DOA Sun

https://www.ttrpginsider.news/p/fighting-oppression-in-new-ways-d-d-s-designers-on-adapting-dark-sun-to-modern-times

Forget it.

Cooked.

It's done.

There Is No Ethical Brain Donation

https://www.polygon.com/dnd-baldurs-gate-3-mind-flayer-tabletop-transformation/

I hate to be the spoilsport, but there is no way around it.

Vampires can live on animal blood or willing donors. You can write a tragic, even sympathetic vampire if you want. The hunger is a problem you can negotiate.

Mind flayers do not have that option. Their food is the entire mind of an intelligent creature. Their colonies do not function without a steady supply of thinking beings kept as livestock. That is not flavor you can file off. That is the creature.

Wizards has spent years scrubbing slavery and “people-owning” out of every other culture they print. Then they release a feat path that lets a player become one of the few monsters whose entire society is built on exactly that. They will give you the tentacles and the Mind Blast. They will not give you an honest accounting of dinner.

As a story option that mimics the BG3 struggle, it is fine. The tadpole, the slow loss of self, the choice to stop or go further - that can be a good character arc. But if the transformation ever completes, you should lose the character. What remains is an evil NPC. That is the traditional take, and it is the honest one. Ceremorphosis is not a prestige class. It should not end up as a power-gaming feat chain you take because Mind Blast looks fun.

D&D has spent years making sure you never lose control of your character. So of course they won’t take the sheet away when the transformation finishes. They’ll just let you keep playing the thing whose society they refuse to describe.

They want to sell you the squid. They just don’t want to talk about the farm.

Games as Media

Getting five people together for a game night is a lot harder than sitting on the couch and consuming games as media. Look at the D&D YouTube audience, the actual-play shows, Critical Role, the $13 million Dungeon Crawler Carl crowdfunding campaign, and the trailer-driven announcements that now drop like video-game reveals. That is a real market. It is just not the same market as a weekly table.

There is a parallel collector market, games as objects, limited editions, shelf pieces that may never hit the table. Set that aside for now. The bigger money and the louder noise are in media.

I like fiddly games. The ones meant to live on a table: math, lore, numbers, figures, dungeon tiles, rulers, a calculator, dried paint on the wood, dice hitting the tray. That is one way the hobby-as-game still looks. It is not the only way. A rules-light story game that a group actually runs every Thursday is still the game layer. The point is not complexity. The point is that the product is built to be used.

Games-as-media can be played on a tabletop. Plenty will be. The difference is what the launch is optimized for. A big IP campaign, a cinematic trailer, an actual-play flagship, those succeed if they are watched, shared, backed, and argued about. Table time is a hoped-for aftereffect, not the thing the machine is built to measure. Attention is the product. Play is a possible use.

You can see it in the artifacts. A game built for the table expects worn books and missing minis. A game built for media expects a clean unboxing, a clip, and a discourse cycle.

Every publisher wants hype. That is just the social-media world we live in. The question is whether the game can bank cash without a table.

A store-level game that nobody plays dies. The books sit. The next order does not come. The FLGS cannot sell atmosphere. Something built for the games-as-media market can live in the licensed-IP sphere instead: a Netflix-pilot energy, a comic-book drop, a pretty coffee-table book meant for casual flipping more than for a campaign. Plastic miniatures. A trailer. The sale happens when the object is desired, not when the session starts.

That is the split. Hype is common. Getting paid before play is not.

Is the Dark Sun trailer selling a physical game, or is it shopping a look? In a games-as-media market, that is a fair question. The footage has to work as a clip, a vibe, a possible Fallout-style show. The books can still be real, and the trailer can still be doing Hollywood work.

In the FLGS and OSR world, this barely comes up. Those games are not built to be pitched. They are built to be run. In the hybrid market, one foot is on the table, and the other is in the pitch room.

Not every launch is like this. Plenty of games still arrive as a book, a PDF, and a hope that a store or a Discord will pick them up. The ones that dominate the feed are different. They land like trailers for the next franchise installment. That layer is loud, and it is easy to mistake the volume for the whole hobby.

The hobby can feel like noise because hype is what travels. A session does not.

I can’t play a trailer.

I can play a game.

Anti-Energy and the Hobby

Anti-energy can be a dangerous thing. Let me define it.

This happened to me. My disappointment with Star Wars built up over years and finally peaked with this year’s lackluster movie release. So I dove in, collecting Star Wars RPG books and telling myself, “I can do better than them.” My goal was to tell classic Star Wars stories at the table the way they were supposed to feel.

The concept of “proving them wrong” is the crux of anti-energy. When that moment fades, the anti-energy fades with it, and you are left holding empty feelings and piles of useless books. Anti-energy is best redirected: create your own sci-fi universe and stories instead. Refuse to “fix theirs” out of spite.

Whatever actually appeals to you about science fiction—low-level free traders scraping by on payroll runs, explorers in barely spaceworthy junk craft, space mercenaries on the fringe, or the classic hard sci-fi stories you love—do those things. Do them instead of channeling anti-energy into fixing someone else’s pile of broken junk that no longer even knows what it is supposed to be.

Then the anti-energy starts to wane. You feel the riptide pulling your creative urges into the abyss. That is when you realize what this feeling actually is.

Anti-energy is a destructive force. It feeds on schadenfreude and the false-positive rush of “I can fix this.” You move on to the next thing. I can fix Dark Sun. I can fix D&D. I can fix Star Trek. You buy more books. You fall into the next trap. The anti-energy fades again, and you are left more drained and empty than before. Time wasted when new stories could have been told.

Look at where the official material is going. Dark Sun is turning into Splatterpunk meets WWE for the new D&D 5.5E version. Star Trek’s shows are crashing and burning—no longer exploring strange new worlds, but turning inward into Gen Z feelings and emotions, the kind of show better suited for the CW on those fringe syndicated budget networks. D&D itself is becoming a fantasy superhero game, and everyone by default accepts it like D&D is the new fantasy MCU. The original had those deep-rooted feelings of myth, heroism, savage survival, crawling into the unknown, crossing into the mirror, the dungeon funhouse of death, and personal struggles where you were not invincible and immortal.

Parts of the OSR are based on anti-energy for D&D. I feel that if D&D were ever to disappear, a good portion of that scene would retract and recede into a much smaller niche audience.

I’m not saying the OSR is artificial. But why you love it may be.

If you are in the OSR primarily to “correct D&D,” you are setting yourself up for disappointment the day modern D&D dies or stops mattering. That corrective drive is still anti-energy. It needs the thing it’s pushing against in order to keep its heat.

If you are in the OSR out of genuine love for the old ways—the resource tension, the real danger, the mythic grit, the dungeon as a place that does not care about your story—and you refuse the toxic anti-energy, you are in a far more creative and better place. That version does not need modern D&D to exist as a foil. It can keep generating new material and new tables even if the official line vanished tomorrow.

The same distinction applies to everything else. Star Wars, Dark Sun, Trek, whatever. When the urge is “I will fix their broken thing,” the energy is finite and extractive. When the urge is “this is the specific feeling and structure I actually want at my table,” the energy becomes self-sustaining. That is the difference between ending up with another stack of unused books and ending up with campaigns that actually happened.

Anti-energy is finite and extractive. Positive love of the play experience itself is generative.

The practical move is simple. Notice when the urge to collect, redesign, or “restore” is coming from opposition rather than appetite. Isolate the actual texture you want—mythic vulnerability, desperate scarcity, outward exploration, low-level free-trader grind, whatever it is—and feed that directly. Build the stories that only exist at your table. Refuse the invitation to fix someone else’s pile of broken junk that no longer even knows what it is supposed to be.

When the spite runs out, that is what remains: the campaigns that actually happened, instead of the books that never got used.

The Age of Distillation

We are entering the Age of Distillation.

The “big iron” systems of the last two decades- multi-book, thousand-page engines like Pathfinder 1E and the various iterations of D&D are no longer the only way to deliver their own fantasies. A growing body of design work is taking those dense rule sets and re-expressing them as lean, fast, highly accessible games. The goal is the same: keep the fantasy, dump the friction.

Just as the iPhone was initially mocked for stripping away the complexity of earlier smartphones, these distilled games deliberately remove the mechanical overhead that once felt necessary. Shadowdark took the core appeal of modern D&D-style play and condensed it into a tight, elegant, torch-lit framework. Shadowfinder does the same for the 3.5E/Pathfinder 1E tradition: it is a Shadowdark-adjacent reimplementation that preserves the class fantasy, the option density, and the sense of a complete campaign toolkit while running on a far lighter chassis.

Old-School Essentials performed a similar act of clarification for B/X.

OSE took the complete rules of the 1981 Basic and Expert sets and re-presented them in a ruthlessly clear, modular, and quickly referenceable format. Strictly speaking, it is more of a definitive rules reference than a mechanical redesign. The underlying procedures stayed very close to the original. What changed was the presentation: ambiguous wording was resolved, scattered rules were gathered, and the entire system became instantly legible.

The practical result, however, was the same as distillation. Players and referees could find any rule in seconds instead of flipping between books, interpreting unclear language, or simply missing procedures that had been poorly organized in the originals. A game that had been written as a teaching text for a new hobby was transformed into a fast, reliable reference that removed most of the friction of actually using it at the table.

Shadowfinder takes the next step. Where OSE primarily clarified and organized an existing ruleset, Shadowfinder actively rewrites the 3.5E/Pathfinder 1E tradition into an entirely different chassis, Shadowdark’s lean, lethal, real-time framework, while deliberately preserving the fantasy, option density, and campaign-scale toolkit that made the original appealing.

Distillation is not replacing the big systems. It is not coming for OSR, D&D 5.5E, or either edition of Pathfinder.

What it offers is a parallel path for players and GMs who no longer have the time, focus, or bandwidth that denser games demand. In an attention-scarce world, many people still want the fantasy those systems deliver; they simply cannot (or will not) invest the cognitive and temporal overhead the original rules require. Distilled games give them a way to stay at the table.

You will hear people say they “moved from D&D to Shadowdark.” Some of them prefer the leaner rules on pure design grounds. Many others made the shift because they no longer have the sustained attention that 5E (or Pathfinder) asks for. Keeping those players inside the hobby through a distilled experience is better than watching them drift toward video games or other entertainments.

This is additive, not zero-sum. The existence of Shadowdark and Shadowfinder does not diminish anyone’s preferred ruleset. It simply widens the door so more people can keep playing.

One of the clearest “missing the mark” moments in the current industry is that neither Wizards of the Coast nor Paizo appears to recognize this movement.

Both companies still treat their dense, multi-book systems as the primary (and essentially only) way to experience their respective fantasy brands. They have no serious product answer for the growing audience that wants the D&D or Pathfinder feeling but no longer has the time, focus, or bandwidth those systems demand.

Just as TikTok distilled the time and attention required to consume video, a significant portion of the tabletop audience is looking for a distilled version of the big fantasy RPGs. The major publishers have so far offered none. Instead, they continue chasing live-service and subscription models for their digital platforms. This approach increasingly resembles the same failed live-service strategies currently damaging many AAA video game publishers.

While third-party designers are busy creating lean, playable expressions of the very fantasies WotC and Paizo own, the companies themselves remain focused on heavier systems and ongoing monetization layers. The gap is real, and the distilled games are filling it.

Yet the absence of an official response does not mean the demand is going unanswered.

Shadowfinder currently stands as one of the clearest and most successful examples of what distillation can achieve. It takes the broad fantasy, character options, and campaign-scale ambition of Pathfinder 1E and re-expresses them inside Shadowdark’s fast, lethal, and highly usable framework. The result is not a stripped-down novelty. It is a complete game that can support the kind of sprawling, multi-region campaigns many Pathfinder fans originally fell in love with, without the mechanical weight that made those campaigns increasingly difficult to sustain.

For players who still want the class fantasy of the magus, the alchemist, the gunslinger, the specialized wizard, or the unusual ancestry, Shadowfinder delivers those options in a form that actually reaches the table. The same is true of the wider toolkit: meaningful gear and materials, alchemy, travel and mounts, downtime systems, richer character advancement, and a bestiary drawn from the full span of the Pathfinder 1E monster books. Where core Shadowdark intentionally focuses on the dungeon crawl, Shadowfinder expands the same engine into something that can carry a full campaign without feeling incomplete.

In doing so, it elevates the Shadowdark experience for a specific and underserved audience. Pathfinder 1E fans who bounced off the denser rules of later editions (or simply no longer have the bandwidth for them) are given a way to reclaim the open, slightly savage, high-option fantasy they enjoyed, now running on a system that respects their time and attention. The fantasy remains. The friction is largely gone.

This is distillation working as it should: not as a lesser substitute, but as a parallel avenue that keeps more people playing the kind of games they actually want.

When some OSR and 5E fans dismiss Shadowdark as “nothing new,” they are missing the actual point.

A growing number of modern OSR systems have themselves become mechanically deep, especially once high-level play enters the picture. In practice, they can demand as much rules mastery and table time as contemporary D&D. The people turning to distillation are often not looking for novelty for its own sake. They are looking for a way back into the fantasy after real life stripped them of the time and attention the heavier systems require.

I have been that player. Games I once loved now sit in crates in the garage, unused and unloved, because I no longer have the bandwidth to support a multi-shelf library of books and the cognitive load that comes with them. The disappointment is real. The promise of those systems eventually collides with the limits of available time and focus.

A distilled version of the same fantasy changes the equation. It lets me return to the world I cared about without the same drain on my days. The campaign can exist again. The characters can exist again. The sense of possibility returns, but it no longer requires the same costly monopoly on attention.

Whether the density of the “big iron” games is intentional or simply the result of decades of accretion, the practical effect is the same for many of us: the system becomes too expensive in time to sustain. Distillation offers a way to keep the dream without accepting that cost.

The Age of Distillation is not a rejection of the games that came before. It is a recognition that the fantasy itself is more important than the particular weight of the rules that once delivered it. For those of us who still want to live in those worlds but can no longer carry the full library, these leaner expressions are not lesser. They are what allow the dream to continue.

Go Big or Go Home

What did Gen Con 2026 reveal about sustained RPG interest?

Looking at the announced play sessions and how the tables actually filled (based on available seats, player-hours, and final sell-out patterns), a clear hierarchy emerged: 

• D&D: Still the clear top tier by a healthy margin, but the 90% leader narrative no longer applies
• Pathfinder + Starfinder: The institutional alternative
• Daggerheart / Pirate Borg / Call of Cthulhu: Mid-tier systems that convert attention into filled tables
• DCC + Shadowdark: The strong fantasy alternatives
• Shadowrun + Marvel Multiverse: Established but lower relative heat

The ranking is not random. It tracks closely with publishing scale, cadence, and independence.

The Core Pattern

Systems backed by operations built for volume and continuous output tend to hold or climb. Paizo maintains Tier 2 through institutional infrastructure and steady product flow. Chaosium keeps Call of Cthulhu in the mid-tier with a large, expanding catalog.

Goodman Games runs the most aggressive mid-scale version of the same model: near-constant crowdfunding, megadungeons, crawl collections, and special editions. Dungeon Crawl Classics is no longer a critical darling or the hot newness; it is an older game, yet it ranked in the same statistical band last year and this year. Sustained support and a deep indie community are what keep it alive and filling tables, more than media attention or novelty. That relentless catalog growth is why DCC continues to place consistently highly despite its age.

DCC being its own system with its own dice also creates a stickiness factor that is hard to escape. We have seen this with a few other special-dice systems (Genesys, the Fantasy Flight Star Wars line, and a handful of others). They either fail to find an audience at launch or, once they do, the proprietary dice keep people engaged simply because “they already have some.”

The high-heat test cases Shadowdark and Daggerheart currently occupy the opposite position. Both have strong design and cultural momentum. Shadowdark remains the most visible pure-OSR-style system that cracked the fourth tier; Daggerheart sits in the mid-tier as this year’s critical darling. Yet both operate with thinner, slower release pipelines. The data pattern from previous breakout systems suggests their long-term Gen Con footprint will depend on whether the support infrastructure scales — or whether they settle into the “excellent but constrained” category.

Necessary Qualifications

Volume alone is not enough. Kobold Press maintains a massive professional catalog, yet remains largely invisible in system-level rankings because so much of that output lives inside the 5E ecosystem. It supports the dominant game rather than competing with it for independent tables and identity. Tales of the Valiant has not yet broken that gravity.

Traveller offers the genre counter-example. Mongoose has one of the deepest catalogs in the hobby, but pure science fiction consistently underperforms fantasy at Gen Con. Even large-scale support hits a lower ceiling when the genre itself draws a smaller share of attention. Starfinder only performs as well as it does because it combines Paizo’s infrastructure with science-fantasy positioning.

What Drives Interest?

Sustained high engagement at Gen Con scale tends to require volume + independence + favorable genre positioning (especially fantasy).

Volume without independence gets absorbed by the larger ecosystem.

Volume in a smaller genre hits a structural ceiling.

Independence + high-cadence support inside the big fantasy lane is what converts popularity into durable table presence.

Old School Essentials sits as the cautionary case on the other side: real reach and critical respect (especially via Dolmenwood’s awards), yet a publishing approach that left the core line feeling under-supported and statistically quiet.

In a crowded field, design quality and early heat still matter. But the systems that keep filling seats year after year are the ones whose publishers treat catalog growth and delivery cadence as non-negotiable. The rest, even the breakouts, tend to peak and then settle.

Gen Con 2026 RPG Observations: Five Tiers of Interest

Looking at the announced play sessions and how the tables actually filled (based on available seats, player-hours, and final sell-out patterns), a clear hierarchy emerged:

• D&D – still the clear top tier by a healthy margin, but the 90% leader narrative no longer applies
• Pathfinder + Starfinder – the institutional alternative
• Daggerheart / Pirate Borg / Call of Cthulhu – the mid-tier systems that convert attention into filled tables
• DCC + Shadowdark – the strong fantasy alternatives
• Shadowrun + Marvel Multiverse – established but lower relative heat

D&D remains the biggest single block of seats and player-hours, but the gap is no longer the old “everything else is a rounding error” picture. The second and third tiers are visible, active, and drawing real demand. That’s the story the 2026 schedule told.