Followup: What Palladium Should Do Now

I stated yesterday that Palladium should retreat, retrench, and refocus on its core original properties: RIFTS, Heroes Unlimited, The Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game. However, BAR-1 Studios reminded me of something to consider:

You & me have much the same assessment about Heroes, but I'd go as far as to drop Palladium Fantasy. In favor of Splicers & BTS

The thing is just about everyone does a high-fantasy game. And committing to an also-ran in an observed genre is pointless when the ideas in other settings are far more interesting.

He's not wrong. It's only by the inertia of habit and Uncle Kevin's stubborn insistence that the fantasy game continues to exist as a game to itself. In reality, it is nothing more than a heavily-ruled and hacked up homebrew of AD&D's first edition. The setting, save for one element (common among Fantasy Heartbreakers, and Palladium's fantasy RPG counts), nothing more than crap vanilla basic bitch Pink Slime fantasy. There is no good reason to not publish it as a third-party D&D setting product line.

Likewise, there is nothing about the Palladium ruleset to make it worth retaining over just using D&D openly. It would be to the benefit of the company to stop being fucking retarded about this matter, abandon the house system, and Just Fucking Use D&D. You're already well into Uncanny Valley territory as it is, so just finish the job, come out the other side and Be D&D.

And yes, you can still do that. The Open Gaming License is still in effect, as it can't be revoked. You can't call the system "d20" or "D&D", but neither does Pathfinder or any of the retro-clones of the Old School Renaissance and they all do just fine. Hell, you can (and Palladium should) follow Paizo's example: put the system, in its entirety, online for free as a System Reference Document. The real value is in playable content, not in rules manuals, and again Paizo shows the way there.

A revitalized Palladium would be a digital-first, digital-primary publisher. Give away the rules; sell what you can do with it, as that's where the real value in tabletop gaming lies. The only print products would be those whose digital sales indicate such a high demand that the hassle for a print alternative would be worthwhile, and then only as Print On Demand so all of the print costs get cut to a minimum. Convention sales would involve booth/table sales that allow people to put down their money and have the print product arriving when they come home waiting for them. Print sales would also include a digital copy as a default package deal, so those who buy at a con have what they buy in digital format to use during the convention while the print product gets made and shipped.

So a new Palladium would have RIFTS as its flagship game. Heroes Unlimited and Beyond the Supernatural are sidelines concentrating on different paralel timelines prior to converging into the flagship setting. The fantasy game becomes a setting supplement line for D&D, with a focus on what makes it distinct from other D&D settings (e.g. Wolfen Empire) and becomes the Ancient Past for a subset of the wider RIFTS setting. You can freely study the actual rules, such as they differ from WOTC/Paizo, free online; you spend your money on playable content instead- modules, settings, gear, powers, PC options, monsters, etc. that gives substance to those rules and context for their use.

Junk everything not a RPG. Sideline the other properties until the core lines are up and evergreen. Repeat the process one by one until every line is now part of that evergreen revenue stream series; cancel and cull those that don't perform, permanently. (Note: Some existing lines really aren't worth keeping as lines, but instead should be subsettings for RIFTS, Heroes Unlimited, or Beyond the Supernatural- such as Systems Failure, Nightbane, and After The Bomb.)

Palladium can do this. It just needs its leadership to get over itself and reform to conform to the new reality of the business.