Goodman Games Addresses City State Controversy – Take Two – WobbleRocket

Yesterday, I posted about Goodman Games’ decision to go ahead with a licensed remake of City State of the Invincible Overlord, despite disgusting bigoted statements made by Judges Guild owner Robert Bledsaw II. Go read yesterday’s post if you’re unfamiliar with the issue, as I’ve tried to lay out a thorough background.

Last night, Goodman Games released a second statement attempting to sooth some of the backlash they’ve received since their announcement of the project. You can read that statement here.

They also released a video statement, which you can watch below. I’d encourage you to read the written statement AND watch the video, as there are important details in both.

Here’s What We Know

There are a lot of good takeaways from these statements, and they address some of the concerns I raised yesterday.

• In the video, Joe Goodman clarified that the contract that resulted in this new City State of the Invincible Overlord project dates to 2008, prior to the reveal of Robert Bledsaw II’s bigoted comments. I suspected that there were some contractual obligations at work, so this does not particularly surprise me.
• Judges Guild and the Bledsaws have had no creative control over the new City State of the Invincible Overlord project — all the work has been done in house by Goodman Games. There is a copyright statement that acknowledges Judges Guild as the rights’ holder. To me, this is a good move.

• As the licensor, Judges Guild is entitled to approximately 10% royalties from this project. Again, not terribly surprising.
• Goodman Games is setting up an escrow account — all royalties that would be paid to Judges Guild from the Backerkit campaign and sales of the new City State of the Invincible Overlord will go into this escrow account, which will be managed by a third party not affiliated with Goodman Games or Judges Guild.

  This seems like a good idea that will help with transparency about how these transactions are happening.

• Goodman Games is taking over the refund process for Judges Guild’s 2014 “Pathfinder edition” Kickstarter that failed to deliver. Robert Bledsaw II confirms this — he updated the 2014 Kickstarter for the first time in five years last night.

  This appears to be the impetus behind this whole project. It still makes no sense to me, but I’ll get into that later.

• Funds in the escrow account will be used to pay for these refunds, dispensed by the third party administrator.
• Goodman Games will offer a single print run of City State of the Invincible Overlord. The size of that print run will be limited to ensure that royalties do not exceed the $85,130 raised in the 2014 Kickstarter. A limited number of PDF copies will only be available through the Backerkit campaign.

  Also seems like a good move. If the intention of this whole project is to refund the backers of the 2014 Kickstarter, capping the profits from the project is a great way to ensure it does that and only that.

What If There Are Funds Left Over?

There is the rare possibility that the final royalties in the escrow account leave an excess. A few factors would have to align for this to happen:

• An unknown number of backers have already been refunded, but it appears to be very few.
• Some of the 965 backers of the 2014 Kickstarter may choose not to request a refund.
• The new campaign would have to be wildly successful.

IF this were to happen, Goodman Games has stated they are contractually obligated to pay the excess to Judges Guild. There’s no way around that without violating their contract.

After a little digging, I believe this is a pretty unlikely hypothetical. For this to happen, Goodman Games estimates the upcoming campaign would need to raise $850,000+.

Curious to see how past campaign performed, I did a little digging. You can look through their past crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter and Backerkit.

Most of their most successful crowdfunding campaigns have raised between $200,000 and $350,000. Last year, their Caverns of Thracia Backerkit campaign raised $650,000 and is a wild outlier in the overall success of Goodman Games‘ crowdfunding campaigns.

Given the backlash in response to this project’s announcement, I doubt that this project will exceed the funds raised from the Caverns of Thracia campaign.

A much more likely scenario is that the royalty escrow account won’t receive enough funds to fully cover the refunds for all 965 backers — in this case, backers will receive a prorated refund based on the amount raised and Judges Guild won’t receive any royalties (but that doesn’t mean they don’t still benefit — more on that later!)

What About Other Judges Guild Projects From Goodman Games?

It appears that Goodman Games purchased the rights to other Judges Guild works. From their written statement linked above:

As we said yesterday, when the events of 2020 occurred, we had several projects in the works related to the Judges Guild property. This is the last former Judges Guild product Goodman Games will be publishing that we do not own the rights to.

We have rights to other products, which we do not intend to develop. 

I will admit I’m concerned about that statement. It echoes what they said in 2020 when they stated “we have no plans to release future Judges Guild titles.” Five years later, here we are.

The fact that this new City State of the Invincible Overlord project was announced after they said they were cutting ties with Judges Guild doesn’t garner much confidence that they won’t reverse again in the future.

What Others Are Saying About the New Statement

The new statement from Goodman Games seems to have received mixed reception.

What Does Kickstarter Say About Refunds?

I’ve watched Goodman Games‘ video statement twice and read over the written statement a few times since they were posted last evening.

I do think that if Goodman Games is going to move forward with the project, these new details about the escrow account and their plans to limit the print run and all the other fiddly bits about how they’re going to make sure that Judges Guild doesn’t profit from the arrangement are probably the best way to go about it.

Their desire to refund the backers of Judges Guild’s 2014 “Pathfinder Edition” Kickstarter is well-intentioned and seems to come from a good place …but I still disagree that it is their responsibility to do so.

See, Kickstarter’s refund policy essentially states that once pledges are collected, it’s entirely on the creator (in this case, Judges Guild) whether they want to issue refunds for a project they can’t deliver — it is not required.

There’s also this statement that shows up on Kickstarter any time you open the form to back a project:

How Judges Guild benefits from Goodman Games paying for their refunds

If even Judges Guild isn’t responsible for refunding the 2014 Kickstarter, then what’s the point of stirring things up a decade later to try to issue refunds? Kickstarter backers know the risks. Kickstarter projects fail to deliver all the time.

Why would Judges Guild or Goodman Games even care at this point?

Well, I think there may be an answer. Here’s what Kickstarter’s guidelines says about the possible action they may take if a creator fails to deliver:

Revoking creator privileges, including the ability to run another campaign on Kickstarter, until they’ve made a good faith effort to bring their project to a satisfying conclusion for their backers.

I don’t know if Judges Guild’s creator privileges have been revoked on Kickstarter, but I’d say it’s a good bet since they haven’t run another Kickstarter in 10 years.

If Judges Guild works with another company to refund their previous Kickstarter, there’s a good chance they can make the case that they’ve made “a good faith effort to bring their project to a satisfying conclusion” in order to get their privileges restored.

That in turn would allow Judges Guild to regain access to the largest crowdfunding platform on the Internet.

No matter how Goodman Games spins it, Judges Guild benefits from the deal, even if they don’t receive direct royalties from the sale of the new City State of the Invincible Overlord release.

Should City State of the Invincible Overlord be reprinted?

There’s also the historical aspect, which Joe Goodman and crew comment on often in their statements — They talk excitedly about preserving the work of Bob Bledsaw Sr. and Bill Owens, the writers of the original product. City State of the Invincible Overlord was one of the first supplements released for Dungeons and Dragons and certainly the first of its scope.

But I disagree that this means it must be remade again and again.

The original City State of the Invincible Overlord was revised and reprinted a number of times by Judges Guild under Bob Bledsaw Sr. and again in 2004 by Necromancer Games, which updated the work for the d20 system.

I own the Necromancer Games edition and two revisions of the original.

The Original City State of the Invincible Overlord

The original is about 100 pages, most of which consist of statblocks for random inhabitants of the city, with some sections on factions and rules for things like crime.

With the exception of the maps and a couple random tables, there’s very little in the book that you couldn’t get out of a random NPC generator. Entries consist of a name, a basic stat block, 5-10 words of descriptive detail, and some notes on how much money or treasure the NPC owns. That’s about it.

The book is problematic at times in its own right, mostly in its depiction of women.

In fact, the first description of a female NPC in the book is an “adolescent wench being dragged by her hair” down the street by an ogre. When women appear in the book, they largely fill of the roles of nameless barmaids and dancing girls, slaves, nameless daughters of male NPCs, or damsels being carried off.

Later in the book, Judges Guild devotes an entire page to random tables about how to determine if one of these random nameless women will enter a relationship (implied to be sexual) with a PC, including random tables for determining her bust and waist size.

This is sort of where Goodman Games‘ argument that they’re not supporting Robert Bledsaw II, they’re honoring the work of his father Bob Bledsaw Sr. falls apart, in my opinion.

City State of the Invincible Overlord is a 1970s TTRPG supplement, written to a male audience — like many TTRPG books from the era, it’s got some sketchy issues. You can’t revive it without acknowledging those issues.

Necromancer Games edition, 2004

The Necromancer Games edition is, in my opinion, much more useful as a sourcebook. At 280+ pages, it’s a meatier product with more encounters and adventure hooks.

Gone are the “bust and waist size” tables, and while women still tend to take subservient roles throughout the book, there are more independent women and many female NPCs are given names and new details to help turn them into proper characters instead of nameless masturbatory fodder for horny teen male gamers.

A larger portion of the book consists of locations and paths for adventures beneath the city, something the original book sorely lacked.

That said, the work as a whole is still largely a collection of very brief NPC descriptions.

Was Goodman Games stuck with this work?

Largely, I think Goodman Games found themselves in a legal entanglement. It appears they licensed the work from Judges Guild, and then found themselves contractually obligated in some way to produce something with it — without seeing the paperwork, it’s hard to judge exactly what that contractual obligation entails or what the penalties might be for breaking it.

I also wonder what impact tariffs have had on the decisions swirling around this project — narrow profit margins in the TTRPG space, particularly for print run products like this one, have been made even narrower by President Trump’s trade war.

Whether through dwindling profit margins or contractual fuckery, it’s possible that Goodman Games found themselves in a situation where they had too much invested in the project to let it go, even knowing it was a bad move to proceed with it.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire, so to speak. I’m honestly not sure there’s a winning solution here for Goodman Games, though perhaps a crowdfund for legal fees to get Judges Guild to release them from their contract may have been a better option.

Would the TTRPG space benefit from a new City State of the Invincible Overlord?

Honestly, I don’t know. Given the beliefs of the current owner of the IP, there’s really no way to proceed on a reprint project without supporting in some way, that owner.

Goodman Games is testament to that — even a well-intentioned publisher is finding that they cannot divorce the product from its owner’s abhorrent stances, even as they bend over backwards in apparent good faith to try to make it right.

I agree with the Bluesky reply posted above from Roll the Dice Games. I would have much preferred to see Goodman Games pursue a wholly independent city supplement.

At the time it was published, City State of the Invincible Overlord was likely a useful resource for DMs and players — chock full of NPCs that could be introduced in any city environment, even if the Dungeon Master didn’t set their game in the same setting.

In today’s age of NPC generators and the countless NPC resources on DriveThruRPG, though, I don’t think the book holds as much value as a playable resource — as a collector of vintage TTRPG material, I do enjoy my old copies for their novelty, but there’s not much from them that makes it into my gameplay. The work skates by only on its historic significance, but I don’t think that history is enough to warrant another reprint.

Print copies of various versions of City State of the Invincible Overlord are available on the used market for prices not much different than the price point Goodman Games has planned for their new project, and digital copies are available from multiple places online.

It takes very little work to convert the limited stat blocks in those publications to 5th edition or your OSR clone of choice. If you absolutely feel you must acquire the work for your games, it’s relatively easy to do so, making a new printing unnecessary.

All said and done, I won’t be backing the Goodman Games Backerkit for this project.