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News Roundup: Children of Time + Neopets Controversy
The minds behind Voidheart Symphony and Eat the Reich are adapting an award-winning sci-fi series at a table near you.
Christopher Hutton
March 15, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 11 minutes
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There’s a lot of news coming up this week. Rowan, Rook and Decard are releasing a new TTRPG based on Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time. The Neopets TTRPG controversy reaches its climax. 7th Sea 3rd edition is crowdfunding! Plus a new interview with Hasbro’s CEO affirms that D&D seems free of AI for now.
In This Edition
Eat the Reich Developers to Release TTRPG Based on Award-Winning Sci-Fi Series Children of Time
Rowan Rook and Decard
Science fiction author Adrian Tchaikovsky has partnered with Eat the Reich/Die TTRPG publisher Rowan, Rook and Decard to publish a TTRPG based on his award-winning Children of series of novels.
The TTRPG and licensing agreement were announced on Thursday. RRD will publish a trio of RPG books built around the novel series, which explore the interactions b etween the remnants of humanity and the non-human beneficiaries who have developed their own society after being genetically modified by human scientists. The books explore the relationship between humanity and the aliens, but the TTRPG will let players make their own stories.
“Construct an ark ship of your own and embark on an uncharted exodus towards a planet of your own making, where you uplift and nurture species of your own choosing. Or retell the epic saga of the ark ship Gilgamesh and the evolution of the Portid spiders on Kern’s world. The choice is yours,” RRD wrote in a press release sent to TTRPG Insider.
The game will be designed by Minærva McJanda, designer of the recently released Voidheart Symphony) as well as work from Grant Howitt and Elaine Lithgow.
The Children of series has released three books so far, with a third scheduled to release in March 2026. The first book won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best sci-fi novel, while the series was awarded the 2023 Hugo Award for best series (Although there are some controversies around that.)
Rascal News has a phenomenal interview with Tchaikovsky and McJanda that I recommend diving into if this proepry interests you.
Neopets TTRPG Comes to an End After IP Owners Terminate Agreement
The Neopets Team
The big story this week was around how The Neopets Team (TNT) and Geekify split and ended the development of the Neopets TTRPG; a topic that has drawn a lot of controversy over the last few weeks.
TNT, the owner of the Neopets IP, announced on Thursday that it was terminating its license agreement with Geekify, which had barred the company from continuing to produce the Neopets TTRPG.
“As part of our commitment to providing quality Neopets experiences, we regularly review our licensing partnerships to ensure they align with our long-term goals and with the standards we set for official Neopets licensed merchandise and experiential projects,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the deal. “We determined that it is in the best interest of the Neopets brand and our community to cease this specific project and ongoing license agreement.”
They also said that they would implement “more robust processes to carefully assess licensees,” implying that Geekify’s approach to Neopets didn’t meet their standards; a big claim for the company.
The statement appears to have come out of the blue, as Geekify's owner, John Taylor, claims the company was “blindsided” by TNT’s decision. They later elaborated on the ending of the license in a post on the original Neopets Kickstarter, claiming that communications between TNT and Geekify has been strained for some time and that they’ve not communicated much since the original Neopets TTRPG beta was released. The beta was a modified copy of Fifth Edition D&D rules with a lot of Neopets flavoring. It also had sections that received significant pushback from indie designers and creators in the TTRPG space.
At this time, it seems unlikely that the people who backed the original Neopets TTRPG will receive anything in return. Kickstarter campaigns do not require people to return funding since that is part of the risk of the crowdfunding approach. TNT did allege that they would provide some in-game benefits to backers, but the details around that are limited.
It’s going to be a major reputational and financial loss for Geekify, who says they already spent a large portion of the $427k they initially raised.
Other Stories from This Week
Dark Horse is publishing Dungeons and Dragons: Total Party Killers, a new comic IP written by Christopher Hastings and scheduled to release in July 2026
There’s a new app for helping LGBTQ D&D fans find fellow players. It’s very dating app-coded, but it’s nice to see tools for niche communities.
The original art from the first “D&D coloring book” is up for auction starting on April 4.
Ars Magica designer Johnathan Tweet worked on a Magic: The Gathering TTRPG back in 1996, and a draft of it is up for auction.
EN World celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Hawkmoon RPG, which also occurred on International Women’s Day
Swashbuckling 7th Sea Launches Third Edition. Check out our interview!
7th Sea, a fantasy/swashbuckling TTRPG owned by Chaosium and being developed by French developer Studio Agate went live on Kickstarter this week. We spoke with the company a few months ago about what they were changing.
Anyone interested in this updated game can check out the campaign here.
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Hasbro CEO Affirms that AI is kept away from D&D Design (Outside of his Private Games)
The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talked to Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks in the latest episode of Decoder. It’s a lot of interestingness in this (a Peppa Pig AI agent helps design Peppa Pig toys?!?!?!) But what I think most readers care about is what Hasbro is doing with D&D. When asked about how he is thinking about the desire to incorporate AI and the interests of the company’s designers, Cocks said the following:
I’m thinking about it a lot and in a lot of different ways just to be at the 50,000-foot level. At the concepting... I suppose it depends on the context. From a creative context, I think you have to think about it very carefully. There are some brands that the audience, the creators, just don’t want it, so we don’t even have it in our pipelines for our video games or for Magic: The Gathering, or D&D. For things like toys where we’re basing it on existing IP, or like a long legacy of ideas, we are able to use it and use it pretty effectively. And in that concept phase, especially when you’re figuring out different ideas for toys and clever derivatives of play patterns, it’s pretty magical. Yeah, you might generate 1,000 ideas and 999 of them aren’t that good, but one of them might be magical, and it’s basically free to be able to create it.
He also reaffirmed that he uses AI in the 3-4 D&D games that he runs. How a high-level toy CEO has time to run D&D games is beyond me, but AI clearly makes it easier.
You can read the full transcript here:
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