So what do we think about the Geekify email announcing the death of the Neopets ttrpg
I'm genuinely surprised that Neopia gave sufficient fucks to pull the plug. There are a lot of officially licensed tabletop RPGs that make an absolute shitshow of the properties they're ostensibly based on and make it to print without a peep of protest from the licensor, some of them involving franchises with much bigger bottom lines than this one, and fucking Neopets is the one that does their due diligence? Really? Really?
I am legit afraid to ask what happened.
TL/DR; version: an outfit called Geekify had been contracted to produce a licensed tabletop RPG based on Neopets. Some weeks ago, they released a public preview of the forthcoming game which featured:
a strange preoccupation with sword-and-sorcery violence that looked a lot like someone had simply slapped the Neopets license on top of their homebrew Dungeons & Dragons clone rather than building something to suit the subject matter;
a discussion of player safety tools which seemed to have been copied and pasted from a totally unrelated game, and which (among other things) advised GMs to discuss with their group exactly how much explicit sexual violence was acceptable at their table; and
several sections which appeared to have been deleted entirely and replaced with written allegations that the contracted author(s) had not been paid for their work, and the project's alleged editor didn't notice before putting the preview up, I guess?
And to top it all off, it's now sounding like Neopia might not have authorised a public preview in the first place, so not a great showing all around.
