After the Fall

These days feel strange.

This is like those moments you learn something terrible about a beloved icon of film and television, and all of a sudden, the things you love make you feel horrible inside.

It felt strange having grown up and enjoyed 20 years of OGL content and embraced worlds and characters from great creators, only to see those creations slowly milked for all they are worth, rolled out for nostalgia addicts, cut-and-paste books slapped together, and very little new coming from a team that should have been the world's best writers and creators of fantasy worlds.

Instead, they turn out to be another nostalgia-milking machine, and after they realize they have sucked out all they could, they turn to greed, and the world sees them for who they really are.

I hold my memories dear, the characters I loved from creators who have nothing to do with this current crowd of empty, show up at work and do what they are told husks, and hope for better days. Hoping they fail so those who come after can pick up the pieces. So we walk away and leave them behind.

And seek better games.

The milking machine was a standard set of rules everyone could use and play with, but it held us back in many ways. Dozens of people tried to make the same game, competing with each other on feeling alone. They were all great, but one idol felt like the only one worth chasing.

After the terrible revelations, games outside the bubble thrived, and the brave ones that broke from the mold shined, such as Pathfinder 2. The Year Zero Engine. Forbidden Lands. And so many others and even older games got looked at again, such as GURPS and Runequest. They aren't beholden to using multiclassing to fix fundamental class design problems. They are also designed to be superheroic cake-walks where you can say your character is in danger but never really be anywhere close, like staying fifty feet away from the railing on the canyon's edge and panicking about falling off.

We have forgotten the danger.

We need to remember what it means to live.

We need to feel the thrill of being right on the canyon's edge, without a railing and trusting ourselves.

We need to learn new things and be challenged again.

And I see thousands walking away and exploring new games, and I am happy. But let's look back every once and a while and realize what we were all hooked to, and this is the same game Hollywood and TV use to hook us in. The nostalgia addiction. An opiate of the past built on lies that things can still be the same.

That broken, jagged, rusted milking machine sitting in the farmyard we all used to be connected to.

One which built a temple of lies built upon the mists of the past, with the echo of the siren's call begging us to return.