July Newsletter: Goblins and Growlers Gazette

⚡ (Total read time: 2.9 minutes) ⚡

This has been a month. Over work-worked, over school-worked, over sick, and just over it. If you read all the way to the end, you’ll see that some of that will be changing soon! In the meantime, thanks for reading! And also, hit me up on our Discord and tell me how long your average tabletop campaign lasts — I’m doing research.

Let us know what you’d like to see in this newsletter. We’ve been doing these monthly for about a year and want to continue giving you want you want. Hit us up at [email protected]. Or, you know, Discord.

(And if you haven’t, please subscribe to the GG YouTube channel 📺 )

In this month’s newsletter:

🗞️ 3 must-know gaming news nuggets
❤️ 1 awesome apocalyptic game you need to try
🔥 1 hot takes from The Goblins and Growlers Podcast
🧭 Goblins in the wild: Upcoming events

🗞️ 3 must-know gaming news nuggets

• 🧪 $30 Free League Alchemy VTT Humble Bundle  (Dig Deeper)

  • It’s a greatest hits compilation featuring Vaesen, Dragonbane, Mork Borg and more. It’s like 11 games with more than 30 accessories.

  • It’s a 97% discount for everything and a great reason to jump onto Alchemy.

  • A portion of the proceeds goes to Direct Relief, which raises money for healthcare and disaster services.
    

• 💵 Hasbro’s Digital Future. (Dig Deeper)

  • D&D’s parent company is spending $125 million to spur the development of more digital tie-ins to their games

  • They’re looking to release one or two new games per year starting in 2025/2026.

  • This feels like a quantity-over-quality-style bad idea. It’s not like we’re gonna get 2 BG3s a year.

• 💻 D&D’s Virtual Tabletop Imminent? (Dig Deeper)

  • Hasbro’s Q2 earnings call indicated that we might get access to the new VTT by the end of the year.

  • We demo’d it at Pax Unplugged last year and it was quite intuitive and feels like the sandbox system they’re pitching.

  • As an aside, WotC had 20% growth thanks to MtG and the long, long tail of Baldur’s Gate 3.

😇 The Meek Shall Inherit This Mirth.

🪦 It’s Too Late to Repent. I feel like there’s almost a GenCon theme for this issue. This is “The End,” which came out in 1995 and was famously kicked out of GenCon that year for being too controversial with its subject matter. Said subject matter is: God is real, The Rapture happened, and humanity has been abandoned. It’s a fantastic niche RPG that was ahead of its time and would have fit in wonderfully with the embrace of post-apocalypticism after “The Walking Dead.” This is special to me, too, because Josh and I got a three-episode series of The Goblins and Growlers Podcast out of this by tracking down the creator, Joe Donka, who’d left the gaming industry years before, and doing a two-hour interview with him. I’ll drop the links here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

There’s a D20 version of this from Tyranny Games that was produced after Joe sold them the rights to it, but be sure to pick up the original version if you can (picture below). The book is well out of print, but you can find it second-hand in a lot of places. I also have an extra copy and, if there’s interest, I’d be glad to do some kind of giveaway!

Also, Joe was super cool and sent us an autographed copy of the game!

Editor’s Note: Between the aforementioned work, homework, life, and illness, we took a bit of a lighter schedule in July so we wouldn’t go insane. Hence just the one episode.

🎧 1 hot takes from The Goblins and Growlers Podcast

• 🎭🎲 Role Vs. Roll: Dawn of Justice With Josh on the mend, we’re joined by our friend and attorney, Noah Downs, Esq., to talk about the differences and approaches of those players who focus on the role-playing aspects of TTRPGs and those who prefer to focus on the dice and optimization. (Spotify)

🧭 Goblins in the wild: Where to find us.

• GenCon. As you read this, our sweet boy, Josh, is heading to Indianapolis for North America’s largest tabletop gaming. If you see him wandering exhaustedly around the Indiana Convention Center, stop and say hi. Once he gets back, we’ll do a debrief episode of GGP.

🎓 The end is nigh. But in a good way.

I finish grad school two weeks from today. That’s one of the reasons I’m not going to GenCon with Josh and boy howdy, I can’t wait to have like 40% of my time back after August 14. I’m very excited to be able to relax again after two years.

Have a good one!
Brandon