First I go quiet for months, and now I’m sending a second newsletter update within 2 weeks?!? I hear you asking: have you gone mad?

Yes.

Actually, I’m just resuming my cadence of sending these updates on the first Saturday of every month. Welcome to May! My favorite time of year!

My family dutifully made our annual pilgrimage to a sugar shack, and this year we even found one with a delicious and vegetarian menu! I highly recommend it (when it opens again next year)!

It’s warming up here in Montreal and I’m feeling ALIVE again! And excited to move my TTRPG project along. Along those lines, I thought you might be interested in…

A Brief History of the SRD

Back in 2000, Wizards of the Coast (the company that owns Dungeons & Dragons, as well as Magic the Gathering, incidentally) did something that I think is pretty amazing. They released the System Reference Document (SRD). This was a bare bones version of the Dungeons & Dragons game (3rd edition back then) that they published under the Open Gaming License, meaning that it was intentionally made available for commercial use by third parties. It was a clever way to dramatically expand the content available for playing Dungeons & Dragons, without having to develop it all at their own expense. And it worked.

The reach and depth of D&D grew significantly. A huge number of books and games were published by third parties based on the SRD 3.0 and its successive editions. Brand recognition expanded, player engagement grew and Wizards of the Coast executives confirmed that third-party support enabled by the SRDs has been “essential to the game’s thriving success.”

To put it simply, the SRD allows an enthusiast like me to write up a compatible supplement, explicitly using the D&D rules and mechanisms that have been developed and refined commercially over decades. It also means that when I (re)publish The World of Kiynan, even people who have never heard of Kiynan (spare a thought for those sad, unfortunate souls) will already be familiar with the majority of the rules required to play the game. Pretty cool, right?

SRD 5.2 Released

Wizards of the Coast released several updated versions of the SRD for later versions of their rules, including the brand new SRD 5.2 on April 22 2025. This latest version includes the rules used in the newest books, like the 2024 Player’s Handbook.

I’ve been reading SRD 5.2 and I love almost everything about it. Naturally, I’m using it for The World of Kiynan 2.0 (the rulebook for playing D&D in the Kiynan setting), as well as two playable adventures, featuring canonical storylines set between books 3 and 4 (Return to Skywall 2.0 and Clockwork Dawn 1.0). I’ll get into more detail about what is included in these books in future newsletters, but as a little teaser I’ll say that I’m adding new subclasses for the House Magician (House Angst, House Lethargy, House Love and House Perplexity), as well as a whole new class:

Have you looked at the 2024 Player’s Handbook or anything more recent? What do you think?

That’s all for this time! Take care!