It’s time for independent tabletop role-playing games to get loud

Dungeons & Dragons has long been seen as the Kleenex of tabletop role-playing games, a brand that looms so large that it seems to blot out the sun and steal the limelight from other, similar games. And yet the D&D brand is currently on the back foot, unstable for the first time in a decade. The recent renewal of the rules has already delivered excellent results Player’s Handbook (2024) and the Dungeon Master’s Guide (2024), but the industry titan feels very much between phases – on the cusp of something new, but still not fully realized.

There are also worrying signs of decline. Despite the sheer precision of that snazzy new PHB, on a cool morning when the wind is just right, you can’t help but smell the delight of the beloved role-playing game drifting in on the wind while the many side projects seemingly wither on the vine .

How did it come to this? First, there were wizards who botched the run-up to the major rules renewal. That gave the company a black eye. The OGL debacle made matters worse by sowing a genuine seed of doubt in the minds of consumers. Suddenly, fans were wondering if Hasbro really had their best interests at heart. But the real damage came when Hasbro laid off about a fifth of the larger company. While we don’t really know how that has affected Wizards headcount, it’s clear from the 2025 schedule that the pace of releases is off. There aren’t as many books coming out this year as I expected.

That’s not all. Project Sigil, the highly anticipated Unreal Engine-powered virtual tabletop, hasn’t been seen much in public since August, when it was repeatedly overheard on stage during an Aabria Iyengar game. Later, at one live event in London with a similar format it was not shown at all. Now comes a new marketing push for a simpler, flatter, web-based solution called Maps.

The announcement of new campaigns and adventures has also been significantly delayed. After the revised Monster manual (2025) in February, fans may have to wait until the summer for new playable adventures set in the Forgotten Realms. And when these do arrive, they may not constitute a full campaign. Additionally, fans will get an untitled dragon anthology of unconnected adventures by the summer, and a new starter set by the fall. That’s apparently it for playable content for the world’s most popular role-playing game.

There is no Curse of Strahd on the horizon in 2025. No Wild beyond the witch’s light or Rime of the Frost Maiden. No Descent to Avernus. There isn’t even one Dragon raid to look forward to. Just a “Forgotten Realms Player Guide” and a “Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide,” two products that I expect will double down on what has become a staid, largely generic, vaguely medieval fantasy world.

And while Hasbro’s elder dragon may be injured, independent artists around the world are busy creating their own dangerous creatures. Indie TTRPG creators of all sizes should see this as an opportunity to get loud, make a little more noise, and go out of their way to draw more attention to themselves and the new and exciting worlds they’ve created. But how?

Only together can the dozens and dozens of small fandoms hope to rise above the din, especially once the dragon begins to roar again. Fortunately, I already see collaboration and community building happening there. As alternative social media platforms like Bluesky begin to flourish, each becomes new starter pack of designers helps the entire fandom find its footing. But with potential rates looming on the horizon, coming together for bigger swings should be an industry-wide priority.

Perhaps the most exciting bit of collaboration I’ve seen took place last October. That is the modestly successful team of Tuesday Knight Games, makers of the hit game Mothershipgathered individuals and smaller design groups for their banner for Mothership Month. It’s an example of what BackerKit calls “collaborative funding,” but it has its roots in things like Zine Quest, which builds on the existing indie design space. This particular effort involved 21 different teams, all creating content inspired by the larger, previously successful Mothership brand. By the end of the month-long campaign, these designers collectively earned just over $1 million – a princely sum for any small game on a crowdfunding platform, but an especially high sum for a group of indie TTRPG designers.

Reached for comment, BackerKit provided Polygon with some additional clarity detailing how successful the project was. Not only were all the campaigns involved in the collaborative financing project successful, in the sense that they made enough money to be considered financing complete, but the financing actions were also relatively lucrative. BackerKit said that nearly 1 in 5 creators involved ultimately achieved the highest-grossing BackerKit campaign of all time. Having a critical mass of fans show up also had additional effects. BackerKit’s data shows that 45% of donors who made donations pledged to more than one project, and 30% of donors contributed to more than five projects.

But Mothership Week was the most successful in raising awareness of the franchise. Prior to that collaborative funding campaign, the Tuesday Knight Games Discord server only had about 10,000 total members. By the end of the project, more than 23,000 people had pledged. Together, these developers have essentially doubled the number of people who are now literally invested in their success – and likely brought many of them into their own private online communities on Discord as well.

The final piece of advice I can give to indie TTRPG creators comes from my own experience in media. Ask yourself: WHO is your audience and what is your audience watching? for? Where is that what they are looking for, and how can you give them the best more of it? And what does success look like? Betting on the answers to these questions will likely make or break many smaller teams in the coming years. The coming year presents a huge opportunity to anticipate what appears to be a fundamental transition in the internet landscape search traffic.

Above all, I think it’s imperative that indie designers realize that their window is closing quickly. Instead of sitting in their own little corners of the internet and wringing their hands, creatives who want to thrive in the TTRPG space need to come together and fight for the recognition they deserve. The dragon is down for now, but it won’t be at rest forever. Only by building a solid party, filled with individual contributors each possessing powerful skills, can they hope to one day face that dragon – or at least earn a place in the lair next to them.