It's pretty amazing to watch Hasbro completely destroy their TTRPG bread and butter by attempting to revoke the existing Open Gaming License v1.0.
I think I get how such a thing happens! The head of the Wizards of the Coast division has states that she thinks the Dungeons and Dragons brand is under-monetized, and that's probably true. For the mindshare DnD occupies in a world dominated by _Stranger Things_, DnD should probably be bringing in much more money than it is. But this ain't the way, chief. There is so much history here, and Hasbro seems intent on grasping ever more tightly to everything they can, which is causing it all to slip through their metaphorical fingers.
The biggest trigger seems to be a clause that, as written, makes any and all third-party content the property of Hasbro. If you create content under the new license, they can take your content and sub-license it to someone else without any compensation to you. Which is obviously completely unacceptable! But I can see how it ended up that way!
Lawyers are paid to think of worst-case scenarios, and one of those is undoubtedly that Hasbro spend time developing a new title, and upon publishing it, some indie publishers speaks up and says hey, that sword you've got in your new title, I developed that sword! And maybe nobody from Hasbro has ever even heard of the indie publisher, but they've got the receipts to show they published months before Hasbro did, and so Hasbro ends up defending themselves in court and possibly losing, and it's a mess. So they say, quite reasonably: look, if you develop a thing, and we develop a thing, and they happen to be similar, that's just life, okay? And being lawyers, they can't just leave it like that, so they spell it out in great detail: if you develop a thing, and they develop a similar thing, that's okay, because they have a perpetual license to do so. And in fact, if they're working with a third party, you can't sneakily sue *them* either, because they can sub-license as needed. And I'm reasonably sure that was the entire point of that clause, that it was intended to be defensive only.
But the law isn't entirely based solely on intent, and the letter of the license is atrocious. Maybe the person in charge today would only use it defensively, but it was written to be very offensive.
And revoking the previous license? I suspect they're just assuming nobody is going to want to fight them in court. They're Hasbro! They've got lawyers for days! But you don't have to be a lawyer to know you shouldn't be able to declare a license null and void because you feel like it. If there wasn't a termination clause in the license, that's it.
So Hasbro, in an attempt to better monetize the D&D brand, has made the D&D brand toxic for all third-arty developers and many dungeon masters.
It's not like there aren't other systems out there! Some of them are themselves relying on the Open Gaming License 1.0, but they soon won't be. Some of them are completely different and unrelated systems already.
Not many people are going to be want to create anything new for a company that tries to change the rules after the cards have already been dealt. It's a scrambled metaphor, but it's a julienned situation.
Me, I'll stick with horror and panic with Mothership. You could definitely run Mothership in a dungeon.
