City State of the Invincible Overlord (CSIO) was an early, third-party campaign setting for D&D, published by Judges Guild (JG). Goodman Games (GG) is a modern publisher of the TTRPG Dungeon Crawl Classics. They have an ongoing series rewriting old modules that have been pretty well recieved, though WotC pulled out of the program, leading GG to turn to third party content.

The original CSIO co-author and JG owner, Bob Bledsaw Sr., passed away in 2008. His son, BB Jr., made some lukewarm comments on social media about woketards and "jewmedia" that got everyone up in arms and saw GG cut ties with JG.

This past week, GG announced CSIO was going to be republished under their brand and eveyone got their panties in a twist. GG put out a statement that reads to me like "we need money and shouldn't have bailed on a business partner for brownie points. But if you really think about it, we're doing this for you and out of the goodness of our hearts." The striking takeaway being that GG was directing JG to use royalty payments to cover refunds for an incomplete 2010 CSIO Kickstarter.

Then they put out another statement saying they were limiting the print run of their own product to cap possible royalty payments to JG at the theoretical Kickstarter refund maximum. Now, Goodman readily admits this is a largely symbolic gesture and that the CSIO project is unlikely to make enough money to generate royalty payments sufficient to cover the theoretical KS refund maximum. The JG KS was for $85,000. At 10% royalties, CSIO would have to get north of $850,000 for Bledsaw to get any money from the deal. A comparable JG re-release by a different author, Dark Tower, only hit $450,000.

GG is somewhat known for taking a long time to do new print runs of products, so promising that CSIO will never get another GG print run isn't a difficult promise to fulfill. And I'm sure the FOMO angle will drive sales. Still, crazy to go through such theatrics, rather than just say that your company has contracts and needs money.