MCDM Productions has confirmed that it is ending its ARCADIA magazine in July, ending a two and a half year run of fantastic articles providing resources for Dungeons & Dragons 5E. The announcement came in a lengthy post to supporters on Patreon yesterday, in which MCDM talked about its plans in the wake of a rumored more restrictive Open Gaming License. “For now, and for at least a few months, nothing’s changing!” MCDM wrote. “We got tons of cool 5E articles and art in the pike and we’re excited about all of it. We have content already in development all the way out to July. The flip side of this is; July will be the last batch of 5E-specific articles. The new license just doesn’t make sense for us.”
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The Open Gaming License (or OGL) has long been used by publishers as the framework for publishing Dungeons & Dragons compatible material, but Wizards has announced plans to release a new version that “de-authorizes” previous versions, establishes a royalty structure, and adds language about usage rights that many creators find to be unpalatable. MCDM would be one of the publishers impacted by the OGL’s new royalty structure, and is one of several publishers to announce plans to move forward with its own game system this week.
In the post, MCDM noted that it had been tossing around ideas for a new game system for months and that the new game system would probably formally enter the development stage later this year even had a new OGL not been announced. “Honestly I have no idea what the next big project was going to be after Flee, Mortals! and I suspect this year was going to be the year we started working full-time on our own game anyway,” MCDM wrote. “The Seattle Company [Wizards of the Coast] just made that decision a lot easier.”
MCDM Productions was founded by Matt Colville, a game designer who has worked on both tabletop RPGs and video games. Colville’s Running the Game video series became incredibly popular on YouTube, leading to him establishing MCDM Productions and making several popular books that added additional rules for 5E campaigns.
