With the OGL committing hari-kari in the space of about a week based entirely on leaks, rumors, innuendo and the most draconian corporate murder license one could imagine, I decided maybe it was time to imagine a future world in which content could be suitably useable with whatever preferred game system you want to go with. I'm not 100% sure how to execute such a thing, though....thoughts cross my mind, but when you look at the history of generic supplements you tend to find they fall in the following categories:
1. Truly generic and system free; these books are like Harn, poster child of the movement, in which the content is entirely setting and scenario based and no assumptions of mechanics are really provided. These are often valued by gamers looking for setting content, and for whom the lack of mechanical ambience in the document is not an obstacle.
2. Mechanical appellations and values are used for stats that coincidentally happen to be sufficiently identical to the game that the product is actually intended for. We shall call this the Role Aids approach, as done by Mayfair back in the AD&D days as they did the legal dance with TSR. I suspect a nontrivial number of books will come out soon that fit this definition, totally compatible to D&D 5E, but otherwise lacking an OGL and restating lots of stuff to look just different enough.
3. Generic statblocks are provided which use general assumptions about the RPGs it is intended for, and look suspiciously like someone's own homebrew rules, but are otherwise just guidelines for the GM to fill in the blanks on. This is represented best by the old Blade/Catalyst series of generic Citybooks and Lejentia series from Flying buffalo, or Grimtooth's Traps with its deadliness rating and elaborate descriptions of murderous contraptions. This approach is one I personally want to think more about.
Any of these approaches can work, but the question is whether the current market will be kind to such attempts. My suspicion is that for much of the contemporary D&D crowd none of this matters; the hobby at its core has never been the 10 million people who watch Critical Role and play D&D for fun but may be at best peripherally aware of the existence of other RPGs (maybe Call o Cthulhu and Pathfinder, and that's about it). The audience for these more generic books is going to be the core crowd, people who are avidly collecting stuff from Mongoose, Modiphius, Free League, backing Kickstarters that don't have 5E plastered on them....this isn't suggesting gatekeeping, but rather I'm saying there are gradient levels of interest and engagement in a hobby, and while one can be thoroughly immersed in one corner of RPGs they can remain blissfully unaware of another corner.
A problem with generic approaches is they depend on the purchaser's engagement with adding in appropriate stat blocks and modifying for the preferred system of choice. I think the average hobbyist has come to expect a product to do the heavy lifting as much as possible, and generic modules just can't do this. For better or worse, they are going to have to either be for a game system or be a statement for a game system....at least, for broad acceptance.
I haven't published on my Zodiac Gods imprint for a long time now, but I am considering giving it a shot again. I am currently taking existing products and turning them into OGL free vessels which have generic rule suggestions in them. I think this is the option I'd like to try, at least until the dust on the OGL's evisceration settles. I always did like the Flying Buffalo/Blade Catalyst products!
I am glad I spent eight years dragging my feet on my proposed Realms of Chirak Revised 5E edition, too. Now I can spend yet more time turning it in to something else for either a generic approach to system free gaming, or maybe wait a bit and see which third party publisher out there becomes victorious with the next open content RPG to take D&D's place.
No matter what happens, I at least know for sure now that nothing going forward I produce will be 5E/6E based in any official capacity. So, there's some comfort there, I suppose!
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