You may have noticed the lack of updates over the last few days. That’s because I’m using by other hat as the co-admin of This is My Game to get press access to the Dungeons & Dragons Experience in Fort Wayne, Indiana this weekend. I’ve been spending the last few days hanging out with cool folks, and playing games.

As I talked about in my Open Letter to Wizards of the Coast, the announcement of D&D Next gives WotC the chance to open up the licencing of their system again, and allow third-party publishers the latitude to work with D&D content more freely. So far, there has been a lot of openness from the design team and other R&D folks, so I’m hopeful that such openness is a sign of things to come. I don’t know anything official, but I’m hopeful.

I have a chance to playtest the early build of D&D Next tomorrow. The sessions are under NDA, so I won’t be able to to give any specifics about the experience, but my hope is that WotC is going in a positive direction that will do nothing but help the industry that I love so much.

Other than that, I do have to say that I’ve got what I consider to be some relatively big news that I’ll be sharing with all of you on Monday. I’m happy about it, and I see it as a positive change for my work here at Sand & Steam. I hope you’ll think so, too.