At Wyrmworks Publishing, our mission is to help you make lives better through tabletop roleplaying games. That mission inherently depends on you — we can’t do this ourselves. We — our team, our patrons, and our subscribers — the Dragon’s Hoard — worked together as a party of thousands of heroes to make lives better last year.

Here’s what we did together in a year (in roughly chronological order):

Changing the TTRPG Industry

We were the only public voice speaking to the effect of the OGL debacle on accessibility (that I could find, and I looked). In the short time Hasbro posted its final OGL survey, that page got 27,000 visitors. I hope that some of the readers who subsequently filled out the survey form, including the hundreds who clicked through to the survey from that page, included those accessibility insights in their responses. And I hope that it in some small way added to the influence of so many others who fought for our community. More than that, I hope that it raised representation and accessibility awareness at Hasbro for future designs across their product lines. We’ll never know whether they heard us, but we’ll keep talking about it regardless.

I was asked to design a character for Azrael’s Guide to the Apocalypse, the sequel to The Adventurer’s Guide to the Bible. They included this sidebar with my character, Rodney Watts, and another disabled character who was also included:

Disability in the Afterlife
In 1 Corinthians 15:42-49, Paul briefly ponders what bodies will look like when we awaken in the spiritual realm, saying “there are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one thing, and that of the earthly is another.” Basically, no one knows what our bodies will look like in the world to come, but it is reasonable to assume they will be an “idealized version of ourselves,” whatever that means to the individual. For many people, this likely means an end to their physical and mental disabilities.
However, our minds and bodies have a way of shaping our identity – our sense of who we are. For example, one person may feel that their reliance on a prosthetic is a hindrance, another person may feel that their prosthetic is an extension of their own body, and an integral part of their physical identity. As a result, the diversity of human bodies in the afterlife is likely to be diverse as it is in the Physical Realm, with some people choosing to be freed from aspects of their physical form that they did not like, and others choosing to embrace their disability as an eternal part of who they are. This is why some people (like Rodney or Rodriguez) may appear in this adventure with a disability, even though they have already entered the afterlife.

– Heroes of the Heavenly Host, p. 41

We worked with DriveThruRPG to add “Ableist” to their CCP non-discrimination template, and seven companies followed that suggestion in their agreements so far besides the one who already had.

Limitless Champions: Making Disabled Fantasy Heroes a Physical Reality

We crowdfunded Limitless Champions. We created the largest, most diverse collection of disabled fantasy minis ever made. Like stock art, very few miniatures include disability representation, and those available are mostly limited to representation through wheelchairs and canes. We expanded that range significantly, including miniatures and printable STL files, cards, accessible condition markers, and more. If you missed the campaign, you can find the collection in our shop.

In 2024, we will crowdfund Limitless Champions Adventures, a collection of adventures featuring these NPCs. To supplement those adventures, we created Limitless Champions Adventures Bonus Encounters with STLs and animated maps. They were each available free for a week or more, and they’re currently available through our Patreon.

Interviews

I love meeting the amazing people using TTRPGs to make lives better on our Gaining Advantage show. (We posted 11 episodes last year.) I also had the honor of being interviewed last year (including here a few from late 2022):

• Accessible Games
• ADHD20
• Alexandria RPG (October 2022)
• ComicBook.com
• Disabled & Dragons
• Everyone-Games Gaming and Mental Health Panel
• Invisible Not Broken
• Randomworlds
• Red Panda Publishing
• Tufts University Tabletop Club & neurodiverse students (October 2022)
• Wired.com

Community Copies

We want to make our resources available to everyone, but poverty prevents a lot of people from accessing many TTRPG resources. So to allow us to both pay our team and make our content as available as possible, we include full previews of our content on the product pages in our store. But that preview isn’t accessible or convenient for many people, so we also partner with you to make Community Copies of some of our products available. Thanks to individual Community Copy purchases, crowdfunding add-ons, and Patreon rewards, you helped us make the following free copies available:

• Limitless Heroics Coloring Book: 250
• Limitless Heroics, Full Edition: 110
• Limitless Heroics, Players Edition: 1
• Total: $5,678

We still have plenty of copies available, so go get one or more of them if you’d benefit, and please share that link with anyone else who needs one.

Specific Awareness

We released the Heart of Ice adventure for Congenital Heart Defect Awareness Week.

And for Porphyria Awareness Week, we produced a new magic item shop and raised $390 for the American Porphyria Foundation.

The Dragon’s Lair

We launched the Dragon’s Lair, a modular database of all of our publications, maps, and lots of exclusive content. It is the most affordable, accessible way to use our content. As of this writing, it has 1,704 entries.

We also launched the Wyrm’s Workshop, an opportunity for you to get your ideas published in our books! This also gave us the opportunity to hire more disabled, neurodivergent, and mentally ill freelancers. And because it costs money to pay those freelancers fairly, we developed a credits system via our Patreon to enable those without the financial means to contribute their ideas to the Wyrm’s Workshop.

Fighting for Online Accessibility

We participated in the Reddit blackout to protest for improved accessibility and helped spread the word about their discriminatory policies. When they didn’t back down, we launched an alternative to r/disabled_dungeons.

#AccessPunk

We created a new literary genre, accesspunk, with the development of the Andovir campaign world, currently in its early stages and available to patrons. Andovir was selected among 70 out of over 600 entries for Kobold Press’s Labyrinth. We created two new languages (the first of many) for Andovir to model improved cultural accessibility in a campaign world.

And we emailed 49 notes of encouragement to the Dragon’s Hoard. (A big thanks to those of you who expressed your appreciation for the encouragement. That becomes ammunition to fight my inner critic.)

I’ve also had conversations with other publishers and content creators almost every day about accessibility and representation in their products.

What’s coming in 2024?

Here’s a sampling of what we’re already working on

• We have at least two, hopefully three Kickstarters coming in 2024. The first two are currently in the playtesting and editing stages:

  • Ready-to-Roll: Last minute, no prep adventures: The first in a series, get the full digital adventure for just $1! Get notified when the project launches!
  • Limitless Champions Adventures: A collection of adventures featuring the characters from Limitless Champions! Get notified when the project launches!

• Expanding Andovir and explaining accesspunk in more detail
• Adding audio to existing and forthcoming projects
• VTT Adaptations (Foundry and Roll20 conversions of Limitless Heroics are nearly complete and in the bug-fixing stage), others are in the works
• Braille adaptations
• Making our products available free in Bookshare, a global library of accessible books

We have more plans in the works, which we share with our patrons.

How can you support this work?

• Sign up for the Dragon’s Hoard weekly emails. Get weekly updates, free gifts, discounts, opportunities to make a difference, and encouragement.
• Support us via Patreon. We get a chance to know each other better, you get access to all of our work, and we give away more Community Copies!
• Rate our products (and write reviews) on DriveThruRPG, your favorite podcast directory (Apple, Google, etc.), and our store.
• Rate our company on Google and Facebook.
• Leave a comment below or on any of our products or posts.
• Send us a note to share how our work has made a difference to you or people you care about.

Finally, a heartfelt thank-you. When we started this, we wondered whether anyone would agree with our intentions and resonate with our work. We wondered whether this ridiculous idea of changing the world by rolling dice and pretending together could change lives and make the world better. Hundreds of people told me it wouldn’t work, and that I should quit before I started.

And the truth is, it couldn’t. Not without you. But here you are. And here’s how far we’ve come. And we’re just getting started. And we’re not going to stop.

Here at Wyrmworks Publishing, we don’t want the corner on inclusion and accessibility. We want these concepts to become so ubiquitous in the TTRPG industry that our work becomes redundant, at which point, we’ll turn our focus to one of the other countless struggles in our society that keep people from knowing how loved and valued they are.

We have a long way to go, but we’re making steps in the right direction.

In May 2023, I emailed DriveThruRPG to add “ableism” to the nondiscrimination template for their Content Guidelines for Community Content Programs.

What are Community Content Programs?

A Community Content Program (CCP) allows third-party creators (like us) to create supplemental content for existing TTRPGs, like adventures, character expansions, and more, making more resources available for that game without breaking copyright and trademark laws. They often include artwork, style guides, and other resources to help creators make their publications capture the feel of the core game. DMs Guild, which allows the use of Dungeons & Dragons IP, is the most popular, but DriveThruRPG partners with about three dozen other companies to offer similar programs for other games.

So what’s up with the Content Guidelines?

When a publisher sets up a CCP with DriveThruRPG, they include Content Guidelines that tell creators what they can and can’t do with the game content. DriveThruRPG provides new CCP partners with a sample Content Guidelines template, which the partner can use as much or little as they want. Those guidelines usually include a nondiscrimination clause, and many use DriveThruRPG’s template for this as well:

Neither your products nor any promotional material, including blog/social media posts or press releases, may contain racist, homophobic, discriminatory, or other repugnant views; overt political agendas or views; depictions or descriptions of criminal violence against children; rape or other acts of criminal perversion; or other obscene material. We reserve the right to remove any materials that we determine do not conform to our guidelines for this program.

Nobody wants their game to be used to promote nazis. (OK, nobody that DriveThruRPG would be willing to partner with.)

In May 2023, I looked through the guidelines for all of the CCPs, and I noticed that only one company, Onyx Path Publishing, included a reference to specific ableism in their guidelines.

I contacted DriveThruRPG:

Given that the template words it, “racist, homophobic, discriminatory, or other repugnant views,” after checking every agreement, I found that only Onyx Path’s specifically mentions “ableist.” I note it especially since ableism is so widely accepted in our culture, unlike most other forms of discrimination, and while it’s certainly covered under, “discriminatory” and “repugnant” in my view, not everyone would agree, especially in the TTRPG space, but I’d like to suggest that you consider clarifying and adding “ableist” to that clause in the template for future CCPs and possibly suggest it for current ones.

A mere ninety minutes later, they replied to let me know that they were changing the template and contacting all CCP partners with the suggestion and would update any change requests immediately. (Again, each CCP decides on their own guidelines wording, so this change is 100% optional.) Considering that this is a change to legal documentation, these are weighty decisions, so I was astonished at the speed of the response!

So like Teos Abadía’s recent article about changes in D&D Beyond’s content, this is old news that you didn’t know about. I waited to write this to allow time for companies to make changes so we could celebrate as many as possible.

What changed?

As of this writing six months later, the following CCPs now specifically forbid ableist content (Remember that Onyx Path Publishing included it already):

• Canis Minor by Onyx Path Publishing (Pugmire or Monarchies of Mau)
• Storypath Nexus by Onyx Path Publishing (Storypath)
• Hero Kids Creator’s Guild by Hero Forge Games (Hero Kids & Super Kids)
• Tiny Trove by Gallant Knight Games (Tiny Dungeon: Second Edition, Tiny Frontiers: Revised, Tiny Wastelands, Tiny Frontiers: Mecha & Monsters, Tiny Cthulhu, Beach Patrol, Tiny Gunslingers, Tiny Living Dead, Tiny Pirates)
• Chronicle System Guild by Green Ronin Publishing (Sword Chronicle)
• Coyote and Crow Fireside by Coyote & Crow LLC (Coyote & Crow)
• Starforger’s Guild by Alligator Alley Entertainment (Esper Genesis)
• 2d20 World Builders by Modiphius Entertainment (Achtung! Cthulhu & Titanic Triumph)
• Entromancy Cryptographers Guild by (Entromancy: A Cyberpunk Fantasy RPG and Entromancy: Hacker Battles)

I have every expectation that the rest consider their existing “other repugnant views” umbrella clause sufficient. If someone reported CCP content to them that discriminated against people based on ability, they would respond accordingly. Some CCP partners not listed here have personally assured me of this.

If you are a CCP owner and change your agreement, let me know, and I’ll be thrilled to add you to the list!

Why is this important?

While our culture has taken great strides to reduce discrimination against marginalized demographics over the past several decades, it’s a slow process. In every case, we still have a long way to go. However, ableism remains the most widely accepted form of discrimination.

To use a mainstream example, we recently watched the Peacock TV show, Baking It, and in the Season 1 Finale, the hosts, Andy Samberg and Maya Rudolph, did a bit called, “Nut Roast,” a parody of celebrity roasts. Here’s an excerpt:

Hey, look who it is, it’s walnut. Hey, walnut, you lumpy son of a nut, you’re the Elephant Man of the nuts. “I am not a good snack!”…

Uh-oh, it’s peanut…Look at him, he’s just sitting there. Somebody get him an epi-pen, I think he’s in shock!

Baking It, s01,e06

In December 2021, they mocked people with facial differences and with life-threatening allergies in rapid succession. My family cringed, and I searched online for an apology by NBC or anyone from the cast or crew. Nothing. I searched for blog posts or news articles about the obvious ableist jokes. Nothing. Not even a Reddit post or tweet. In two years, nobody on earth with Internet access even noticed and cared enough to mention it until this post. And this is just one example.

We have a long way to go. We’re counting on the gaming community to roll initiative with us. And we deeply appreciate DriveThruRPG and the eight TTRPG producers who quietly but publicly entered this particular fray. They deserve recognition for leading the industry along with many others who have helped raise awareness through other efforts.

Has this changed the TTRPG industry?

Has this changed the content made available via these CCPs? I hope not. I hope that all of those who create CCP content already consciously avoided ableist content. I have friends who create CCP content, and I know that they don’t need a clause in a legal agreement to make sure their products are welcoming and inclusive to all people. I expect that those who changed their agreements did so because they already found ableism repugnant and would not want their brand associated with it.

But I also hope that the inclusion of one extra word causes everyone who sees it to experience a subtle influence. Maybe they subconsciously tweak the language in their projects to avoid microaggressions. Maybe they consider adding a disabled character and discussing it with someone whose lived experience is represented by that character. I regularly encounter compassionate people who don’t realize ableism exists. Sometimes simply learning the word makes them more sensitive to it when they encounter it.

Finally, thank you to our Patrons and everyone who supports our work and raises a sword with us or other TTRPG parties to welcome everyone to the table. Rule systems don’t make this hobby great — you do.