The Neopets RPG is going through a rocky development phase after Neopets says its licensee released a playtest without approval.
The official Neopets RPG has been through a rollercoaster of a development cycle following the rousing success of a crowdfunding campaign last year. About two weeks ago, Neopets’ licensee, Geekify, the developers of the TTRPG in question, released a “beta playtest document” to a fairly substantial community uproar for a number of reasons. Including concerns about lethal violence in a Neopets RPG that sold itself as appealing to “those without a mean bone in their body.“
Late last week, Neopets, the company, issued a statement addressing these concerns, claiming that the playtest document “was not approved or reviewed by [the Neopets] team prior to its release.” And that the “content and themes” of the document do not align with Neopets’ standards.
According to Neopets’ statement, the playtest document that raised those concerns was released without approval, and it doesn’t operate within the “full breadth of the Neopets experience.” Alongside the statement, Neopets requested that the document be taken down.
If you didn’t get a chance to see the playtest for yourself, it used the mechanics of D&D 5E. And it goes from there. Including encounters with bandits where the game talks about what they say, “if anyone is left alive.”
This is especially puzzling considering that Geekify had apparently submitted an entirely different suite of material to the Neopets team, per Neopets’ official statement:
“We want to be transparent with the community: the beta playtest document that was recently made public was not approved or reviewed by our team prior to its release. Under our licensing agreement, all content bearing the Neopets name must meet our quality standards and receive our written approval before it is shared publicly. Following an internal review, Neopets has determined that the content and themes contained within the document do not align with our brand standards, values, or the expectations we hold for experiences created under the Neopets license. Although the Neopets team has been steadily reviewing the TTRPG in sections as it is submitted, none of the aforementioned submissions was included in the beta document material released. We immediately requested the document’s removal and have been in direct communication with Geekify to address the matter.”
So none of the previous work submitted to Neopets was in Geekify’s playtest, per the statement. Neopets also spells out that this isn’t what the company wants for its TTRPG, going on to say that “Neopets is not a generic fantasy dungeon crawler.” And that any tabletop adaptation of its world should be “meaningful and authentic.”
While it seems that the direction the TTRPG will take may change very sharply in the coming weeks, Neopets remains confident that there is “a fantastic Neopets TTRPG waiting to be made.”
We will follow the story as it develops!
