Bencompetence

a) Never again in your life will you have the chance for this kind of god-tier ninth-level casting of Malicious Compliance

Wizards of the Coast have been notoriously protective of their monster IPs since forever. Just WAY over the top about it. to the point where extremely popular webcomics would use it as joke plot twists.

Recently, Wizards of the Coast tried to change some of their other IP licensing to be WAY more restrictive (it’s really complicated, but basically, they wanted to make it so that if you made up stuff for your own DnD games, they a) were allowed to steal and sell it as much as they want with no attribution or permission needed, and b) they got a share of your profits if you were making lots of money from playing it on your twitch channel/podcast/paid game/etc.) The gaming community,. who have been making up their own patches for DnD stuff since forever, HATED this -- the whole point of DnD is to use the rules to make up your own story! You can play preset campaigns with no extra invented stuff, but that’s not how most people play it, or they’d go and play a computer game instead!

The public outcry was MASSIVE, and Wizards were forced to walk back their changes. At first, they tried to be sneaky about it, changing the language in some stuff, making it so that they’d walked the changes back but they had the legal right to change their minds at any time, stuff like that. But tabletop players analyse and interpret rules looking for fun synergies and loopholes for fun. There’s an entire stereotype of player called the “rules lawyer”, and while the term is often used derogatorily (for those who go overboard and kill the fun), every group benefits from having one or two laid-back rules lawyers on hand to weigh in on unusual situations. Players tore these sneaky changes apart immediately, and were NOT happy.

So it looks like Wizards have given up. Not willing to slaughter their cash cow over this (YET -- this’ll come back and be normalised eventually, just look at how microtransactions became normal in computer games), They’ve just gone, “FINE, you can have permissive licensing!”

Yea! It’s got lesbians. It’s a slow build on the romance aspect due to the individual hangs up of the characters, as well as some eldritch nightmare extra dimension that draws inspiration from folklore, ghost stories and creepypasta

The horror aspect made them perfect to attempt to adapt into Mansions