Russ “Morrus” Morrissey

Now there's a third one.

So Comic Book News used to quite robustly cover D&D and a bit of other RPG stuff. They have been laying off a lot of their journalists, a lot of whom are posting on Twitter saying, hey, I am unemployed and looking for work.

And it looks like the Comic Book News is no longer going to be covering tabletop gaming news either. So that's the third one in under a year. Major outlet where tabletop gaming news could be found. They're going down like dominoes. And I'm not 100% sure why. Well, has Ian World...

But we're a very different model. They make their money off of that. We don't make our money off that. But my suspicion is because two of those were due to buyouts. So Dicebreaker was part of a much larger buyout. And the people who, the entity that bought the company that owns Dicebreaker, Dicebreaker wasn't the part of it they were interested in. Yeah.

And comic book movies has just been bought by another company. And following that, the tabletop news stuff gets shuttered. So there's kind of a pattern here. Yeah. But I think what it is, is if you're running one of those sites, and this I don't have an insight into because I only cover tabletop RPG news.

If you cover movie news and comic book news and tabletop RPG news on the same site, I imagine you are going to see a massive, massive difference in viewer figures for those three topics.

Massive difference, like an order of magnitude difference. Yeah, at least. And a new owner would look at that and go, why are we spending these resources writing these articles which get one-tenth of the views that these other articles do? Can we please just write those other ones from now on? Thanks. I think that is probably what is going on, at my guess.

On a comic book news, the main D&D correspondent was Christian Hoffer.

who coincidentally, I'm not saying it's connected in any way whatsoever, but coincidentally has written two articles for Ian Rod this week, as it happens.

What are the chances? What are the chances? Sorry. Anyway, and that is it. That's the news. I think we're done. Yes.

Yes, let's go and talk to Rich Luscaflair back in time about Phantasy Star.

So we have a special guest with us here this week, Rich Lescouver from Skydawn Games, who's here to tell us all about the upcoming Phantasy Star. That's Phantasy with a PH, Star, tabletop RPG, based on, I believe, a video game. Am I correct?

Yeah.

You know me and my relationship with video games is not a strong one.

What's the actual game about? It is very sci-fantasy. The original game was very like, you know,

Yeah. So how did you end up getting the license to produce the official tabletop RPG? I assume you contacted Sega? Who owns it?

Always wanted to go there. Yeah. Yeah. So it's going to be powered by your Esper Genesis game.

Which in turn is 5e powered itself. Is that correct?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I remember you came on like two years ago. Three years? It was a while ago. Maybe three or four years ago. Before we were doing Level Up Press, it was quite some time. Sorry. Yeah, but you came on to talk about Espigenesis then, and we can probably put a link in the show notes if anyone wants to go and listen to that episode again and sort of get a recap on Espigenesis itself.

But do you want to just give us a really, really quick