2025: The Year in Roleplaying

Somehow, the disasters seem to keep stacking up. The fact that they’re not taking down the industry shows how strong roleplaying has become in the 21st century.

RIP. But before the big disasters, the personal losses. The following creators passed in 2025:

• Ernie Gygax. Ernie was of course one of the late Gary Gygax’s sons. The influence he had on D&D was mostly personal, though he worked at the Dungeon Hobby Shop for a time. We can still see his imprint on the game in things like the water weird and Tenser. Farewell to one of D&D’s first players.
• Scott Haring. Editors usually don’t get the renown they deserve. The fact that Scott did shows how great of an editor he was. I know him best as the editor of Steve Jackson Games magazines, Autoduel Quarterly (1983-1992) and Pyramid (1993-1998), but he had a long history at the company and also worked at TSR where his short stint saw the design of books such as FR3: Empires of the Sands (1988) and GAZ11: Empire of Darokin (1989).
• Tim Kask. Speaking of editors, Tim, who just passed just two days ago, was the first editor of The Dragon (1976-2007). In creating our hobby’s inaugural magazine, he set a high standard for not just quality, but also independence: he famously built a wall between TSR Periodicals and the rest of the company, so that he could truly be a representative of the wider industry, not just a house organ for Dungeons & Dragons. His resume was much longer than that: he founded Adventure Gaming (1980-1983) magazine in the wake of his time at TSR and eventually went on to become a teacher though he still supported modern-day mags such as The Crusader (2005-Present) and Gygax Magazine (2013-2016). He was truly one of the industry’s greats. His long-running Curmudgeon in the Cellar Youtube series allows us to remember him even now that he’s passed; the last new installment ran just two weeks ago.
• François Marcela-Froideval. François was an important member of the French roleplaying scene, where he founded Casus Belli magazine (1980-Present). He later became one of the members of Gary Gygax’s inner circle at TSR, though his contributions there were largely second-hand. But he may be best known in France for his long-running Euro-comic, Black Moon Chronicles (1989-2008), which is lightly linked to the world of Greyhawk.
• Rob Wieland. Though Rob has an extensive library of designs across a wide array of modern games, he’s perhaps best known as a writer and advocate for the hobby and as gamemaster, a panelist, and generally a friendly face at local conventions.
• Rob Reiner. Obviously, Rob Reiner was never involved in roleplaying (as far as we know!), but his movie, The Princess Bride (1987), written by William Goldman, is a touchstone for many fantasy gamers. For that matter, other movies he directed such as This is Spinal Tap (1984) and Stand by Me (1986) helped to define one of the earlier generations of roleplayers. His murder has shaken many of us.

Also lost in 20025 were William “Bud” Baird (podcaster & Call of Cthulhu author), Rebecca Heinemann (computer game designer), Pete Knifton (Games Workshop & Fighting Fantasy artist), Al Leonardi (Ace of Aces designer), Paul Sawyer (Games Workshop editor), Ian Straus (Jonstown Compendium author), and likely several others.

Lost Institutions. We should also note the passing of two institutions. Alarums & Excursions (1975-2025) ended its run with A&E #593 (April 2025). The APA debuted a year before The Dragon (1976-2007), which means that it’s long been the longest-running roleplaying periodical, and likely always will be, with 50 years and 593 issues under its belt. Knights of the Dinner Table (1990-Present) is probably the longest-running periodical that’s still in print, but with its recent move to bimonthly publication, it’ll be a few decades before it reaches Lee Gold’s issue count.

The Canadian miniatures manufacturer RAFM Miniatures has also closed up shop after just less than 50 years in the industry. Like APAs, miniatures have a greater presence in the past of the industry than the present, so the closure of RAFM, like the end of Alarums & Excursions really marks a changing of the guard, as the history of the hobby slowly (and eternally) recedes behind us.

The Tariff Tantrum. On to the disasters of the year. The first one was the setting (and removal and restoration and reremoval …) of huge tariffs for goods being brought into the United States, a chaotic series of maneuvers courtesy of President Trump that nearly cratered the US economy in the first half of the year (and may well still do so as the long-term effects of the tariffs are felt in lost jobs and lost opportunities). At the worst, Trump’s massive tax increase included a 145% tariff on goods from China … which is of course where most games are produced today.

The roleplaying industry was (perhaps even moreso than the rest of the world) filled with uncertainty in early 2025 because of the tariffs. Eventually experts in the field were able to explain that paper-only RPGs were unlikely to be affected because of a narrow exception in the Harmonized Tariff Code for printed material. But then Curt Gould reported that a few precedents existed from U.S. Customs that claimed that roleplaying supplements weren’t “for passive reading,” and so didn’t fall into that exception. Fortunately, roleplaying books do not seem to have been attacked, but that doesn’t mean that the roleplaying field hasn’t been effected. The tariffs killed a trio of card-based RPGs that Magpie Games was Kickstarting, because that’s how narrow the exemption is: printed material is excepted, but if you put in cards or dice, you’re screwed. Daniel D. Fox has also explained some of the magic incantations necessary to ensure that your fully print RPGs aren’t subject to these demonic forces.

Though the roleplaying industry has gotten lucky, the board game industry is treading much closer to the abyss because their releases are all taxable under Trump’s new orders. At various times, publishers who had crowd-funded board games had to admit that they couldn’t distribute them into the US (though they were able to get them into the country during various gaps, as Trump’s erratic decision-making bounced back and forth). But they’ve still had to pay punishing fees. At least two board game companies went out of business due to Trump’s tariffs: Greater than Games was effectively shut down by its parent company, as was Boardlandia Online.

The theory behind tariffs is to increase production in the United States, but that’s a bigger fantasy than Dungeons & Dragons. No one would make such an investment under the constantly changing conditions seen in 2025. Besides that, it may just not be economical. We have a recent example: Quimbley’s Toys & Games tried to build up board game manufacturing in the United States back in 2024. They failed.

So the first disaster of the year was a chaotic mess built on economic theories that had no foundation in reality. And its pain is continuing, though roleplaying seems to be standing firm, other than no longer being able to easily manufacture games with components other than paper.

The Diamond Disaster. Which brings us to disaster #2: in January, Diamond Comics Distributors filed for bankruptcy and also announced that they were selling off Alliance Game Distributors, the main distributor for the entire roleplaying field thanks to some unfortunate corporate consolidation a few decades earlier. At the time they owed Wizards of the Coast $900,000, Catalyst Game Labs $400,000, and PSI (a distributor for medium-sized RPG companies founded by White Wolf alumni a few decades earlier) $200,000. But it looked like our industry got off pretty clean for a while. Universal Distribution in Canada picked up Alliance, and life went back to normal.

But there was a bigger problem for a few: a handful of RPG publishers (and piles of comics publishers) had been using Diamond Comics proper for consignment. This let them put products into book stores, but they only got paid when those items sold. That means the products were still owned by the publishers, not Diamond. The most notable of those in the RPG field was probably Green Ronin, who was putting their literary-licensed RPG The Expanse (2019) into bookstores via Diamond, with plans to do the same for The Fifth Season in the near future. But, Paizo was another victim.

Unfortunately, bankruptcies in the United States are almost totally corporate-serving. Banks and shareholders get top priority, but it goes beyond that: bankruptcy laws often allow them to seize things that the bankrupt company didn’t own, but that happened to be on their premises. Like consigned books. So Green Ronin (and a handful of other RPG publishers and lots of comics publishers) discovered that Diamond’s creditors were trying to steal their products because they hadn’t filled out some obscure form saying it was theirs. And I do mean obscure: the fact that dozens and dozens of comic companies didn’t do this means that nobody knew about this form that the Diamond creditors claim was required. This theft was maybe legal, maybe not (which seems to be a recurring topic this year), but definitely unethical. Green Ronin was forced to set up a legal defense fund to try and protect their investment in their books, and so far they’ve forced Diamond to the mediation table, but haven’t had resolution. Diamond’s year-end move from chapter 11 to chapter 7 bankruptcy might well make things harder (or impossible) for them and others. Sadly, this isn’t the first time that Green Ronin has been screwed by a distribution problem almost entirely beyond their control. That’s definitely one of the “dragons” of the roleplaying industry.

Besides a potential loss of products, those books suddenly became unavailable to the book trade, something that Paizo and Green Ronin have both commented on, and which is doubtless knocking another hole in budgets. So, yeah, Alliance came out of it OK, but after a horrifying few weeks for the industry, a few companies have been unlucky enough to be impacted more.

The AI Intrusion. The other rolling disaster for the roleplaying industry, though really for creators of all types, is the continued tech push on large language models (LLMs) and the generative “AI” that they enable. The RPG field as a whole, designers and fans alike, have been pretty clear about their feelings on AI. The majority not only do not want it, but they will rightfully condemn a company that opts to steal from artists by using generative AI. And it could be that the larger problem is self-correcting. Anthropic owes $1.5 billion dollars due to their theft; 95% of companies aren’t making money from AI; and more than one analyst has stated their belief that the amounts of money being dumped into data centers, often paid for with debt and risky financing, will never be recouped. But, we don’t know, so all the RPG industry can do (all every creative industry can do) is hold the line against the biggest heist of creative content in the history of the world.

Despite the fact that a vocal share of gamers are virulently opposed to the use of stolen art, some publishers are surprisingly using it. The biggest pusher in the roleplaying field is likely RiotMinds, who got in there early by trying to crank out an art book built with AI way back in 2022. They were then caught returning to that well in an RPG product from the era. (They’re now forced to acknowledge it in their Kickstarters by more recent policies.) But this isn’t just a problem of years past. The Gates of Krystalia RPG (2025), a JTTRPG unapologetically built with AI, caused problems for not just themselves, but the UK Games Expo, who was promoting them this year. The creator Alberto Dianin tried to excuse himself by saying: “All creators today use AI in some form. Saying ‘I don’t use AI’ is a lie.”

Most other designers would likely say Dianin’s statement was the lie.

Board games seem to be diving into art theft even more than roleplaying publishers. FyrxGames is perhaps the biggest offender there, since they’re highly successful, but still willing to use AI on everything from their already prosperous Terraforming Mars (2016) to one of their newest releases, Kingdom Legacy (2024). Kingdom Legacy designer Jonathan Fryxelius claimed the reason for using stolen art was “to lower the cost”. (Yeah, theft does usually make supplies cheaper.) Another board game designer, Dan Verssen, is even more explicit about the stolen art he’s using for his upcoming game Fermi’s Paradox. He said, “For a sci-fi game there was no way the game would support the art budget needed for all the unique cards. … My decision was to either use AI art for Fermi, or not make the game at all.”

But it’s another parallel field that offered the most shocking obeisance to AI, just as the year ended. The Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) announced that AI-written stories were eligible for the once (but no longer) prestigious Nebula Awards as long as they disclosed that fact and weren’t “wholly” written by AI. But AI ideas? AI text? 99% written by AI? All A-OK. Members and fans did not take it well. One person may have stated it best by saying, “Are you the Science Fiction Writers of America” or the “LLMs of America.” Apparently the backlash was so extreme that the SFWA decided to reverse things. Within four hours, they’d excluded LLMs from being involved in the writing process at all. A small victory, but it’s shocking that SFWA could have examples such as NanoWriMo in the past (who killed themselves with their own LLM support), and still come out so wrong-headed. And it’s shocking that some of its members are still arguing for their own guillotines, as Chuck Wendig recounts in a strong rebuttal.

Much as with the Diamond debtors’ seizure of consigned products, we don’t know where AI will land legally, but many of us have come to an ethical answer: it’s stealing. Therefore the fact that there are successful publishers saying, “I had to steal the art, or not publish it at all,” is nothing but jaw-dropping. (Because of course the answer in that case is not to publish. But they’re instead readying their coshes and ducking into dark alleys to see what they can acquire.)

The Censorship Complication. Though it’s not quite as existential of a threat to our industry, the continued drumbeat of censorship is an increasing problem for anyone wanting to do anything particularly innovative or different in the form. And I say it’s censorship in the industry, but it’s really censorship via digital gatekeepers, who increasingly hold way too much power for what people get to read in the modern day.

DriveThruRPG got a lot of pushback in the summer for their decision to deplatform Rebel Scum (2021), an indie game about fighting fascism. The censorship apparently happened in 2024, but became more widely known at UK Games Expo 2025. The main issue seemed to be the satirical game’s Introduction, which talked about punching space-Nazis and called them “Republikans.” The publisher, 9th Level Games, was asked to remove the Introduction and demurred. Which led to DriveThruRPG’s censorship. Now DriveThruRPG hasn’t blocked a lot of games; this seems like an exception not a rule. But the disturbing bit was their claim that they censored the game because it contained “overt political agendas or views.” That’s pretty much a definition of art: it carries overt political views.

itch.io’s decision to “deindex” NSFW content is much more problematic. Their deplatforming decisions originated with payment processors, which in many ways makes it worse, because payment platforms are just the servers who run our credit cards; they should not be able to determine what we buy and sell. But itch.io also dramatically overreacted compared to Steam, the other publisher under direct attack by groups trying to impose their Victorian morality on others. And of course the biggest problem is that NSFW bans often blindly scoop up all LGBT content in their censorship sprees, which is discrimination at its worst.

So perhaps that’s the end of the year’s disasters? It’s been a bit hard to say in recent years when talking about the next topic: Wizards of the Coast.

The WotC Corner. The 5.5e Monster Manual (2025) trickled out on February 18, 2025, certainly putting it into D&D’s 51st year, even by Jon Peterson’s updated publication date for D&D, in February rather than January 1974. Mike Mearls, former big D&D dog, suggests that 5.5e might not be doing as well as one might hope, per a chart of USA Today best seller listings he put together, which is reproduced here.

We of course only see bits and pieces of the big picture when we cherry-pick a single set of sales numbers like this, but the core 5.5e books doing worse than a supplement from several years earlier and disappearing more quickly don’t seem like good signs.

The other bad sign for Wizards of the Coast in 2025 was their launch of Sigil, their 3-D virtual tabletop. To be precise they launched in February, laid off 90% of the Sigil staff in March, and then closed Sigil in October. Though this was just the latest in a long line of online failures for Wizards, staff have suggested that the issue here was the fundamental philosophy of short-sighted money-grubbing that has beset Wizards for years. Management didn’t understand the difference between a VTT and a video game, and when they realized Sigil wasn’t going to bring in Baldur’s Gate 3–level money, they abandoned it.

That philosophy likely also underlies the move of Dungeons & Dragons to a franchise model. Except no one really knows what that means. As Chase Carter says at Rascal, the LinkedIn post that announced this change was full of “cynical buzzwords that should have never broken containment within marketing pitch decks.” However, everyone who isn’t thrilled with Wizards trying to extract every penny from Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson’s game (and our game) seems to think it’s bad. To again quote Carter: “In the age of IP ascendance its a promise to shareholders that a creative work can be strapped to a money-milking machine and squeezed until the skin chafes.”

Wizards did do some good stuff in 2025, and it wasn’t just not trying to destroy the industry and not setting the Pinkertons on their fans.

• They released the D&D 5.2 SRD, verifying that they’re not going to try and silo 5.5e.

OK, that might be it.

The Coming of the D&D Replacements. Wizards of the Coast’s bad corporate decisions of recent years continue to bear fruit. In 2025, that meant the release of both Daggerheart (2025) and Draw Steel (2025) as potential D&D replacements. Now a lot of the anti-WotC sentiment has subsided since they tried to withdraw the OGL in 2023. Nonetheless, these games, which blossomed from that decision, seem to be getting notable attention, even if it’s questionable whether they’ll be able to compete with Pathfinder (let alone D&D itself).

Following the releases, a lot of attention was focused on Daggerheart, in large part because of the tremendous reach of the Critical Role campaigns. So it was perhaps a disappointment when Critical Role announced that they’d be using D&D for the main Critical Role season 4 campaign.

Except a series of events have suggested there’s more to it than that:

• Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford left Wizards in April.
• Perkins and Crawford joined Critical Role’s Darrington Press as Creative Director and Game Director in June.
• The long-running liveplay Acquisitions Inc. announced they were moving to Daggerheart in December. Acquisitions Inc. was one of the first D&D podcasts, founded by none other than Perkins.

So even if Critical Role may not be leading the way with Daggerheart, they have set it up for success with one of their fellow podcasts. We’ll have to check in in another year to see how it (and Draw Steel and the rest) has done.

The OSR Corner. Despite all the tribulations (and they certainly added up in 2025!), it’s wonderful that the industry is now doing well enough that it can support multiple subcategories of design. 15 years on from its foundational publications, the OSR is definitely one of them.

• A new third edition of OSRIC, raising over $200,000 on BackerKit, demonstrated that the OSR hasn’t forgotten its retrocloned roots.
• But it’s also looking at new old-school designs. The successful release of Dolmenwood (2025) demonstrated the increased interest in modern takes on retrocloned designs while Rebellion’s reinvention of Tunnels & Trolls in “A New Age” shows that totally new games can (hopefully) support old-school play.

However, the big OSR news of 2025 might have been the crowdfunding of new Castle Zagyg levels, something we’ve been waiting 17 years for, since Gygax’s death in 2008! (That one brought in $600,000!).

Do we include Toon second edition in the list of OSR successes? It’s hard to know where to draw the line, but with its original publication in 1984, Toon is four times nearer to the start of the industry than to the modern day. The updated RPG is still in the gathering-signups stage of crowdfunding, but the thousands who have already signed up suggest it’s going to be a hit.

The OSR side of the industry did also have one major controversy this year: Goodman Games’ decision to incorporate Judges Guild’s classic City-State of the Invincible Overlord into their Original Adventures Reincarnated series. The problem is that the current owners of Judges Guild (the son and grandson of co-founder Bob Bledsaw) are unrepentant bigots: homophobes and antisemites. So there are people that don’t want any money flowing to them. Joseph Goodman came up with a compromise: using what would be royalties to Judges Guild to pay back backers of Judges Guild’s failed kickstarter for the same property. But that compromise ultimately didn’t seem to make anyone happy. Nonetheless, Goodman Games’ crowdfunding for the new release brought in about $600,000 … but we can no longer use Kickstarter numbers as the sole mark of success given that FyrxGames and RiotMinds have been held successful kickstarters for AI-laden gaming products.

The Indie Corner. Indie RPGs are of course the other category of gaming that originated in the ’00s and has found increasing success in the ’10s and ’20s. One real sign that a new generation has come is the updating of the classic Apocalypse World (2010) RPG in a third edition, with the “Burned Over” Kickstarter running between the Thanksgiving and Christmas. Another sign of indie influence (and in particular Apocalypse World) influence was the update a few months earlier of the Tribe 8 RPG (1998) to the Forged in the Dark system as “Tribes in the Dark”. That Kickstarter was for just $10,000, but the story of a classic RPG being updated to an indie system, much as with KULT: Divinity Lost (2018) some years earlier, spoke volumes.

The Problem with Periodicals. Periodicals seemed to have died out at the turn of the century. They’d always been a tough category because they take just as much work as roleplaying supplements but have to be sold for much less due to expectations born of newsstands sales that aren’t actually relevant to the RPG field. The internet made their production even tougher. But nonetheless they came back in the 21st century in large part thanks to interest in the OSR.

But 2025 was another tough year for them. The two leading magazines of the modern-day, Pathfinder Adventure Path (2007-Present) and Knights of the Dinner Table Magazine (1990-Present) each stepped back from their monthly publication. Pathfinder AP moved to quarterly 256-page publication and Knights of the Dinner Table dropped back to a “bimonthly, double-sized graphic novel format.”

But the interest is clearly there for periodicals, even if the economics are often hard. The Crusader Journal returned with #28 (2025) and Fight On! returned with #15 (2024), both after long absences. In addition the industry continues to enjoy some of the best magazines ever, such as the gorgeous Knock! (2021-Present) and the thoughtful industry spanning Wyrd Science (2021-Present).

I certainly feel better about periodicals as a real subcategory of roleplaying now than I did in the ’10s!

The Kickstarter Charts. At last, the crowd-funding for the year! Here’s the roleplaying Kicsktarters that broke a meeelion dollars.

That more-than-a-million listing is shorter than it has been in recent years, but it’s still great to see games so high-flying (especially a second major success for Kelsey Dionne and Shadowdark, offering another data-point for modern-day OSR success).

The Backerkick Expansion. Those missing million-dollar listings were over on Backerkit, which is increasingly becoming the go-to crowdfunder for the roleplaying field. (My own Designers & Dragons: Origins was there, bringing in a quarter of a million dollars, more than double my last volumes.)

Before this year, just two Backerkit projects broke the million-dollar mark, but three more jumped on this year (with the last still accumulating cash as of today).

That brings us up to seven million-dollar crowdfundings for the year, which is more what we’ve been seeing lately (just to Kickstarter’s deficit).

Backerkit also offered up the last interesting bit of news for the year: in later 2024, they experimented with “Mothership Month”, where a number of publishers all simultaneously crowdfunded releases for the Mothership RPG (2024), creating a nexus of interest that helped to highlight smaller publishers. It was apparently successful because they followed up a second Mothership Month and with Mausritter Month in 2025 and have also announced Old-School Essentials Month for 2026. This “collab-funding” is a great new expansion of crowdfunding, and I hope it’ll help RPGs grow even more!

(Because we’ve certainly got our dragons out there in the field right now!)