I Probably Decided to Save the Unicorn Because It's A Unicorn (new Axe + Thought Eater)

The girls try to rescue a unicorn and kill children. Pretty into my nun voice here...

Also new entry for ROUND THREE of the Thought Eater Writin' About Games Tournament.

This is not by me, it's by an anonymous contestant, since there's an odd number of contestants in this round if it gets more votes than the average contest entry for this round by the time I count votes then it'll go to the next round.

The theme for this round is to describe the significance of something that's missing from an RPG text.

Here is the first essay, if you like it best, send an email to zakzsmith AT hawtmayle with the subject line "EVE" and nothing else.

Making Your Character A Character

You’ve just bought a new RPG for your group to try out, and if it’s organized like most RPG rulebooks there’s a players’ section and a GM’s section. If the game is at all well-designed, the GM’s section has tons of useful information to help you figure out what you’re supposed to do both before and during the game. There will be rules you need to know, tips on using the built-in conflicts of the game world as hooks for adventures and campaigns, formulas for coming up with the right level of challenge, ideas to help you set the tone and mood during the game (horror games in particular like to talk about music and lighting), tricks for making action resolution easier, advice on creating memorable NPCs, and lots of other stuff. In the players section, you’ll find--well--setting background and basic game mechanics.  

Ok, some games go a little farther than that. Sometimes the players’ section also gives you a few paragraphs about creating a character backstory or coming up with character goals and story hooks, but it firmly falls into the preparatory “character creation” step of role-playing. If the rules tell you anything at all about how to play your character once the game begins, it’s all very generic surface-level characterization stuff, like “use an accent” or “give the character a distinctive mannerism or nervous tick” or “masturbate vigorously when your character triumphs.” Most game books tell you how to create a character sketch, but offer very little information about how to tell a story with that character. They help you create an action figure, but don’t tell you how to play with it. If you’re mostly interested in the strategy game aspect of role-playing (hacking monsters, solving puzzles, that kind of thing), that’s probably all you need. If you want to focus more on storytelling, it might not cut it. 

You might be inclined to think that game books don’t talk about how to tell your character’s story because people can figure that out on their own. After all, it’s not like you have to give a kid instructions on how to use an action figure. The problem is that an RPG is not the same as playing childhood imagination games, no matter how many cookie-cutter “What Is Role Playing?” sections claim otherwise. There are a enough similarities that a lot of people can make the jump, but there are also enough differences that not everyone can figure out how to make their character and that character’s story a real part of the game. How many players have you seen show up to a game with pages and pages of character background that never comes into play during the game? Or worse, extensively detailed characters that they try to shoehorn into a game they don’t fit into well at all? 

To tell a story with a character, you need three things. The first is a character that the audience (in this case, the other players) can identify with in some way. This is the kind of “don’t just make a dead-eyed murderhobo” stuff that lots of game books (and thousands of gaming articles and blogs) have covered endlessly, so there’s no need to waste ink on it here. The second is the sense that the character fits into the group: giving the character a reason to be there, the group a reason to keep him around, and building relationships between the characters. This often happens naturally, and can be improved by making sure everyone knows the premise of the game and building connections between PCs from the start, either by working out more than just who has to be the cleric during character creation or by using something like Dungeon World’s Bonds mechanic. Most groups have not problem with players talking about the game before it starts, it’s talking about the game after the characters have left the tavern that some people have a problem with. 

For some games, that’s all you need. A mission (the story provided by the GM, whether in the form of individual adventures or an over-arching plotline), some characterization, and a sense of group unity were the key ingredients for most TV shows and movies until around the turn of the century. The thing that’s missing is the character’s story. Without character-driven subplots, the character doesn’t really have a life of his own. The character only exists within the context of the group and the story that the GM has set up (and sometime he’s only involved in that story because he happens to be a PC). Especially in today’s world of seasonal (as opposed to episodic) television and cinematic universes where every major character has their own story that weaves in and out of the main plotline, more and more gamers want their characters to have arcs and subplots as well, and that’s the thing that most RPG books don’t really explain how to pull off  (the lacuna, for those of you who have been wondering when I’d get to the point for the last five paragraphs).    

Most game books give the GM all kinds of information about telling the main story. Many also give the players good information for providing set-up for the character’s story (those pages and pages of background that never become relevant), but very few touch on how to make the background stuff an actual part of the game. Since story is traditionally the GM’s territory, the few games that talk about character-driven subplots put the pressure on the GM, assuming that it’s her job to bring all the stuff from the character background into the game. I think this is unfair to the GM (she already has enough to do) and to the player (who shouldn’t be completely dependent on the GM to tell his character’s story). It also ignores the reality of how most games work. In my experience,  the players with fully-realized characters were the players who actively worked to tell their character’s story by playing character goals and introducing supporting characters, character-driven subplots, and other character-centric stuff  in a way that naturally fit into the larger game (just forcing your way onto center stage just annoys everyone). They also worked with the GM to make sure the player’s story got told. 

The “working with the GM” part seems to be where most games drop the ball, in part because most game designers seem to be writing for an extreme (and mostly straw man) audience. For games aimed at the “let the dice fall where they may” crowd, who are nothing but power-gaming munchkins, any out-of-character discussion about the game is meta-gaming*, which is inherently evil, so talking about it would alienate the audience. On the other end of the spectrum are games aimed at the “drama club” crowd, where it’s taken for granted that every character is a special snowflake and the GM is not allowed to cause them any “agency”-destroying inconvenience without a drawn-out negotiation where everyone talks about their feelings. These games either talk about character subplots in vague terms or just assume that anyone playing them already knows what they’re doing. 

Most games ignore the vast majority of gamers who fall in the middle and want character-driven stories and surprises, but don’t really grasp how to accomplish it. That’s unfortunate, because RPG players are both audience and authors, so their connection to the story doesn’t fit the author/reader relationship, or even the co-author/co-author relationship. A lot of people, even game designers, have trouble grasping that. My third criticism of first-time adventure writers (after passive verbs and misplaced modifiers) is almost always that they’re trying to tell the GM a story rather than give the GM the tools to tell the story. If the stable boy is a vampire, the adventure writer needs to tell the GM about that when the stable boy is introduced, not when players are supposed to figure it out. On the player/GM side of things, if you want your character to settle his score with Jabba, you need to let the GM know that your character wants his debt to Jabba to be a subplot sometime during the game, and probably give her some background about Jabba and his resources. She’s got this whole “civil galactic civil war” plotline to deal with, so she’s not going to have a lot of time to fully detail the Hutt crime syndicate. At the same time though, you don’t get to stage manage your character’s encounter with Jabba or decide how it turns out. That takes away the uncertainty that makes the story fun. If you get some bad rolls and end up getting frozen in carbonite, you and the rest of the party have to deal with the consequences. It’s the risk you take when you decide you want your character to have his own story. 

Giving players the tools to work with the GM to tell their characters’ stories requires accepting the idea that not all meta-gaming is bad (just like most spoilers don’t actually make a movie less fun to watch), recognizing that playing an RPG isn’t the same as either creating or consuming fiction, figuring out what division of authorship between players and GM allows the players to enjoy the story both as a co-creators and as audience members, and providing advice about how to talk about it so players can figure out what works for their group. On the most basic level, this missing section is something like “How to Compromise,” but it’s a little more complicated than that and requires breaking down some long-standing gamer fallacies about how fiction, gaming, and adult social interaction work. Some of this involves theory and process that’s kind of hard to pin down, some of it involves basic interpersonal communication stuff that’s obvious to most people and potentially deeply upsetting to the people who need it most. I think I’m starting to see why most game designers just skip it. 

______________

*While talking about the game does meet the dictionary definition of meta-gaming (if it were in the dictionary, at least), when I first encountered the word (probably in the early 90s, when people added “meta” to everything), it specifically referred to using player knowledge to give the character an unfair advantage. I’m not sure where or when the usage drifted to include any and all out-of-character discussion of the game, but I’ve run into it online and with a few flesh-and-blood gamers. Depending on which definition you’re going with, meta-gaming is either absolutely essential (actually talking about the game) or cheating (reading the module), but the negative connotation of the most obvious term for the kind of thing I’m talking about is kind of annoying. 

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"I'll let him touch me because I rarely say no"

New I Hit It With My Axe today:

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Great Adventure Hooks in Art History 2: Matejko's Stańczyk (+new Axe)

First: new I Hit It With My Axe episode

Now...

Stańczyk (The Ioculator)

(Second in a series about how Art History is Actually Adventure Hooks)

Click to enlarge, it's magnificent

So the official story is this is a late Piratey Era painting by Jan Matejko. His art was censored by both the Russians and the Germans on grounds that he depicted Polish history, the existence of which irritated them, and this particular piece was stolen by the Germans in the 40s on the grounds that it was not nailed down then (in an irony that pretty much sums up Polish history) returned by the Russians in the 50's on the grounds that they basically owned Poland so they could afford to be generous. History Painting (more a genre than a movement, but a big deal in the 1800s) was a generation before straight-up Realism (which typically had less lush color, and focused on contemporary subjects) which Matejko's students would adopt.

It depicts the semi-legendary Stańczyk, satirical genius and jester to three Polish kings for at least 40 years during Poland's Renaissance being depressed about the Russians taking Smolensk while a brushily executed ball (or just a few people talking in a lobby?) takes place on the right and a comet streaks earthward on the left.  It's an important and iconic image in Poland according to the thing what I read and the number of weird red-suited parodies of it on pages in Polish that come up when you google image search it and Matejko is to Polish history what Wayne Reynolds is to Pathfinder--basically if it happened to Poland before Matejko was born, he painted it.

Also:

-"The title erroneously suggests that Poland was at the time ruled by Queen Bona Sforza, when in fact, on July 30, 1514, when Smolensk was lost to Russia, Poland was ruled by King Sigismund the Old and his first wife, Queen Barbara Zápolya".

-Sigismund survived an assasination attempt by an unknown assailant in 1523.

-The country experienced an uprising known as the Chicken War during this same period.


In reality....

Although attributed to Matejko by the Soviets (who decided they liked the idea of the most famous Polish painter's most famous work being a clown who's sad about losing a fight with Russia), it is in fact much older--having been painted in Osc Lithicum by Haerlaen Qinzael during the reign of Sigismund the Old, while Stańczyk, the Great Ioculator, was yet living.

It hung for many years in the Snail Quarter headquarters of the absurdist anarchist Cult of the God That Laughs and depicts Stańczyk brooding not over the loss of Smolensk but over his unsuccessful assassination attempt on Sigismund earlier that year.

While outwardly a loyal subject gently but cleverly tweaking the foibles of the Crown, Stańczyk was a spy in good standing for the ruinous Cult.

The Cult's foundational beliefs are based around the idea that, in their formal and named forms, comedy and democracy emerged at the same time (the 6th century)--and it considers the former absolutely necessary to inform the latter. Just as Aristophanes mocked the Athenians in order to tell them who to vote for and against (ok, mostly against), the Cult sees the creation of amusing viral absurdities as necessary to spreading the Laughing God's message of universal disorder. The Cult's actual aims are variously populist, nihilist, socialist, apocalyptic or merely liberal, depending who you ask and which branch and era they are familiar with.

Only marginally more successful than the assassination attempt was the so-called Chicken War--while history records that the name derived from the popular notion that only chickens were harmed in the anti-monarchist rebellion, the name actually came about because during this period Stańczyk had managed to introduce an hypnotic pheasant into the court of Sigismund the Old, which strolled from room to room whispering bad advice to generals and advisors until the fowl was discovered and traduced by the Minister of Wells.

At any rate, in the manner of all Laughing Cult artworks and artifacts, the portrait of the undiscovered traitor Stańczyk contains esoteric clues to the mysteries of the Troupe--in this case the combination to the Cult's vault in Vornheim.

It comes in the form of a spread in the Nornrik Tarot (the word "Karkivit"--Northen Elvish for "6 Cards" is written on the message in the center of the painting):

The Comet ( 17 )

The Tower ( 16 )

The 3 Goblets

The Marotte ( 0 )

The Peacock's Fan ( 7 )

The Chandelier in Blood ( 14 )

Stańczyk himself is a 14th level Thief or Rogue or Specialist or Assassin, like all members of the Cult he has access to one Joke which, due to issues of timing, pronunciation, accent, etc only he can properly tell.  These Cult Jokes have the following characteristics:

-They are cruel and target one intelligent creature present.
-The can only be effectively told once to any given audience--the joke's power is lost if anyone present (aside from the teller) has heard it before.
-These impressive jokes shake and humiliate the target such that, each morning thereafter, s/he must make a wisdom/will/spell save or lose a point of charisma. This continues even after a day's save is made until the victim is reduced to a timid husk, incapable of any action.
-The joke's devastating effects can only be ended by gathering the same audience (or such members of it as are living) and telling a funnier joke at the Cultist's expense. The counterjoke must make the god's laugh (practically speaking, this means it must make the majority of the players at the table laugh--and genuinely). This reverses the effect of the joke completely.

The Cult's vault is rumored to contain:

-The immensely compromising diary of Queen Bona Sforza, a Cult member, including intimations of improper contact with the most powerful wife of a prominent Eastern Monarch.

-Coins of many nations.

-A Goblin Marotte which, when shaken by any creature of that kind, causes changelings to laugh and thus reveal themselves.

-A Sforza family tree, accurate up until the current date.

-A report compiled from various sources on the senses of humor of the world's monarchs covering the last 600 years written with an eye toward practical use--including topics and formats likely to gain favor, offensive subjects to be avoided and reports on the success and failure of various specific attempts to amuse them.

-A secret Deck commissioned by Franceso I Sforza consisting of portraits of his family depicted as Fools and variations thereupon--the Idiot, the Joker, the Ioculator, the Jester, the Joker, Le Mat etc ... As only Foolishness is universal and only Fools behave the same regardless of context, this Deck is said to have ultradimensional properties such that for any deck (including any world's Deck of Illusions or Many Things) there is a card within which can be inserted into it and subtly rewrite the esoterica of that world--causing suits and arcana to shift, altering sowing seasons, changing spell durations, renaming gods, etc.

-A painting entitled The Poisoning of Queen Bona painted before the poisoning took place likewise painted by Qinzael and inaccurately attributed to Matejko in the modern era:

New I Hit It With My Axe + Some Pics

Episode 43:

L to R: Stacy Dellorfano of Contessa, Me w/Ennies, Trollsmyth

Drinking Kickstarter's beer after the Ennies

L to R: Ken Baumann (Satyr Press), Kenneth Hite, Me
Satyr Press intern Theo on the bottom 

Graham Linehan created the IT Crowd, Black Books and Father Ted. He's a fan.

Ennies, L to R: Some guy, Charlotte Stokely, Me, Stoya, Kiel Dungeons & Donuts Chenier

Carl with yet another infuriating homemade shirt

Stokely manning the Lamentations of the Flame Princess booth

This was just a really cool Warhammer 40k table i liked -- do yourself a favor and enlarge these

While we were at Gen Con, our cleric, Karolyn, was invited to the White House. There are Pokemon there.

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Post GenCon, me and Stoya went to Europe to make some pornography

St George about to kill Stoya in  Marshall Tito Square, Zagreb

Gnolls, Nuns, Sneaking, Bobbi Starr, Unicorns (new I Hit It With My Axe)

New I Hit It With My Axe!

"I want to shoot a child with my bow and arrow"
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All About The Halfling (new I Hit It With My Axe)

New episode up!

This one's all about Connie.
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Mandy's Ringo Walk (New I Hit It With My Axe)

Still haven't heard back from Paizo about their employee harassing us last week, hope that gets sorted before Gen Con.

Also, there's a Maze of the Blue Medusa actual play from Ropecon.
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New I Hit It With My Axe + Maze News + Don't Be Like Metallica

New I Hit It With My Axe today--

This one's all about Miss Mandy Morbid and the art of playing a rebel cripple leader cleric. Subscribe to Satine's channel to keep up.

Also:

Here's an in-depth interview Patrick and I did about Maze of the Blue Medusa where we talk about medusas, greek gods and that Metallica documentary, among other stuff.

And here's an Enworld thread about the Maze, kicked off when somebody said "Maze of the Blue Medusa isn't an adventure as much as it is a fractal."

Also:

There's a cheap charity Bundle of Holding featuring my book, Vornheim and a ton of other LotFP adventures including Seclusium of Orphone, England Upturn'd and the excellent Forgive Us available here. https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Lamentations. Get your weird historical horror and your warm inner glow all at once.
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New I Hit It With My Axe + Kenneth Hite, Zeb Cook & a Lizard On Maze of the Blue Medusa

-So first off, here's RPG-royalty Kenneth Hite on why our "Maze of the Blue Medusa" is his "...most dangerously close and worthy competitor" .

-Second, so apparently some Ennies votes may have gotten glitched away, so check to see if you voted for Maze in Best Adventure, Product of the Year, Best E-Book (the physical copies weren't ready by judgin' time), Best Cartography and Best Writing 

-New I Hit it With My Axe is up, with historical gnotes about gnolls and Lord Dunsany (and ball-stomping).

For some reason Laney is inaccurately captioned as Stoya. That needs to get fixed.

-Fourth: if you don't have Vornheim yet, or just want a way to check out other stuff from Lamentations of the Flame Princess on the cheap, there's a Bundle of Lamentations out now offering Vornheim: The Complete City Kit with four other books as a bundle.

-Fifth: TSR legend Zeb Cook played a session in the Maze. And liked it.  

Lizards, too.

I Hit It With My Axe is Back + Other Good News

So some of you may remember we had this webshow which documented the girls playing D&D at home. 36 episodes and then...the Greek economy collapsed and our show, being the most expensive and time-consuming on its network (and a lot of work for yours truly to edit), disappeared off the web.

Well, after many tribulations it is back. New episodes start here (with a helpful recap) this week and the old episodes are being uploaded to the same YouTube channel as we speak. Stoya guest-stars.

The first few new episodes will be kind of re-introductions to the players and how they play, a little more gameological than the originals, and then back to the plot. New ones will be coming out every week for the next few months. The more you share and tell people, the more we can do.

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And, yeah, if you haven't already vote for Maze of the Blue Medusa for Best Adventure, Best Electronic Book, Best Cartography, Best Writing and Product of the Year. Because if the books win fabulous prizes, it's easier to make more of them. It isn't on RPGnow or anything, you can only get it here. ("It smells good, too, in case you like smelling books").

If you're still not sure you want one, there are some very thorough and brand new reviews here and here and here and here, including videos and pictures.

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In other good news, Contessa--the gaming convention by women for everybody organized by the inevitably awesome Stacy Dellorfano has been put on the list for the Diana Jones Award. Let's all hope she wins because, really, it's what Diana would've wanted.

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This is shaping up to be quite a fucking Gen Con. We'll see you there, possibly hanging around the LotFP table Friday and Saturday. I'll be the one who looks like this:

"Cool Cool" and Other Wisdom From The Escapist

So yesterday we announced we weren't going to do our D&D show, I Hit It With My Axe, with The Escapist website anymore because they hired a transphobic dickhead.

So that's that. People in general seem to be really wondering What Is Going On At The Escapist? so I am going to do my best to say what I can tell you from the inside about how something this fucked up happens. And maybe under what circumstances it might happen again. This summary was written quickly--and poorly.

So who are these guys over there? We had meetings, some in person and we talked many times.

From the first phone call I got the impression that these are very much people for whom The System Had Worked. Not necessarily the school system or the government system or any institution, but the broader dork version of the American dream where you are smart and ambitious and so eventually by hook or by crook you get what you are due--that had worked for them. "We're smart so we win." They had respect for technocratic smarts. They do like games, for what it's worth.

Yeah, there was a libertarian vibe which I was really not into, but I've heard Daily Show writers say they were libertarians, and that place seems alright. In the beginning I wasn't paying much attention. It was inside baseball video games and that's mostly pretty boring.

The most common comment you'd get when you said something outside their experience was "Cool cool". Mandy might do a column about feminism and gaming? You want this metal band to do the music? "Cool cool".

"Cool cool" was a way of saying "I don't know what you're talking about, but I like that you are thinking and therefore smart about something so I trust you, I am not going to think about this any more, go to it".

You could show them things and they would appreciate that a thing was being shown to them, but lacked curiosity about it. Like your dad when you talk about some band you liked covering a Hendrix song.

I think a lack of genuine curiosity is one of the most dangerous things a person can have on the internet.

Like the women on the show would go "We are getting a lot of hate on your forums and it's fucked up" and they'd go "Ok, we'll see what we can do" but, like, they didn't get it. They had a Keep The Talent Happy attitude but it took a while for it to sink in that this meant that Tons of their users were abusive assholes and this had to be dealt with constantly and you need someone on it. It seemed like they kinda overall did not have a lot of experience dealing with women with strong opinions who weren't in their same line of work.

What did they have a passion for and what could they talk about with passion? In the cases I saw--history. Particularly military history. I don't mean to suggest that they were crypto-fascists, more just that this was something the dudes could wrap their heads around: a clear foe, tactics and strategy, total victory, total defeat, Clausewitz, the greater technocrat wins.

The most common compliment you'd hear was "____ knows more about ____ than most people in the world so _____". The idea was: you divide things up, and you put an expert in charge of each thing. Which makes sense when you're fighting a war.

It reminded me of that Killing Joke line: Business, lawsuits, market forces - No philosophy courses

Here's the problem: the current argument the Escapist is embroiled in requires philosophical thought. And they don't have a guy for that.

I think they're not the only ones. People--especially dorks--like to set aside thinking about whether to do something and just set their minds to doing it. Just assume Bowser is an asshole and the Princess needs to get saved and get to work on the jumping and fireballs.

So to apply this to the current situation. So here's Brandon Morse talking about calling trans people what they wanna be called:

Here's his defense:

Now what you notice right off is this sounds like an evasion:

You can say whatever you like. People then can decide you're a dick based on that. Every human in the history of the planet has had that experience and is ok with it. When they go "You can't say xxxx" or "You shouldn't say xxxxx" what they mean is just a shorthand for "You say that and I will decide you're a dick and maybe take action based on that".

I don't think Morse thinks this is a dodge, though. I think he actually believes that. I think the emotional logic of "I do what I want!" is as far as he's thought about it.

Like so many people on the internet, he wants to get what he believes out of the way so he can get on to sickburning people for not believing it.

When I went to The Escapist about this dick, the response was basically pretty libertarian: we don't tell people what to think, his ideas are his own, the market will sort it out etc etc. They didn't have a defense of his ideas, just a defense of their right to slather them in money and slide them across the Internet.

The obvious question is like, Would you use the same logic to employ--ok, this is nerddom so we're not allowed to say a Nazi but fuck it, my dad was Jewish--a very polite Nazi?

My honest-to-god read on The Escapist is they're so libertarian it's a 30-70 shot they'd say something like "Well so long as they weren't advocating violence and were putting out great content, why not?" Not because they hate Jews, but because they just believe that hard in the Marketplace of Ideas.

Or maybe they'd go "Well that's different."

And I'd go "How?"

And at that point, no matter what they say textually--it'd be a desperate cover for the fact that we'd just crossed beyond their experience. Because they never thought "Ok, what if we set up rules at our company to make ourselves money harmlessly and it doesn't work and makes the world genuinely worse for people during our lifetime and theirs and you could've stopped it and didn't because greed?" Their whole lives there has literally been no reason to ask a question like that, so it's never seriously occurred to them.

Just like when you ask people how any 140-character life rule they just made up for themselves breaks down.

I'd like to pretend this is just The Escapist, or just libertarians, but it's really really not. It's a pattern you see over and over with people online when push comes to shove.

Most people don't actually have very clear rules about when to take action or what the words they're throwing around mean. They just have loyalties. That's why you can go "Brandon Morse is a bigot and so is that guy Ettin" and the same people will be like "Yeah Brandon Morse is a dick" and "Calling out Ettin in public like that for something he said months ago? Not cool, dude! You don't go starting drama like that."

Not unless it's, like, important.
What counts as important?
I'm not here to debate you.

(Why do people feel ok about saying that? Just so you know: I am always here to debate you. Ask me whatever.)

But if you're on the internet to announce ideas instead of talk about them, you end up basically using those ideas as a kind of faceless fuel to gather steam for a much larger enterprise and one with more certain rewards: fighting on behalf of them. Tactics, strategy, a clear foe.

And the impression I get is that even if they don't agree with Morse, they like that he's offensive about something even they don't approve of because it somehow in some weird realm proves the macho robustness of their libertarian ethic.

I think the level of Nope Not Gonna Think About It dismissiveness here is hard to wrap your head around if you don't share the mindset. Morse's take on trans issues has been consigned to a certain bin of Less Relevant and there it will stay.

Brandon Morse says something transphobic--4 people retweet it and 11 people favorite it--and that hugging fuels Brandon to say the next thing. And the next thing. That is The Job. That stuff beneath where people, like, question the ideas? Addressing that is not the proper work of Brandon Morse. Or the Escapist or anyone else who ever used the "I was just giving my opinion on my blog jeez isn't this a free country any more?" excuse. You are here to advertise ideas, not use them.

And Brandon makes money somehow, I guess, so it's ok--the same reason RPGnet won't just get rid of the ad server that keeps sending them sexist ads.  Dudes Need To Make Money.

Long ago someone at the Escapist decided that We Hire Whoever So Long As It Makes Us Bank--and, moreover, they decided that decision wasn't a secret, cowardly compromise, it was What They Believed and they were proud of it. So, cool--now they have something to Fight For. And the rest is just tactics.


p.s.

If anybody at The Escapist has a problem with what I just wrote:

Hey kids, buy my new D&D book! It's the fastest-selling and best-reviewed indie RPG book of the season!

...if I follow your logic, if I make even a dollar today, everything I wrote up there was totally justified. Because, like, money's the most important thing, right?

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We're Not Playing D&D With The Escapist Ever Again

EDIT:
Periodically this post gets linked from GamerGhazi, where the link here (thanks!) its accompanied by a bunch of attacks on me and the women in my game group (boo!) from folks participating in a smear campaign started by Paul Matijevic / Ettin and his conspiracy theorist friends from the Something Awful boards literally because I like the wrong edition of Dungeons & Dragons (as Mandy explains here). If you have any questions about me or the motive for this post, here's my Ask.fm--I can link directly to evidence, you don't have to ask random Redditors why my allegedly "toxic" rpg presence has gone all Social Justice.

Hi everybody,

As many of you know, we've been working on making new episodes of our D&D documentary series "I Hit It With My Axe" for the Escapist website.

The first time around they gave us a shoestring budget and we figured we'd do it anyway for the fun of it, but this time they gave us a lot more and we were looking forward to doing the show exactly the way we wanted this time--lots of interviews, in-depth looks at the players and how we played games, and lots more jokes. We've been working with the Escapist and combing through the footage since the summer.

But then this week they hired this douche:

So, to put it simply: we refuse to work for the Escapist or its parent company any more.

Why? Well this is us:

Left to right, top to bottom:
Wizard, Druid, Wizard
Thief, Cleric, Wizard
DM, Thief, Druid
Thief, Ranger, Ranger

Without comparing anybody's struggle to anybody else's, you don't need a degree in social science to figure out that since one of the people in our group is a Jew, six are people of color, two were born handicapped and like someteen are bisexual women and one is trans it would be shooting ourselves in the foot if we were, hypothetically, to make money for a company that would then give that money to an actively anti-semitic, racist, ableist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic person. 

So the D&D With Porn Stars crew working with the Escapist under those conditions would be as hypocritical and self-defeating as supporting Think of the children!-anti-sex conservatives like Fred Hicks or Fox News. Here: we let you film us playing D&D, you make money, then take the money, buy a bullet, and shoot us each in the foot with it. 

Well, every monday I log on to Google Plus and run a videochat campaign where Scrap Princess plays an awesome wizard and we're happy to have her. We owe her the same protection we owe all our friends. I'm not gonna shoot Scrap (or Sarah or Ana or Natalie or Morgan) in the foot just so we can have a TV show.*

The most cutting-edge game-designer in the early tabletop hobby and a major force in early video games--Jennell Jacquays--is trans, as well as some of the most innovative folks working today. Jennell wrote Dark Tower, did the arcade conversions for Pac-Man and designed the Quake levels. If the girls in our group get shit on by conservative gamers and conspiracy theorists just for showing up to play and telling trolls to fuck off--I can't imagine what she and other transfolk go through having to actually work in the business.

And, for what it's worth--and many of you may not understand--I'm a porn performer, and so is most of the rest of the group, and you can't get too far in the adult industry without realizing the hours that trans people like Sarina Valentina, Bailey Jay, and Buck Angel put in on their sets are as real as the ones we put in on our sets and the stigma they face every day is real.

Maybe we'll put the new episodes of Axe out somewhere else, maybe not. The Escapist wants to give us a lot of money--but nothing is worth this compromise and any new gamers the show brings into the hobby are not worth the damage the Escapist does by telling people you can be openly transphobic and still get paid to talk about your dumb ideas.

Sometime maybe we'll get to see Stoya fight a manticore, but not today.

-Zak S.

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*Yes, I checked with Scrap before linking to her page here to make sure she was cool with this post. She was. I put her official response in the comments below this post if you want to read it.
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They Should Be Put In A Pit With Wild Dogs

Still editing new I Hit It With My Axe episodes...

Connie's video editing notes

Here's some…well you wouldn't call it mainstream press I guess but literary world press--me getting interviewed for Fanzine.com about the new edition of D&D.

I think it does a little better than hit the usual notes.

Here is a frog that has Mandy's dice.

"The Internet Is Screaming"

"The Internet is screaming with the harm caused, Zak; this very conversation wouldn't be happening if you'd not actively hurt and pissed off a great many people."

   -Sean Patrick Fannon

Well 'the Internet screams' when 2 boys kiss on TV. The Internet is dumb as butts.

But not always.

Got a note from Zeea last night...

(EDIT LATER--Zeea recanted this, and began re-harassing me on RPGnet. Her alleged grounds for doing this are a pair of literally insane beliefs:

-Mandy outed the Something Awful harasser sometimes screen-named Mikan as trans (despite the fact Mandy and I have no way of knowing secret info about Mikan)
-The Dongion blog, which is on my blogroll, referring to Mikan as "grotesque" was a reference to her trans status--which is impossible since that happened long before the alleged "outing" so how would The Dongion know?

So point is Zeea is either lying (seems unlikely, she's very earnest) or merely literally insane. However I've left the rest of the post intact for the record:)

--a trans gamer (and now RPGnet moderator) who often points out things she thinks are problematic in games, and whom, until recently, this guy Sean above might characterize as part of the "screaming" about the "harm" I caused by having the audacity to respond to the Dungeons & Dragon's peoples' request to email them my thoughts on the recent edition of D&D and then collect a check for it.

Zeea said:

Zak S:

So, I've spent a few hours doing as much research as I can, and I've talked to folks some more.

I'm not going to equivocate. People made accusations against you without proof, the accusations got amplified and distorted and repeated through the Telephone Game effect, and I bought into it when I shouldn't have.

I can't find any evidence of you making broad transphobic statements. I can find evidence of you making trans-inclusive statements. Every transgender person involved in arguments with you was in an argument about something unrelated to being trans, with the exception of the "morphodite" thing, which was such an over-the-top obscure thing to say that I'll take you at your word that you were using it to parody a certain posting style.

Furthermore, in every one of those discussions, there was a lot of shit and toxicity flying around and everyone was hot-tempered. And finally, because all of the incidents I've found any public examples of were "person and an entire faction of people vs. person and an entire faction of people," even if there was cyberstalking aimed in either (or both) directions, there's zero evidence you instigated it or posted non-public information.

I don't think anyone I talked to privately is intentionally lying about this. I think they believe it. But perceptions color memories, as does hearing the same event discussed by multiple people, and some of things look a bit stretched by this point. I can't base an opinion on stretchy-looking facts.

So, I hereby apologize for and retract any implication that you're transphobic or have engaged in cyberstalking. I'm sorry. I'm going back to my original statement on the subject before I got all the private messages, which was, "As far as I know, neither Pundit or Zak S have said anything transphobic."

Furthermore, while I highly doubt that my opinion has _any_ influence on the subject whatsoever, and I wasn't the one who started this whole line of discussion (nor was I the person that got Mike Mearls involved*), I sincerely apologize if anything I said on this subject damages your industry reputation in any way. I disagree with you on plenty of subjects, but I fucked up here and let that influence me to believe and repeat something I shouldn't have.

Oh, bonus apology. I said you were disingenuous. Know what? I've reread a lot of stuff you've posted and then read it in the context of other stuff I've found in places I don't normally frequent. I retract and apologize for that, too. While you can be abrasive as hell and tend to accuse people of disagreeing with you because they're "conservative," it seems you're arguing based on a sincere belief and not intentionally strawmanning. Plus, you've displayed more nuanced opinions on the subject in some places, and if I'd seen those before, I'd probably have had a different opinion.

--Here

A complete history of the grudges that brought on the bullshit is here. The thing that got blown up into me "stalking someone" (I found someone who lied about me online and asked them a question. I did it by clicking on their screen name) is here.

And, if you need it: further evidence of my innocence of the various fuckwadderies published about me this week. The most obvious one being: people were asked to send evidence of me being bad to WOTC, the D&D company, aaaaaand: they got nothing.

If anybody ever has me saying a single bigoted word, they haven't got a single quote. For the best shot the rest of the opposition has taken, here's a hilarious list they've made of my despicable crimes, including tagging a guy into a Google + conversation about his ideas in case he wanted to defend himself and making this awesome cartoon:

I'll be accepting apologies all week. Roll up.

ANYWAY:

Lots of other things going on in RPGland soon:

We are working on new episodes of I Hit It With My Axe (watch this one if you never saw it).

Outside-the-box genius RPG artist Scrap Princess and outside-the-box genius RPG poet False Patrick released Deep Carbon Observatory which looks to be exactly the kind of folk-art kludgewithchery the old school has been promising to make for years.

And Red & Pleasant Land is chugging along. Should be out this summer. Started working on a new edition of Vornheim and I helped James Raggi write a DeeeeeLuxe Death Frost Doom that'll be out soon.


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A Little Kimberly Kane Appreciation

Left: Porn. Right: Brand X Official Warner Brothers TV show.

So the press has seemed to notice...

That our Dungeons and Dragons group's barbarian-turned-druid looks like she's going to be a way better Wonder Woman than the mainstream movie people have managed to scrape together.

So I think this calls for a brief moment of Kimberly Kane Appreciation.

Kimberly has been Scully, Beverly Crusher,  Maude Lebowski and a blue alien...

...she's turning into a pretty good photographer...

...missed dinner last night because she was working for the Free Speech Coalition, rolls more 20s than any player I've ever seen...

...and anybody who's seen our D&D show knows she's really good with a lasso

The Escapist : I Hit It With My Axe : Episode Eight: Don't Tell Us, Right Now!

....and, in general, a fucking warrior.

Also, her character sheets are totally metal:

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And, by the admittedly not terribly high standards of the adult film industry, she's pretty professional.

So she did some research, which consisted of coming over to our house and asking Mandy to show her Wonder Woman comics.

So Mandy showed her the George Perez run...

...and Adam Hughes covers...

...and the Justice League cartoon...

..and I told her that the guy who created Wonder Woman was a shrink who invented part of the modern lie detector test who believed in therapeutic bondage to prepare men for a coming female-dominated future and lived with his wife and girlfriend. Which is true.

So, y'know, ClubD&DWithPornStars is doing its part to keep standards high in the world of Movies You Get For Your Birthday From People You're Not Sure Like You.

Cheers.
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Watch me fidget a lot

Interview about game stuff.

Also: Trigger warning, brief discussions of necrobestiality and related topics as well as a great deal of me going "It's like, y'know...".

Satine runs a game...

<---(Satine shown here totally not in the middle of running a game) So my 5th level thief, Blixa, started life as a Warhammer PC. He then, through the magic of FLAILSNAILS Google + games, has migrated through the D&D retroclone Swords & Wizardry, then AD&D, possibly Mentzer red box-era D&D in there, Labyrinth Lord (another clone), Lamentations of the Flame Princess: Weird Fantasy, and now, for his greatest challenge ever, we took this 3d6-rolled-in-order schmuck and kitted him out with skills, feats and dailies so he can roll 4th Edition style (and his little dog, too)...

And--god help us--our girl Satine is the DM.

Actually Satine's been DMing a lot lately since she started organizing twice-weekly games at Meltdown Comics* but since I've been in another country all winter this was my first chance to actually go to the comic book store and see her do it. Some notes:

-Did you see that episode of Axe** where Satine lost her PC and was saying how she'd lost the last one 15 years before? You know how she lost that one? Hell hounds. You know what she had us fight? Hell hounds.

-4e's much-lauded balance relies on several assumptions, one being that your PC has 4e stats. Mine doesn't. He's got a 7 strength, 7 con and his best score is a 14 dex. I had to self-balance by trying as hard as possible never to ever do anything that required me rolling the dice. Which is exactly how I run Blixa in every other game. (Thieves suck) (Yet oddly this thief is one of the highest level FLAILSNAILS PCs.)(And people die like flies in those games.)(Go figure.)

-Satine's good at describing things as they happen "It explodes and there's a shimmer of light..." etc. and has an admirably relaxed attitude toward the Rules As Written. We're doing group initiative f'r'example. World hasn't ended yet.

-So I'm in a ring of fire, right? Because I brought flaming oil with me and these are ice hell hounds...

-Best 4e moment of the night: So all the other players are totally new to the game--this is their first campaign (and they're so sweet). This one kid is trying to shoot a hellhound with an arrow and decides he'll run so that me and my ring of fire are between him and the hell hound, then shoot an arrow through the flame, so it catches on fire on the way and then hits the hell hound. Excellent***.

-Worst 4e moment of the night: The brand new girl (the D&DMelt crowd is about 20% female) with her psion has seriously this 4 page character sheet and has to wade through it like a bucket of pint tar every round. Satine did a good job of priming the kids with "Hey you can do whatever you want, these are just some of the things you can do" but still, a 4e sheet is a lot to handle and poorly organized. And the fact that the online builder does it for you means the new girl wasn't along for the ride in making all these numbers happen so she doesn't remember them.

-Kinda What You'd Expect 4e moment of the night: The new girl finally finds the part of her character sheet where she can use her brain powers to make the hellhounds fight each other. Everybody is like Whoa, you're awesome! She seems much happier and more relaxed and pro-active once we're out of combat rounds.

-So there's one of those situations where you grab an NPC to interrogate and eventually--you guessed it--the NPC loses an ear. That always happens. Do you blame Tarantino or Lynch or do you blame ears? They look so cut-offable.

-The kids love Satine. It's cute. I hope they aren't traumatized when she kills them.

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*Hollywood geography lesson: Meltdown Comics, by dint of being in central Hollywood across from Guitar Center and also massive, is sort of the Hollywood funtelligentsia's front lawn, like you take the MGM executive you're trying to talk into producing your Alita Battle Angel movie to eat at Toi across the street and then go buy an Alita Battle Angel comic book so you can go "See she looks like this?" and then he goes "I get it, I get it...I'm seeing...Cameron Diaz?" and then you cry--with the much smaller and less vinyl-toy-infested Secret Headquarters in Silver Lake being more the same cohort's den/drawing room, like where you go to meet up with the other screenwriters and special effects guys and DJs and go "Cameron Diaz? I know, right, but I'm getting 9 figures just for the treatment so fuck it".

**There's currently some propaganda telling you to join the marines at the beginning of the video. Don't join the marines.

***Even if there's no way I would've let him do that. Unless maybe he coated the arrow in oil first. But hey, adventure is the aestheticization of physics