Today I am delighted to announce the release of Running on Empty as a book available on Amazon in softcover and Kindle format. The book edition features all-new tables and charts, updates reflecting recent events, and a foreword by my friend Gary Brode, from Deep Knowledge Investing. If you’ve enjoyed my writing on the blog, I hope you’ll grab a copy of Running on Empty for yourself or friends interested in geopolitics and economics.
In other news… This week has found me embroiled in perhaps the most dramatic legal situation that I have encountered in my career. For the last 12 years, my company Autarch has published my game Adventurer Conqueror King System under the terms of Wizards of the Coast’s Open Game License (OGL) 1.0. For the last 5 years, ACKS has been my full-time job. Substack doesn’t pay my bills, not yet anyway — writing elf games does!
The OGL has permitted me and many, many others, to participate in the ecosystem of Dungeons & Dragons. Now, Wizards of the Coast, in what I can only describe as an act of perfidious treachery, has decided to retroactively deauthorize the OGL 1.0 and offer up a new Open Game License 1.1 to replace it. I have written in detail about this perfidious treachery on my other substack, Arbiter of Worlds, detailing the impact on my business and the steps I now have to take. It’s been a long week re-writing and editing and purging material. Accordingly, I have postponed part II of The Seven Walls of Fortress America for now.
The de-authorization of the OGL 1.0 has endangered most of the income I rely on day-to-day, so allow me to say thank you to the premium subscribers whose woeful contributions have helped to soften that blow. I am very grateful for your readership.
I read that piece the other day, but didn't realize it was by you. What Wizards of the Woke did was unconscionable. It's also self-marginalizing. They've essentially told everyone in their ecosystem that there's no point being in their ecosystem anymore. In the medium to long term, they'll be irrelevant.
I for one look forward to when you buy the rights to D&D during Wizards of the Woke's bankruptcy fire sale.
I was wondering if you'd paid any attention to some of Peter Zeihan's work? He did an interview with Joe Rogan recently and broadly agrees that a global economic recession and/or state of war is likely within the next decade or so, but he has a quite different perspective on US oil dependency and the petrodollar due to shale fracking.
I'm sorry to hear about the OGL being revoked- I have to agree it's kind of a dick move, but so long as alternative RPG systems are around I think most publishers will survive.