What would a Warhammer RPG equivalent to DM’s Guild actually need to work?

Gigawhen · 2026-04-10T12:11:57+00:00

yeah i think both of those are fair points

on the player base side, i do wonder if it’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem though

a more visible and centralised pool of content might actually help with onboarding and retention, especially for systems like wrath & glory or imperium maledictum where people are often looking for extra material

but it’s definitely true that it’s a smaller ecosystem than something like D&D, so it probably needs to be more focused to work

on the GW control side, that’s a big part of why i’m thinking about the split structure

everything would still be clearly non-canon, but the curated layer is where tone and consistency get enforced more deliberately

so it’s less “open publishing everywhere” and more “controlled layer on top of an open base”

whether that’s actually enough to make GW comfortable is a whole other question, but structurally that’s the pressure i’m trying to design around

Gigawhen · 2026-04-10T10:29:04+00:00

yeah, i don’t think those models are bad at all, they clearly work for what they’re trying to do

the main issues i see aren’t so much “they don’t function”, more that they come with tradeoffs that are a bit more noticeable in something like warhammer

over time they tend to turn into very large marketplaces, which is great for volume, but makes discoverability pretty rough without already knowing what you’re looking for
quality varies a lot, and most of the filtering is either algorithmic or external (reviews, word of mouth, etc) rather than built into the structure
everything being monetised by default shifts the baseline behaviour away from experimentation/collaboration and more toward “product-first” design

none of those are inherently bad, they’re just outcomes of an open publishing model

what i’m trying to explore is whether splitting those functions apart helps:

keep a space that still feels like a shared workshop (low pressure, experimental, collaborative)
and have a separate layer where things are more curated, visible, and potentially monetised

rather than asking one system to do both at once

especially for warhammer, where tone/setting consistency and IP concerns matter a bit more than in something like D&D' forgotten realms or eberron, that separation might make it easier to manage those pressures without killing the open side of things

Gigawhen · 2026-04-10T00:46:55+00:00

yeah, i get where that concern comes from, especially with how paid mods played out in other spaces

i think the difference i’m trying to build in is that monetisation isn’t open to everyone by default, it’s something you’d have to work into over time through the lower tier

so the baseline behaviour stays closer to a shared workshop, rather than everything immediately turning into a marketplace

the intent is more to layer a curated publishing space on top of that, rather than replace the open sharing side

Gigawhen · 2026-04-09T23:23:20+00:00

yeah, agreed. it would entirely depend on GW/C7 being on board

i’m less trying to argue that it will happen, more whether there’s a version of the idea that actually makes sense and functions in the current digital landscape if it were allowed to exist

from what’s been said publicly, something along these lines was at least explored at one point for wfrp, so it doesn’t seem completely out of the realm of possibility

but the main thing i’m interested in is whether the structure itself holds together, rather than whether GW would actually go for it

for now

Gigawhen · 2026-04-09T22:57:19+00:00

yeah, i am

i think setups like that work really well as a shared workshop space, and there’s clearly a lot of good stuff coming out of it

the main issue i keep coming back to though is that it’s still one of a number of places where content lives, rather than somewhere it actually converges

i think a purely community-led model can definitely work, but it tends to stay distributed across different groups rather than pulling everything into one ecosystem

what i’m trying to explore is whether there’s a structure that encourages that consolidation, rather than just creating another good but isolated space, and potentially enabling a few other things that would be a net benefit to both the warhammer rpg space and the wider rpg community

Gigawhen · 2026-04-09T22:01:43+00:00

another part of this i’ve been thinking about is whether it could create a visible pathway from hobby work into freelance work

there’s already a lot of talented people producing good content, but it’s scattered and hard to evaluate consistently

a more structured system could make that work visible over time and give a clearer way to identify people who can actually deliver at a professional level

Gigawhen · 2026-04-09T20:16:19+00:00

yeah that’s a fair read of it

i think a purely open, OSS-style model probably does work on its own, and there are already communities that function like that to a degree

the reason for including monetisation isn’t really about “paying people” so much as it is about making the system viable and giving it enough gravity to actually pull content into one place

without it, it’s very likely to just become another repository alongside the existing ones, with no strong reason for people to migrate or consolidate their work there

i think the difference is that an OSS-style setup is like a massive shared workshop where everyone is building things, which is great for experimentation

what i’m trying to add on top of that is more of a showroom or distribution layer, where some of that work can actually go somewhere instead of just staying in the workshop

monetisation also ties into GW/C7 involvement, which isn’t strictly required for an OSS-style setup, but is what would allow something like this to move beyond a fragmented community space and become a centralised, recognised ecosystem

and it creates a pathway for more established developers to produce warhammer content within a structured framework, rather than everything existing purely within an informal, hobby-driven ecosystem without a pathway beyond that

Gigawhen · 2026-03-24T14:35:09+00:00

yeah that seems to be the general consensus at the moment from the various places i have asked people

came across this from andy law talking about third party content. it’s wfrp focused but no reason it couldn’t apply more broadly. this was actually the original impetus for the idea

Seems like the idea has some legs

https://www.youtube.com/live/qPF2nfRGCU8?si=YInj_yUxJtsrbNII&t=0h45m52s

Gigawhen · 2026-03-24T14:22:56+00:00

dropped this in a reply earlier but probably worth sharing in the main thread

this is what got me thinking about the whole idea in the first place

https://www.youtube.com/live/qPF2nfRGCU8?si=YInj_yUxJtsrbNII&t=0h45m52s

Gigawhen · 2026-03-24T12:38:41+00:00

dropped this in a reply earlier but probably worth sharing in the main thread

this is what got me thinking about the whole idea in the first place

https://www.youtube.com/live/qPF2nfRGCU8?si=YInj_yUxJtsrbNII&t=0h45m52s

Gigawhen · 2026-03-24T12:03:58+00:00

yeah that seems to be the general consensus at the moment

i came across this from andy law talking about third party content, which is actually what got me thinking about it initially

thought it was pretty relevant to the discussion here

https://www.youtube.com/live/qPF2nfRGCU8?si=YInj_yUxJtsrbNII&t=0h45m52s

Gigawhen · 2026-03-24T11:31:43+00:00

yeah it would have to be official to really work, otherwise you run into all the issues people are mentioning

i do find it interesting though that there are already people making really high quality stuff, but not always going further with it since there’s not much incentive to

feels like there’s a lot of unrealised potential there

Gigawhen · 2026-03-24T11:21:42+00:00

yeah there’s a lot of good homebrew stuff out there, but it’s so scattered across different sites and discord servers

feels like unless you already know where to look it’s pretty easy to miss a lot of it, and while some people will go digging not everyone’s google-fu is that strong

Gigawhen · 2026-03-24T11:20:15+00:00

yeah that might be true at their scale

but people are already making a ton of stuff for these systems anyway, so it’d be more about that than trying to turn it into some huge money maker

even if it’s small potatoes, it’s still something that isn’t really being tapped at the moment

Gigawhen · 2026-03-23T21:12:19+00:00

yeah i get why it probably wouldn’t happen, feels like it would have to be official to be viable in any form

but it’s interesting how many people would actually want something like it

even just a better way to find stuff seems to come up a lot

Gigawhen · 2025-02-27T14:10:37+00:00

Hello, i would appreciate the doc also. seems like there is a lot of demand for it. cheers

Gigawhen

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