consume

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

January 13, 2023 by krisis

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

Updated: Guide to X-Factor

January 12, 2023 by krisis

Now that I’m digging back into my comic guides, it’s time to start attacking my backlog of 150+ guides that haven’t had a significant revision in half a decade! Time flies when you’re reading comics. This week, I’ve reached back to update one of CK’s earliest guides. Actually, I re-wrote every word and rebuilt every link from scratch to make it easier than ever to find the physical and digital collections you want. Welcome to my all-new, all-different Guide to X-Factor.

Guide to X-Factor

My last update of the Guide to X-Factor was in the middle of the Reign of X, which means it wasn’t missing too many collections – just the newest Epics and the relatively fresh second and third volumes of the Peter David Omnibus line.

However, that doesn’t meant the page was easy to use! The guide had grown to be a labyrinth of collections with 20 years worth of competing oversized hardcovers, Epics, and paperbacks. That approach to guide organization predates Marvel’s more-organized approach to the contents of Omnibuses and Epic collections. Now that collection formats are getting tidier, the guide should follow! Now, major collection formats have their own sections that you can easily open or skip.

As a result, I rebuilt every collection link on the page. That’s not the only big change to this guide. I’ve added all of the features of the newest guides on the site, including a “Where to Start” section, digital purchase links, reformatted images, and links to read on Marvel Unlimited!

This was one of my milder rebuilds, since it didn’t require adding many new collections or researching character appearances. It still took a whopping five hours altogether, which is almost as long as it takes to create a small new guide from scratch! I’ve got my work cut out for me keeping everything updated, but the more often I do it the easier and quicker it becomes.

Enjoy this renewed Guide to X-Factor – and, let me know in the comments which of my 200+ guides you’d love to see me update next!

Crushing On: Willow Season 1 on Disney Plus

January 11, 2023 by krisis

E and I absolutely loved the revival of the original 1988 Willow film as a television series on DisneyPlus!

That wasn’t a guaranteed outcome.

Even though Willow is one of the first films I can remember watching in a movie theatre, when I heard that it was being rebooted for Disney’s streaming service my reaction was somewhere on the spectrum from disinterested to actively hostile.

I love having my nostalgia buttons pushed as much as anyone, but can’t we just let some things live in our memories untouched as a single bold and often-silly original film? And a startlingly good novelization by Wayland Drew? And a pair of little-known sequel novels written by Chris Claremont(!)?

The question contains the answer. Extending properties like Willow for an audience of devoted geeky fans is nothing new. What’s new is that geekdom has pervaded pop culture so thoroughly that these properties are wagered on as movies and major tentpoles for streaming networks!

I’ll admit, I wasn’t wild about the first episode of this eight-episode season. Even with Warwick Davis on board, without Val Kilmer could it possibly recapture the inane magic of the film? Despite high production value, at first it seemed to be mired in focusing on a group of preternaturally attractive young adults who seemed to have only a passing connection to the original movie.

In fact, the show almost lost me with a ponderous third episode that was almost too dark to decipher – even with the lights turned off and the contrast cranked up!

What ultimately won me over to the show wasn’t just continued improvement in production value as it centered a queer love story. (More on that in a moment!) It was also something it shares with the original film.

Willow was a Hero’s Journey that turned the Hero’s Journey on its head. The movie was ostensibly about finding and saving a chosen one, but that chosen one was a defenseless baby. This was not a story about Luke Skywalker becoming an unstoppable space sorcerer. Willow himself was a bumbling wannabe wizard. Sorsha was a privileged princes and Madmartigan a feckless mercenary.

Willow was a story about unlikely heroes deciding to care about the fate of the world, as well as the fate of each other.

This new Willow show follows a similar trajectory. It has a cast full of seemingly “chosen” characters. Everyone in the main ensemble comes from an important lineage, has a major quest, or has been imbued with special power. In a world that has grown complacent while great evil grew at its margins, they were all satisfied to simply play the roles they were assigned: vapid prince, bored princess, dutiful soldier, directionless commoner, hopeless prisoner, and a humble patriarch.

The reemergence of evil forces each character to confront those roles and the assumptions that came with them in unexpected ways. [Read more…] about Crushing On: Willow Season 1 on Disney Plus

New for Patrons: Guide to Werewolf by Night

January 10, 2023 by krisis

I’m excited to be back on my comic-guide-making A-game, picking up right where I left off with a guide for all Patreon supporters of Crushing Krisis to one of Marvel’s many 1970s horror characters that followed in the wake of the easing of the Comic Code. Thanks to his entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there’s some renewed attention on Jack Russell, and you can read every issue of his comic book history in my Guide to Werewolf by Night!

Guide to Werewolf by Night

Jack Russell is one of those Marvel characters who appeared consistently throughout the Bronze Age and then had a hard time finding his footing afterward. I’m never sure if that’s down to the departure of creators who favored a character or simply the changing landscape of comics in the late-80s and early 90s.

In this case, I think it’s a combination of both. [Read more…] about New for Patrons: Guide to Werewolf by Night

RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15, Episode 1 & Episode 2 – “One Night Only” Talent Show Review & Power Ranking

January 7, 2023 by krisis

Welcome to my supersized Power Rankings of the massive double-episode premiere of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15 – “One Night Only”! This pair of premiere episodes introduced a never-ending cast of 16 queens competing in a mini-challenge photoshoot, a Talent Show, and a runway theme of “Who is She?”

The last season of Drag Race was one of the most-entertaining in the history of the show. It also verged on jumping the shark. There were several stretches of episodes with no eliminations, the season shoved an excessive (but entertaining) lip sync tournament in the middle, and the entire thing was saddled with the “it’s chocolate” save mechanism that was obviously fully under the control of the producers.

It left Season 14 feeling belabored. For the first time, many fans complained that Drag Race was… well, dragging. Drag Race is at its best when it is a non-stop variety show competition with real stakes for the contestants when they misstep. The more it is stuffed full of non-eliminations, immunity, or special saves, the more it drifts into feeling scripted – which minimized the agency of a talent cast of artists.

What saved Season 14 from sailing straight over the proverbial shark was its cast. In retrospect, the cast seems packed full of unforgettable personalities – but, part of why they were so unforgettable is that we got so much time between them Sashaying away!

As it turns out, a belabored season can still be one of the best, as long as it spends that extra time showing off its cast.

The show seems to be headed in the opposite direction this year, with a massive cast competing all at once in this first pair of episodes with a supposedly irreversible elimination at the end. That means far less early screen time per queen. Plus, after this initial pair of episodes, episodes will only air for an hour on MTV (which means the actual content is more like 40 minutes).

Will Drag Race be able to steer away from its impending shark jump by producing a brisk, tight, shenanigan-free season that shows off the talents of its massive cast? Or, will this extra-long season of extra-short episodes collapse under the sheer weight of trying to make each of its 16 queens stand out.

Only time will tell if the season was successful, but based on these first two episodes there seems to be a clear divide in the cast between the competitors and the potential fodder. Several queens burst out of the gates ready to slay, while many others seemed to struggle to make their drag ready for prime time.

Which queens came out on top and which ones are in danger of an early elimination? My Power Rankings considers each queen’s performance on the show as well as how they are treated by the edit and the “meta game” of what a queen needs to win Drag Race in the wake of a season with an unusual winner like Willow Pill.

Readers, start your engines! And, may the best drag queen win! [Read more…] about RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 15, Episode 1 & Episode 2 – “One Night Only” Talent Show Review & Power Ranking