Into the Oddish and monetization of the hobby

15 Mar, 2026

Last night I had a blast playing in my friend warenunförmig's new dungeon that he's currently playtesting. In my head it is called "The Horrendous Hens of Henstedt-Ulzburg", but I'm sure I made that up and he will correct me in time. I'll put up a play report, I promise. But first, I need to talk about something else that came up that night.
We had a bit of a yap after playing and were gossiping about RPGs and the blogosphere. As I am wont to do, I was complaining about the increasing monetization and the commodity-driven¹ discourse that can be found on the usual Discord servers and blogs. He then told me about a blog post by unturned hovel which actually makes a more substantial version of the argument I usually make when I’m quibbling about this. But we also talked about a new game that is crowdfunding right now: Into the Oddish.

I mostly remember Prismatic Wasteland because of his claim that commercialization is necessary even for hobbyists like him. According to him, without it people simply would not read what hobbyists produce. He wrote that post in response to an argument made by Marcia B. who claimed that turning its time and output into commodities is counterproductive for a small community such as the OSR. The bottom line was that people would gain more from sharing their time, experience and products rather than sell PDFs to each other.
Wasteland's counterargument is unconvincing, but at the time I thought that maybe that was just a very bleak perspective of somebody who really wanted to get attention for his magnum opus heartbreaker.

Into the Oddish, however, casts a different light on this line of argument.

This blog post should have been a comment, but it was deleted.

What's so bad about Into the Oddish — or selling PDFs to each other?

Imho, the answer to why selling PDFs to each other is simple. When blogs, Discord servers and Reddit subs become platforms for advertisement and marketing, it diminishes the quality of the discourse and participating in the hobby turns more and more into consumption instead of creation.

Why does Into the Oddish irk me so much?

For one, Into the Oddish reminds me strongly of a marketing trick from the video game industry — Pokémon’s dual-version release. When Nintendo released Pokémon Red and Blue (or Red and Green in Japan), it was marketed as promoting social interaction, because trading was necessary if you wanted to "catch'em all".

This of course, was a big pile of bullshit.

Pokémon was released as two separate games because Game Freak was very aware that people (or their kids) were afraid of missing out if they only had the one game. So you had to buy both if you wanted to make sure that you got the whole deal.
There were also some features in place, that made this requirement even more palatable. Some of the color-exclusive Pokémon were rather rare (Scyther and Pinsir) or you could only get one of them per playthrough (Hitmonchan and Hitmonlee). Which made trading them a risk, since you had to be sure that your trading partner would trade them back - after getting their Pokédex entry. Otherwise you would need to play the whole game all over again to the point where you received one of them. But bue, you interject, I fondly remember how I traded Pokémon with my friends. The social interaction aspect was true!

Do you really think, that Nintendo (or Game Freak) sold their customers a nearly identical games twice by chance? Not a chance in hell.

How do you sell twice the amount that Super Mario sold?

The move to artificially increase sales by selling two nearly identical games that differed in one key aspect, the available Pokémon to catch, was a brilliant idea — from a marketing perspective.

But from the perspective of everybody besides marketers and shareholders, it's a pretty shitty practice.
Into the Oddish is a parody of Pokémon that not only copies the visual design and gameplay of the original two games², but also copies the cash-grabby business practice.

But surely this isn't why you're wasting so much time writing a blog post, right?

Yes and no. I think it's a shitty practice. But what bothers me about it is not that it exists within the OSR. What bothers me is how normalized bullshit marketing and cash-grabby products have become. And how much they define the discourse within our community.³
When Prismatic Wasteland made his original argument in his post, he was writing about how this was a hobby motive, not a profit motive. It was a questionable argument back then and right now it seems downright ridiculous.

Don't miss out, the nearly identical games in a bundle with an adventure that is not part of the two nearly identical games are on sale!

Into the Oddish is not a parody of Pokémon. It is a copy-pasta. There is nothing original to it. It uses the design of the original pocket monsters, not only the visual aspect but the mechanics as well. Even its name isn't original. The name and mechanics of the game are based on Chris McDowall's popular line of games.⁴ Into the Oddish is a collection for odd-likes that is curated by Yochai Gal.
The blog post regarding Into the Oddish and Pokémon-as-OSR aren't about player experience, dungeon master problems, new fantastical worlds, innovative mechanics or procedures⁵ — they're marketing.
As is the bullshit term "heistfunding".

Even the description is a copy pasta of Pokédex entries, for fucks sake!

Into the Oddish doesn't need commercialization for it to get noticed by other hobbyists. Into the Oddish is a product to sell first and foremost. It is not an innovation. It is neither a hobbyist's heartbreaker nor somebody's darling adventure. It is pre-existing content recycled in order to make profit.

It is exactly the stuff that should not dominate our discussion when we talk about our fantasy adventures.

What can be done?

Well, I think it would be a good step to stop buying stuff and instead create more stuff of our own. Instead of talking about which product is superior or fits our individual taste better, we should talk about what happens at our own tables.
Honestly, nobody plays the stuff they buy as is anyway. We're all tinkering and fiddling about when it comes to our games and systems. Why not talk about that? Your game does not need to be a polished and hyperlinked PDF ready for itch and drivethrough in order to be relevant. This is only the case if we make it so. So next time a friend tells you that "sometimes the only way to really make an enduring piece of art that has reach is through the market", tell them to get lost.

I for one will start posting play reports of the shenanigans me and my friends are up to when we're crawling in our dungeons. If all goes well, I'll show my first shoddy and amateurish attempts of designing my own dungeon and the struggles and pitfalls I experience throughout it.

Thank you for coming to my monthly rant!
I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

#Into the Oddish #OSR #commercialization