limited resources. They do not deserve your ire, but your gratitude.
