Delvebound 2023 Wrap Up

2023 has been a fun year—but not a heck of a whole lot happened. At least, not a lot of publishing. A lot of things have been happening behind the scenes, but overall, it was a pretty slow year for Delvebound.

OGL Crisis

At the beginning of 2023, right away in January, we all experienced the OGL Crisis. If you’re not familiar with this, then 2023 probably seemed pretty normal, but maybe a bit slow all around. In January, Wizards of the Coast (WotC) wanted to rescind and replace the original Open Game License (OGL). The proposed changes made it so that many 3rd party publishers would be hurt, and that the larger publishers would likely not be able to exist. They revised the revised OGL again a week later, and by the end of January, WotC released the entirety of the v5.1 SRD under a Creative Commons license. We haven’t heard much about any of this since, so it seems like things are in the clear, at least for now. We’ll see how this is updated when the Revised 2024 D&D rules are released.

When all of this happened, it pushed a lot of people away from D&D. There was a boycott, a lot of creators put a pause on their work, and some completely switched to other systems or creating their own systems. All-in-all, 2023 was a fantastic year for TTRPGs as a whole. I’ve seen some of my favorite games get a lot of new support, and I’m really looking forward to a few new systems that came out in late 2023 and in the coming year.

Delvebound Progress

All of that really did put a damper on the 5e creations out of Delvebound. I, personally, stopped creating anything 5e related for several months. We had a very active Delvebound developer leave part way through the year, which made a significant halt on works. There were also a few developers putting a heavy focus on their education, which is a much better use of time. (Congratulations for all your hard work!) With all of that, by the end of the year, we didn’t fully publish anything for the first time since the project began.

That doesn’t mean we weren’t doing anything around here. We have a lot of in-progress stuff, a lot of which we’ve been able to show off by the end of the year. Updates to the Delvebound Basic Rules, the ongoing Anthropology Companion, and a spell book expansion, currently being previewed in the Mages Guild Mailers. We’ve made some unreleased revisions to the Sorcerer, some improvements to the Barbarian and Bard, and are looking at an exciting rework of the Spellsword. These changes are intended to make significant improvements to the base game to give a solid foundation to everything.

Wiki Updates

We also saw a few good updates happen on the wiki. (If you haven't stumbled across this yet, it is an amazing resource for your games).

The creature stat blocks that were intended to be released as part of Legionnaire’s Guide to Cyrodiil 2 have been added to the wiki, which includes 99 new common creatures found in the Elder Scrolls series. We also have all of the Shadows Over Skyrim creatures, and a handful of exclusives that don’t appear in any of the books. With all of this, we now have 390 stat blocks available for use in your games. Incredible!
The Heritage system has been included on the wiki now, along with the legacy content for Basic Rules 1.4 races, if that is the style you prefer / are currently using.

Delvebound 2024

This year, we had a few new people join up as developers for the project, which are doing some pretty cool things and are making some important improvements. In the early days of this project, everything was hastily thrown together to get a home game started. I was able to put a lot more thought into my later works, but I was still limited to being a single person. The best work comes when a group of people come together with the intention of making something cool. From LGtC onward, things have been getting better and better, and I think we have a great group of good people doing great work.

I don’t know what's in store for 2024, but I do know that we have some cool things that we want to show off!

—Teluusa, on behalf of the Delvebound Team

And to end it off, here are some games I'm looking forward to playing this year / in the future: