I'm Going To Break Some News About The New Marvel Multiverse Role-Playing Game

As far as I know--nobody knows what I'm about to write but me and the chain of people who got it to me, so it's breaking news.

There's a new Marvel superhero RPG. Though playtest kits have been out for at least a year, the final game seems to have come out in early August:

It says its by a longtime industry hack named Matt Forbeck:

But documents I've got suggest it's not.

Apparently the bulk of the game is by Alex Macris, the guy who was (rightly) drummed out of the RPG industry because he worked closely with Breitbart right-wing mouthpiece Milo Yiannopoulos,  and the guy who me and the D&D With Porn Stars crew parted ways with because he hired a transphobe. Yiannopoulos is famous far outside the RPG sphere.

How do I know this? 

Well, basically, because folks in the RPG industry destroyed my life and I had to sue lots of them for defamation, I've spent the last 5 years collecting every piece of information I could on all the worst people in the RPG scene--very much including Macris and Forbeck.

And one of the folks feeding me information happened to be in Macris' discord group, and Macris spilled his guts to them.

Here are the screenshots, Macris is "Archon", the other person is my source (not a native english speaker so that's why the grammar's weird):

These screenshots are pretty much all I know--that and that Macris and Forbeck are both very bad people who have done very bad things in the past.

Obviously if I start asking questions, nobody will answer. But you should.

If anyone in the game press wants to figure out what's going on--Matt Forbeck's website is here.

And his twitter is here.

The dedicated reddit for the game is here.

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Collectivity, Cooperation and Challenge

Failures of Collective Spirit

Everyone on the internet, and many people who aren't, have had an experience like this:

-"Hey guys don't we all love this boat we're on!"

-"Yes we do! Or, at least--it is better than having no boat!" all agree

-"Ok, do whatever, have fun doing your thing just please nobody press the red button or the boat will explode!"

-Someone--just for funsies, or for clown clout--presses the red button.

-Boat explodes. Everyone regrets this.

--

This is a failure of collectivity.

That is: a set of behaviors that everyone involved acknowledges benefits everyone, including themselves, and someone just cannot stop themself from putting some other short-term personal goal first.

--

In a role-playing game one of the fun parts is having your PC do weird or funny stuff, things you wouldn't do in a more practical world--the fun of being someone else.

In a role-playing game with a heavy challenge element (one where there's a real threat that you will lose a character and therefore no longer be able to play the game in the specific way you were having fun playing it and have to start over and do it a different way) the usual best strategy to succeed in the challenge is to engage in collective thinking.

This can involve explicit planning--"We all benefit if we kill the monster and get the treasure, so let's pay attention to who we each are as a group and figure out how to use those aptitudes to best do that", but it can also involve just, as a player, being aware of who the other peoples' characters are and what they can do.

Many people experience a mild conflict here in the moment:

• They want to succeed!
• They also wanna do what they wanna do because its playtime, dammit!
• (Also sometimes failing because one PC cannot help but be the squeaky wheel they are is fun, too.)

--

Outside a role-playing game online there are other obvious examples of this in forums online:

For example, there's no piece information that can be passed on via namecalling on a forum that can't be passed on in some other way, but someone will, eventually, always do it even when there's an explicit rule against it. Somebody gets bounced and nobody is hurt but them.

Every time somebody does one of these things they're failing to act in a way that's best for everyone--including them--and they know it, but they just can't stop themself.

--

D&D and Cooperation

D&D is very much a game about cooperation.

It is much more so than most triple-A video games or nearly any other popular entertainment you'll be involved with outside of actual sports.

This is an oddly-smothered point.

The Lord of the Rings is a trilogy about cooperation, as is Star Wars. The ideal that people with diverse skillsets and attitudes need to work together to achieve laudable long-term goals is deep deep in the DNA of the media that inspired most RPGs.

The current post-5e, post-Critical Role, post-D&D The Movie temperature of conversation about D&D broadly online emphasizes many things including:

-Character-creation options (related to conversations about peoples' interest in video game character gen options) and the ability to use them to express yourself

and

-Progressive social principles.

Considering this, its very odd that one of D&D's radiant innate progressive virtues--the emphasis on working together--isn't placed front and center all the time.

--

Here's Why

Despite any open claims of holding to progressive principles, the people most responsible for the current conversation in RPGs absolutely suck at collective thinking. So many pay more attention to what happens to an imaginary orc than to a real human player at the table with them.

I know. I've seen them play games. I was often in games with them.

Right now the conversation is defined by:

-the post-Storygame narrativist scene which largely grew out of people being unable to communicate with their fellow D&D or Vampire or RIFTS groups, especially in challenge-oriented play and so invented games full of rules to police interhuman communication or simply gatekeep any player out unless that player wanted to play the exact narrowly-defined microsubgenre of game they themselves wanted to play instead of just agreeing they all wanted the fucking ring to go in that fucking volcano

and

-2010s OSR veterans who, when given a choice between politely asking one sacred crackpot friend to stop lying on the internet or letting the entire ship sink, absolutely chose letting the ship sink

I reiterate-I have seen these people play games. 

They are absolutely blown away by 101-level collective-success tactics. See you're outnumbered? Back up, close the door, pour flaming oil on the floor, drop marbles in the oil, have a resilient PC hold a torch over the oil (remember which PCs are resilient!), ready to drop it, protect the wizards. Works all the time.

They are filled with shock and awe by even just the most basic gestures in this direction, they will make you leader immediately.

Patrick Stuart once killed one of Zach Marx Weber's PC because he thought throwing green slime on him would help.

If the current version of progressivism in the RPG scene seems oddly fascist, I'd posit this is why--these are the people who have absolutely zero practice self-governing, who made their clout by talking about how they were proudly unable to play with anyone else and needed very new very specific new gates built to keep people out rather than just learning how to throw a party.

-

-

Idiots With Benefits

Before I go into real news, legal update/rumor control: In 2021 a judge tried to dismiss my defamation case against Gen Con—this was much celebrated by right wing douchenozzles on twitter. I appealed to a higher court, won, & the case was back on. Oddly, the douchenozzles didn’t spread the word about that. Well the same judge just tried it again. The right wing douchenozzles are celebrating again, like they forgot this already happened. Obviously I’ll just appeal again to the same higher court.

So, anyway something else that happened last week was interesting.

• A couple of Gen Con's fellow right-wing hatemob members named (on Twitter anyway) panny_lines and aledlawlor have a little company called Leyline Press.
• They hired someone to edit one of their RPGs.
• They then fired them when they found out that they'd once worked for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, the company that published most of my game stuff. They also erased his name from the credits.
• They then made a very vague announcement about their very vague right-wing problems they had with LotFP. They made the word "problematic" do a lot of work.
• Now here's the strange thing, something that hasn't happened during the last 4 years of hatemobbing: people noticed--and did something about it.
• Lamentations then announced a big sale.
• Lamentations then sold a phenomenal amount of product:

And keeps selling a phenomenal amount:

Now this was just a pdf sale, that ends tomorrow.

A sale on printed stuff starts today.

Action is good.

Fix things.

Ask Them Why.

I sued again. It worked. Again.

-

In 2019, by taking advantage of my estranged and mentally-ill ex, basically the entire tabletop RPG industry decided to start harassing me.

It worked. They destroyed my entire life. I had a career inside RPGs, I had a (much larger) career outside RPGs selling paintings. I had a social life. All that was annihilated.

This is my eviction notice--because I couldn't pay the rent because of this:

This is my food stamp card--because I can't afford food because of this::

This is where my 5 missing teeth used to be--because I couldn't afford to get them fixed because of this:

This is what happened when I sued Ettin / Paul Matijevic, a Something Awful troll and RPGnet moderator in Australia, where he lives, for claiming I abused and harassed people:

This is what happened when I sued the game streamer Vivka Grey, in Los Angeles, where she lives, for claiming I abused and harassed people:

This is what happened when Vivka Grey sued me back, claiming I was lying when I defended myself:

And, now, if you were on the internet yesterday, you might've seen this:

-

I haven't lost a case yet.

For years everyone has been telling me how hard it is to win a defamation case in the US.

Fewer than 5% of civil cases go to trial.

Viv, for one, admits to having spent over half a million dollars on her cases, yet I won while evicted, on food stamps, and missing five teeth.

You may have heard about my case against GenCon being dismissed. It was. Then I appealed. Only about 20% of appeals are successful. I appealed, it worked.

And then everybody was telling me how hard it was to sue overseas--how would you collect? You collect the same way people overseas pay for anything else, with the internet. It's 2023.

Everyone who was screaming at you about me was wrong. Again.

How long can hundreds of nerds be wrong before just admitting it?

-

Both in court and on the internet, when anyone anywhere is asked to produce any proof I did anything bad they come up empty. 

This is especially significant considering how many people are claiming I did bad online things--things that should be able to be proved with a fucking screenshot. Nobody has been able to come up with thing one.

Basically, every single thing a person could possibly do to prove they're innocent, I did. In person, on video, via tweet, in court, out of court, you name it--I have been subjected to every kind of scrutiny from every direction for longer than it'd take to earn a Bachelor's.

If you still think I did something wrong, I'm not asking "provide proof" (there isn't any), I'm just asking, for the millionth time: Why? What makes you personally believe any of this shit? 

-When at least a dozen of the people who spread this bullshit have been, themselves, cancelled?

-When the original beef that all the Something Awful goons (like Ettin) had was fake allegations of transphobia against someone whose main online defenders are trans, who repeatedly got trans people hired, and gave up a 5-figure contract to protest transphobia?

-When the original beef that all the story game designers had was a bunch of shit nobody now believes about the supposed objective inferiority of Old School games or people who played them?

-When there's video evidence that the people who started this particular round of harassment turned out to be lying out their asses?

-When the excuse that I have a trust fund turns out to be bullshit because I don't?

-When the excuse that "well the laws are different there" turns out to be bullshit because I won in the US, too?

-When the excuse that I was "obnoxious" has to be put side by side with but you lied about rape?

What the fuck reason do they have left?

Ask them. Ask for the receipts that justify their hate.

Ask WOTC and Hasbro what's left of their reasons for doing this..

Ask GenCon what's left.

Ask Matt Mercer what's left.

Ask the folks at Green Ronin Games what's left.

Ask the guys at Mothership what's left.

Ask Patrick Stuart and Gus L and Arnold K and Noisms over at Monsters and Manuals and all the other OSR people what's left.

Ask Chris McDowall and the OSR discord what's left.

Ask Sandy Pug Games and Tin Star Games what's left.

Ask the Troika folks what's left.

Ask all the sacred crackpots what's left.

Ask Ramanan and Grey Wizard working on BREAK! what's left.

Ask Crystal Frasier and Jessica Price --formerly of Paizo--what's left.

Ask Andy Kitkowski--the founder of Story-Games.com--and Ron Edwards--leading light of the Forge--what's left.

Ask RPGnet and reddit/RPG and reddit/OSR what's left.

Ask OneBookShelf what's left.

When every single reason for hurting someone has been proven by time and by inquiry and by the law to be bullshit, what claim are they hanging on to?

Ask for the receipts. Ask why they ever believed any of it. Ask if they think their reasons were good. Ask if they're even capable of changing their minds.

Please ask them for me.

Ask because I can't do it because I'm busy moving because I can't live in my apartment any more, and my friends here can't because they're busy helping me. 

And when you ask these people, remind them: I will never give up. So if they've got reasons, they'd better be real sure what they are.

-

-

A Gift To Jojiro

So, since I won, more apologies are trickling in. Which is good: every public apology is one less person I might have to sue.

But a lot of people are doing weird in-between things, here's a telling example:

Once upon a time there was someone screen-named Jojiro or Ant Wu.

In the beforetimes, they liked my game stuff and started social media-ing me.

Then they were casually in a conversation and started namecalling at someone. I was like "Hey, this is a place for grown-ups, we don't do that, you're banned" and Jojiro was like "Wait, wait! I want to talk".

So, I set up a Zoom call. On this Zoom call I patiently explained to what appeared to be an actual human adult that it is not good to announce your issues with a fellow human adult you share space with in the form of namecalling.

Just like every other time I did this, it worked.  Because there is no sane argument a person can make in real time against "If you have an issue with someone tell them like a grown up".

This seemed to have an oddly profound effect on Jojiro. For a long time Jojiro started talking to lots of people in their life like fucking adults instead of 4chan trash. Jojiro's life improved. Jojiro made this claim frequently.

But also, just like every other time a gamer troll got confronted, they eventually backslid. They joined the hatemob and were extremely active in hatemob spaces in the early days, pushing for my life to be destroyed. 

But they would post conflicted things like this (from the OSR Discord)...

...where they are still very active.

After I announced won, they sent me this:

I'll open with the most relevant thing. I'm sorry. I fucked up.

This is Anthony Wu/Jojiro.

In 2019 I said I had a hard time believing your story regarding Mandy and co.

In the intervening years I maintained this position in more conversations than I can count. With the passing of time, I now believe that I was wrong. The process by which I've come to that belief is independent of evidence or the court case. It was a BPD friend of mine from childhood flipping out on me about totally false premises that convinced me - nothing like your situation, but she painted me as an abusive friend, citing events that didn't ever exist in reality. This is not ideal, I think, by your values as I understand them - ideally it would be fact-checking, and not personal hurt, that would inspire my apology to you. I've wondered if there's any point in apologizing, when my apology is so far from what you actually want people to do.

Oh well. You've said that apologies matter to you - not in a personal sense, but in the sense that you thought humanity was more normal, sane, and good when people apologized for being wrong. In lieu of that - I'm sorry. I was wrong.

You've also said that when people make public attacks, they should make public apologies.

I've not the moral fortitude for that - I've no plan to go and rescind every single wrong thing I've said about you. I've stopped, certainly, but I've done damage to you, and this is me admitting that I've no plan to go and undo the damage.

If that admission positions this email as a pointless apology - fair enough.

Still felt that I should send it.

Congratulations on your legal victory against Vivka.

---

Proof below:

So Jojiro, I will be patient and generous with you again, accept this gift.

While you not have the "moral fortitude" to go public and apologize and help fix the problem you created, I did it for you.

Gygax vobiscum.

-

-

-

What, if anything, was your understanding of the phrase "Group titfuck bonanza"?

From Viv's "Dread" Character Sheet

Previously on D&D With Pornstars: We had a trial. I won. Details.

Today on D&D With Pornstars: A trial excerpt. Because trials are funny.

-

[Context: Viv had claimed that I talked with a level of sexual frankness she wasn’t comfortable with etc. ]

(lawyer) MR SELF: Can you please help us understand what you understand to be written in the top of page 2-18?

MR SMITH: Okay. so this is -- you want me to read the whole thing from my pov?

MR SELF: Yes, please.

JUDGE: And what page are you on, two?

MR SMITH: 2-18.

MR. SELF: 2-18, top of the page.

MR SMITH: So, "re, a much more civilized means of communication." V stands for Vivid. That's Vivid's -- Viv's e-mail address. There's a date in January which I actually have a hard time reading. And it says wednesday. “Oh, fine, leave me to wallow in pain and braces and give myself post surgery boob rubdowns." She's referring to her plan to get breast implants.

(lawyer) MS. KRIEGER: I'm sorry, object to his characterization of what she was intending. Calls for speculation.

MR SMITH: Okay.

JUDGE: Overruled. Go ahead.

MR SMITH: Mandy -- then there's —I think like she's sticking out her tongue that -- I think that's what that is. "Mandy is going to school ... you guys get back, and bam, group tit fuck bonanza. Then you will be a lucky guy." Then is in all caps.

And that -- I don't know what that -- [reading viv's email] "Wow, better not have been sarcastic. threatens with thumb of fury. hearts, pretty hearts, xo xo."

Q BY MR. SELF: Mr. Smith, do you here today in 2021 recall seeing the statement you just read to us at the time that it was published?

MR SMITH: Did I read it in 2010 when I got it as an e-mail, yeah. Yes.

MR SELF: Do you remember reading it?

MR SMITH: Yeah. I remember -- I remember -- yeah. Yes.

[You’re not supposed to say “yeah” or “uh huh” at trials, because its hard on the stenographer, but I keep forgetting.)

MR SELF: What do you remember, if at all, was your understanding of that phrase "group tit fuck bonanza"?

MR SMITH: That we were like -- Viv was going to get breast implants and we are all having sex. And that was -- having sex and specifically —I don't know if there's any other way to say “tit fucking” except for “tit fucking”. I apologize to the court, but yeah.

[I looked it up: “mammary intercourse”]

MR SELF: Based on your experience with the defendant, did Ms. Grey seem easily embarrassed or humiliated about things of a sexual nature?

MR SMITH: Not at all. in fact it was one of the things that we liked about her. She's very kind of crude and frank and --

MR SELF: Pronouns. When you say we?

MR SMITH: Amanda Nagy. Ms Nagy and I liked about that she was very frank, open, honest about everything sexual, you know.

MR SELF: Based on your experience as Ms. Nagy's husband, would you characterize Ms Nagy as having been open and frank about sexuality in matters of a sexual nature at that time as well?

MR SMITH: Almost more than any living human, yes.

MR SELF: What about you, Mr. Smith? How open, if at all, were you regarding matters of a sexual nature in and around 2011?

MR SMITH: Very open. I had just published a book called “We Did Porn," which was a memoir about working in the sex industry. So yeah.

MR SELF: Real briefly, what -- tell us -- give us a summary, synopsis of that memoir.

MR SMITH: It talks about how i got into the business out of -- I was a working artist before, and still was, and then working on movies and meeting Mandy and -- Amanda Nagy, Ms. Nagy, and other people we knew in the industry by the time I had written the book. So covered a few years of the beginning at that. It also had art in it, drawings.

Mr Self: Do you remember a song by a Detroit artist named DJ assault?

MR SMITH: Yeah.

MR SELF: That was --

MR SMITH: “Ass and Titties." Viv introduced it to us. We were trying to play a game [Dread], and it was a game where people can be eliminated. And Viv got eliminated first, and so she started playing this song "Ass and Titties." And the lyrics are just "Ass, titties, ass, ass, ass, ass, ass, ass, ass, titties, titties, titties." And she was -- you know, that was Viv.

-

-

-

Another Theory Tested (Harry Potter And The Sourest Grape)

One Nice Thing

One nice thing is that for a long time I had no idea there was a new Harry Potter game out.

Nobody in my real life talks about it, nobody in my social media feed talks about it, it's--as it should be--a non-thing. Even among people I knew who used to like Harry Potter--even among people who now have hastily-covered-up Harry Potter tattoos--even from trans friends who once were deeply invested in the franchise.

But then--because I have to check on the worst people in games all the time for legal reasons--I found out there was one.

I wouldn't have thought much of it except--they are all talking about it all the time. Hundreds of them.

Congratulating each other for realizing Harry Potter is bad is now their personality in the same way complaining about official D&D's whole Open Game License fuck-up was their whole personality last week and complaining about me was their whole personality in 2019.

And the same way liking Harry Potter was their personality before that.

Lots of media is made by terrible transphobic people--but they're especially mad about Harry Potter because they fucking loved Harry Potter.

The Soft Smack

Anybody might like any thing for any stupid reason, but before JK Rowling revealed herself to be not just boring but also evil, Harry was frequently recruited by harassers in RPG circles to make a point about how bad it was to like cool, metal things like Warhammer or Jack Vance.

Harry was not like all the terrible nasty media that Old Schoolers liked a lot where push frequently came to shove and shove came to blood and blood came to axes and fire and people sometimes fuck or think, Harry was accessible, Harry was unproblematic, Harry was diverse, Harry wore sweaters, when people died it was emotional and earned because character development, Harry was Young Adult friendly and Dumbledore was gay and the only time anything was sexy it was in fanfic written by tumblr people, and Harry was, above all, soft.

Harry was a symbol for nightmare nerds of all that was wholesome and undifficult.

One RPGnet mod used to tag "10 points to Gryfindor!" when backslapping friends for outstanding feats of online harassment. Former-Pathfinder-employee-turned-professional-Karen Jessica Price once wrote about how since "spirit animal" was so problematic, we should all just say "Patronus" instead.

Which is so cringey that a joke newspaper that probably never heard of her repeated it years later as satire.

The Drama Club Theory of Harry Potter was simple:

1. Good people liked wholesome media where wholesome things happened and that could be shared with the children they would eventually have or already had

2. And this was somehow not a facemeltingly reactionary concerned-parent take but in fact a bold and progressive stance in These Troubled Times

The Failed Test

Just as the theory about morally improving games has been tested and disproved so has this one. They were proven wrong. Rowling's trash and so are zillions of her most devoted fans.

It's hard admit the club you were hitting people over the head with for 20 years is made of human shit.

So instead of apologizing to the people they attacked and talking up something actually cool like Adventure Time, they are rebranding as people so angry about a video-game no well-informed grown-up cares about that they have to tell everyone it exists.

I lay odds this exact thing will happen again with Steven Universe in the next 10 years and, again, no-one will learn a single lesson from it.

The Price of Painkillers

My ex- used to listen to the audiobooks and movies to go to sleep, so I know the story much better than most things I don't like.

Aside from the issue of just how every generation is going to need some relatively long and relatively literary fantasy novel readable by children written in a version of the english language they'll recognize as of-their-own-time, the only distinguishing thing about Harry Potter is its unusually full-throated embrace of the aesthetics of comfort.

Squashy armchairs, butterbeer, kids living in castles, bumbling idiot villains, shapeless outfits, plots so casual characters forget them because they keep going to class, authority figures who are not only good and wise and all-powerful yet non-threatening because old and gay they also respect you personally and say it a lot, domesticated goblins, wands instead of any more interesting or scary weapon, reading presented as the be-all end-all of fighting evil, and all this even as the stakes rise to death and genocide. All in prose so bloodless it made Peter Rabbit look like Les Chants de Maldoror.

It's as if the whole of Lord of the Rings took place in Hobbiton. The British genius for coziness-uber-alles given full vent over stressful social concerns like how to dress for a date or feed yourself--or anyone else.

If you dreamed you'd leave your shitty family and go to school and there discover you're really good at everything that matters with no work and have everyone decide you are an awesome celebrity because of your trauma and then successfully fight for what's right by pointing your finger at people and saying words while wearing glasses, Harry Potter is the power fantasy for you.

It was meant to be, by its author, a monstrous, thoughtless person who thinks she's being socially progressive by avoiding any invitation to engage her victims.

Again: there's nothing wrong with liking that story or any other--but wielding it should have always been suspicious. It's not a coincidence that all the people who did that as adults to other adults later turned out to be yes, actually, really bad at real-word problems and being adults.

It should be no surprise that, like Rowling, these people thought of "This conversation makes me uncomfortable" as a reason to leave it.

-

-

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Dear Fiona Geist,

This is the fourth time I've tried to contact you about getting paid for your work on Demon City.

Our original deal was the standard one I did with contributors: you help write a section or edit some stuff and in exchange you get whatever you want, within reason--I could write, edit or draw something for you or just throw you some cash.

Before telling me what you wanted in return for the work you did, around Februrary 2019, you stopped answering messages or emails and wrote a public blog entry saying what you wanted as compensation was for me to publicly lie about a felony.

Since that's not just morally wrong and illegal but would also make it harder to bring my abusers to justice in order to prevent them from hurting more people, I can't pay you that way. 

I've tried contacting you privately, but no answer (last attempt was 3/3/2021). I think people should get paid for their work so I am making one last effort by posting this in public--since I know you read this blog.

So, email me at zakzsmith AT hawtmayle dawt calm.

-Z

The Jeff to Patrick OSR Continuum

Basics

• OSR stands for "Old School Renaissance"--a resurgence in interest in pre-90s RPGs that began around the time blogging became a thing online and influences products to this day by people who want to do something new and creative with RPGs but don't think D&D makes people into Nazis or want to hang out with people who do. A small community, perhaps, but one still capable of running a Kickstarter
• While some products or creators or commenters that might be considered "OSR" existed before this, the most important person in the early OSR was Jeff Rients of the venerable Jeff's Gameblog. It goes all the way back to 2004. If you read it, you can see OSR ideas clarify themselves one by one in real time.
• I--much influenced by Jeff--showed up gameblogging years later, in 2009.
• Patrick Stuart--of the False Machine blog and Veins of the Earth etc.--showed up after me, saying explicitly that he was--in turn--much influenced by me, especially by Vornheim.
• Since they were both really influential OSR creators with lots of ideas (and ones I liked and got along with), it always seemed odd to me that the two of them didn't talk much.

I have two points to make here:

1. I think of all OSR game products as existing on a continuum from Jeff-ish to Patrick-y.

2. By what is honestly coincidence, it could be fairly claimed that Jeff Rients created the OSR community and Patrick Stuart destroyed it.

The Continuum

The Jeff Rients' End

Jeff is an incredibly experienced DM (example) whose style reflects having run games for strangers and friends at home, in game stores, and at conventions for longer than many of us have been alive.

His blog, GM style, and game products reflect that experience: how to make sure people have fun.

On the other hand, his game products are few in number and relatively modest. His major thing out is Broodmother Sky Fortress, which is half awesome-adventure-with-tips-for-first-time-GMs and half best-of-Jeff's-Gameblog. The adventure's great but it's pretty short and compact.

Though both I and other people have spent lots of time asking Jeff to put out more product he hasn't--and he once told me his very Jeff reason for this: most of the dungeons he runs are composed a lot of old dungeons mashed together. It's the way he runs them that makes them work.

Jeff has lots of really good ideas for weird things to put in a game, but that's not the center of his aesthetic. The center is: make sure it's playable and fun.

I think a good example of the Jeff Rients aesthetic is the random hireling table in Broodmother Skyfortress: it's a d6 table.

Obviously, if this was a Zak table it would have 100 entries and if it only had 20 then I'd make some excuse like I was trying to fit it on the page with 9 other tables. And every entry would tell you like 4 things minimum about the hireling.

...but I also know what Jeff would say when you ask why it only has 6 entries (including pack-apes, which is cool): Jeff has run dungeons over and over and over and over and over and has found that 6 is enough--after that you get diminishing returns.

So that's Jeff's thing: doing a lot with a little to make sure you have fun.

The Patrick Stuart End

Patrick was not only capable of writing magnificent sentences, he really liked to show you that he was. When I created Maze of the Blue Medusa and wanted to save some time by not writing it all myself, I asked him to collaborate. He's good and has lots of esoteric ideas and the things he writes are brimming with exciting concepts.

On the other hand: 

He never rolls.

Last I knew: he lived alone in the middle of nowhere, UK, he's painfully isolated, his best friend is someone he's never met in real life, he's never had--as an adult--a regular RPG group he met with and doesn't even run his own stuff.

He once told me his favorite-ever session of D&D was one he played online. That's fucked up--and it shows in his work.

Patrick Stuart has not a clue how to make a functional game without help from a collaborator.

So that's Patrick's thing: Doing a whole lot with a lot but without a lot of clear ideas about how to make it fun.

Creating on the Continuum

Unsurprisingly, considering the timeline, I've generally tried to make things that are in the middle, or which have the strengths of both:

Esoteric and well-written enough to be interesting and new, but concise and considered enough to be playable. Whether I've succeeded isn't really the point--that's not up to me--it's just often a real thought I have in my head: "This needs more out-the-box playability--this needs a little more inspiring verbiage". 

That idea's in my head.

And It's Weird Because...

...the OSR kinda did begin and then end with these two guys.

Jeff showed up, wrote about playable things, handled shit right, and--to the degree he took responsibility for people or talked about other peoples' business--had a moral compass.

Patrick started out that way, but was fucking terrible at it because he had no real-life experience with real people. Around 2017 or 18 he started lashing out at basic 101-level rules of healthy human interaction like "Talk to people before assuming crazy shit about them" and "Don't lie".

Unfortunately a lot of creators followed his lead--the people he influenced took Patricks repudiation of things like facts and evidence as a cue that standards for how to treat each other were now lower--and they ran with it.

And now the OSR is not really a thing--creators and moneymaking entities are still here but the community is gone, because in a world run by Patrick rules, nobody is ever accountable for their actions and interacting with other creators is fucking dangerous.

The OSR reddit would, for example, rather just take down a critical post than figure out how to constructively criticize a game...

...

...considering one of the only things the OSR was ever good for was constructively criticizing games, this is pretty fucked up.

I hate it all and I want to die very badly.

Bye.

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I'll Call Him Ed Because I Can't Tell You His Name

I can't tell you his name because 3 years experience shows people--people reading this--will harass his family. I'll call him Ed.

Twelve years ago I had business in...a cold city. I didn't know anyone but Ed's boyfriend.

I stayed at their house. We hung out and watched TV, watched the snow fall. Talked about art, the midwest--which I knew nothing about then. Ed had a collection of cookie jars.

They were nice was the point. Intelligent, incredibly generous, willing to think about things you put in front of them and to put things in front of you so you'd think about them. He wasn't the funny one (the boyfriend was the funny one) but you got the feeling he knew it, which was funny.

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Ed liked my work--he eventually had a stained-glass window made from one of my paintings. I hadn't seen him in years--maybe ten?--when I found out he had one year left to live.

I visited. He wasn't the kind of guy who wanted pity or to talk about the chemo or biopsies or the remaining viable cells. He had lived a life of being the reliable guy and wanted to keep being that guy. The cancer had accelerated his decision to retire but he'd been a very successful lawyer.

So as soon as he's shown me around the apartment--and the new cookie jars. He says "I hear you're dealing with something of a legal situation. I can take a look for you if you like?"

He wanted to do something besides sit around the house and talk to his kids on the phone and wait to die. He said it--plus you could just tell. He read every document, he asked every question, he listened to tapes of hearings, he threw himself into my case(s) whenever his health permitted.

There are things that a lawyer that you're paying might not tell you--because it might involve them getting paid less. Also, just, he'd worked on some of the biggest defamation cases in the country. So, for two years, whenever I was dealing with any big legal decision I'd send it to him and get a second (often third or fifth) opinion. "A judge won't care about that" or "If they said that in that state it's open-and-shut."

He kept not dying. He also kept not wanting to talk about the cancer (I tried because I felt bad he was spending the effort on me) and talk about my case instead.

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He called some months back and asked how all the legal stuff was progressing. It was a little bit of a surprise because up until then he'd waited for me to call him (legal stuff involves a lot of waiting for the court to decide to set a deadline to do a thing). I told him. We're waiting, as usual.

A few weeks later Ed's boyfriend (now ex-) got in touch to tell me Ed had died. Ed had gotten sick of the chemo and decided to just end it--after tying up his loose ends.

Looking at the dates, I realized that call was one of those loose ends.

He'd decided to die and one of the last things to do on this planet was get in touch, check in with me, and help however he could--and not tell me he was about to die. He didn't want pity about cancer, he wanted to do what he could to make sure I was ok, that I wasn't being taken advantage of, that my lawyers were taking the tack that made the most sense, that I was suing the right people, that he called all his people to find out what he could about any judge any of them knew anything about.

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I don't know why I'm telling you this but the reason I'm still here, the reason I'm still alive is because of about two dozen people like Ed in my life. There was only one Ed but there are a lot of Eds: People who have been going through all the shit that life, Covid and the world throw at people and still had time to stop and go "Holy fuck, Zak, this is fucked up" and buy me lunch or give me the number of a guy they know or just show up and type a thing on the internet and let the other Eds know they're not alone.

I will never be able to repay them because either I die or I will live and owe them my life. I'm not a doctor, I'm not an EMT, I'm not a shrink, I don't have any life-saving skills. I can't do what they've done for me.

I also will probably never be able to publicly say their names and, probably, vice versa. Even if I survive, the people who did this will never stop trying to find ways to harm them. But I wanted to say that I appreciate you, not just to Michelle, Kimberly, Charlotte, Sara, and all the people who can speak out publicly, but to all the Ed's out there who can't. My house owes your house a debt it can never repay but I'll do my best to come as close as I can.

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The Real Mandy Morbid (Video)

During this whole legal thing I knew sooner or later that, if Mandy didn't get therapy and instead dragged this out, sooner or later I'd have to go through all the footage we'd all shot over the years.

I resisted doing it basically because, well, we were together for over a decade and there's a lot of it and watching all the footage is painful and when it isn't painful its really boring. But it also shows that Mandy wasn't in any way the person she's pretending to be, so, here we go.

These 4 clips are short.

Here's Mandy and I shooting a session recap for I Hit It With My Axe.

In case you think this is just her lashing out at me, here's how Mandy treated the other girls while playing D&D:

This kind of thing from Mandy was common and most of the women in the Axe group testified to that fact.  Here's one going into extensive detail with me if you haven't seen it.

Why did we all put up with this?

Well back then Mandy was self-aware about her mental illness and how it affected people, and she was once capable of seeing how she's acting and apologizing:

...she isn't any more.

After a decade as a model and stripper and porn actress and whatever, she left all the people in those worlds behind--mostly because they knew she was lying about me.

Apparently her only friends now are gamers or people she's cultivated mostly online relationships with. Last I knew, she was even dating one of the dudes who used to harass us, a former gamer guy who worked at Onyx Path.

She's now completely insulated from reality--as are the folks whose main source of information on this stuff is Mandy herself. She lies a lot and there's a lot of conclusive proof of that. She even admitted to perjury in court.

There's a lot more where this comes from and a lot of it directly contradicts claims she's made under oath. I'll post more video tomorrow.

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The Proof.

Here in year three of legal purgatory, new evidence keeps coming in and turning up and it proves what I've been saying is true. I'll be posting more whenever I have time.

This first one is pretty simple.

Mandy has repeatedly claimed she has never been given a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder. Those exact words.

A pretty simple claim and not too hard to check:

Here's a letter from one of the many mental health professionals Mandy has seen over the years, you can click to enlarge it or just read the excerpt below:

The doctor says Mandy was diagnosed and was treated for Borderline Personality Disorder (aka BPD) for "more than a year".  

And how did Mandy describe her own mental health and diagnosis back in the day, before she decided to make up all these accusations? Here's every page of a handwritten journal entry from her sketchbook:

In case you missed it:

And what did the people who knew her best think? Here's Mandy's closest confidant, her sister, in text messages with me from April 19, 2019--happily texting me two months after Mandy made her accusations online--click to enlarge:

Was she misdiagnosed? Maybe, I'm not a doctor, I didn't even know what BPD was until she told me she had it--when we met. The point is:

• Mandy had severe mental health problems since long before she met me.
• Her close friends and family all knew this.
• Mandy doesn't tell the truth. Even under oath.

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DriveThruRPG basically has banned every RPG book

 Here are the guidelines for DTRPG, the most important online RPG book store:

Neither your Work, description, nor any promotional material, including blog posts or press releases, may contain racist, homophobic, discriminatory, or other repugnant views; overt political agendas or views; depictions or descriptions of criminal violence against children; rape or other acts of criminal perversion; or other obscene material without the express written permission of OneBookShelf.

Racist and homophobic views are bad, there are lots of arguments against obscene content in various private commercial contexts, but what's super wildcat here is this:

...overt political agendas or views...

According to their own guidelines, DriveThruRPG says you cannot have your work on the site if you have blog posts with your overt political views on them.

Now since all public social media communications by RPG creators is (as many have admitted) de facto promotion of their work and Facebook, Twitter et al are blogging/microblogging platforms and basically every single RPG creator has expressed at least one overt political opinion on one of said platforms and, so far as I know, none of them have asked for the "express written permission" of DTRPG, that means pretty much every single RPG book on their is banned.

Please begin reporting creators to DTRPG.

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"Get up. The war has started" Interview from Kyiv

Kyiv.

Hey all, like I promised Friday, here's an interview with a gamer in Kyiv, as the bombs are dropping.

How did this happen? Anton from the metal band Kauan is a fan of my game stuff and Anatoly is also in his band. 

We all want to know what's going down there, so here's an interview. The first thing I asked is who he was, what games he was into, and what's going on. The interview begins with what he said, via Telegram (click to enlarge if it's hard to read):

Imagine paying for Kingdom Death and then having to leave

Territorial Defense Forces, Ukraine

How much debris would it stop?

William T Vollmann, a real nice guy who introduced me to getting shot at in Eastern Europe

Disco Elysium

Vladimir Putin's favorite band

Did you see that? Of course I saw it.

Ok, that's that. If you're interested in the perspective of Russian gamers I am also working on an interview with one of those guys as we speak--hopefully it'll be ready and up within the week.

And for those of you who are like "Yeah yeah international events are very exciting but when are you going to get back to telling us about what you learned from suing Something Awful trolls while suing people?" Well if you're interested in that--don't forget to vote!

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