Who? What is relation to gameing?

Who? What is relation to gameing?

Zak Smith (I)

Here's a list of his most lauded products:
Maze of the Blue Medusa
Vornheim: The Complete City Kit
A Red & Pleasant Land
Death Frost Doom

And he had a very popular blog called D&D with Porn Stars and his brand was "I Hit it with my ax"

And he was a PAID consultant for D&D 5e - his name is listed in the credits, along with a couple of other dumpster fire individuals.

Mike Mearls defended WotC's use of his by citing that the evidence of his abuse was thin.

This guy has been a dumpster fire for years. He harassed and doxxed some of my personal friends several years ago and I have steered clear of him since then. I am glad that Mandy was finally able to remove herself from the situation and feel secure enough to speak her truth.

There are many, many women who have been yelling about his behavior - for literally years. But they were shut down and ignored. One of them even left the gaming industry as a result. He is an expert gaslighter and manipulator and many people have fallen for his crap. It is too easy to believe a white man with talent than a few women who get branded as crazy b*tches.

This guy has lots of supporters and defenders. He still wins Ennies like there's no tomorrow. Several women (and a few men) walked out of the Ennies when he was going up to give his acceptance speech. People ignored the women and continued to laud him.

was drama surrounding him and then became aware he was an online jerk. But there were always people defending him and everything seemed complicated and trivial I didn't pay it too much attention.

...but it seemed like a lot of he-said-she-said with unpleasant mob behavior on both sides.

Also his work was good, Maze of the Blue Medusa is a mega dungeon I want to run. Frostbitten & Mutilated was something I was going to buy based off his prior work. But not now.

I agree with Sam that his stuff is really, really good. But it's not like he's the only one able to cure cancer or something. There's plenty of other good, creative people out there who don't come with that degree of baggage. (Ditto for Polanski and Allen.)

I completely agree. But it does leave me pondering what to do with the stuff of his I already own. Burn it? Keep it? Sell it?
A Red & Pleasant Land was a gift from the rpggeek gift exchange that I was exceptionally stoked to get.

John - if you feel the need to do something, auction it off and donate the proceeds to a fitting cause. And if you want to engage with the material later on, I'd be happy to run this on the Geek one day.
(I see no point in deleting my pdf, tbh; and now that I already own it, I might as well make use of it without endorsing the author in person.)

Here is more info on the original WOTC response: http://failforward.co.uk/post/93348768153/how-dungeons-and-d...

A lot of the history and issues are in this article or alluded to in the article.

Personally I sold all of the material that had his name on it. But I do not presume to know what anyone else should do - that is a personal decision for people to decide individually based on their own personal reasons.

Looking back I think some of the things he and his supporters did very well was to
- Keep the conversation fragmented. There are bits on twitter, bits on G+, bits on forums.
- Reduce the incidents down to individual things. I remember from law school a discussion of circumstantial evidence, if there was blood on the accused hands, his story where he was at the time is convenient, all of his family were murdered but not him, his computer looks as if the time log was changed around the time of the murder, viewed together those are some pretty convincing arguments. However the common defense in a courtroom is to tackle them individually, the blood was from when he touched the (already dead) victims, the computer wasn't passworded. You don't address the totality and instead keep trying to frame the issues as small. Looking at the stream of blogposts, G+ discussions, and overall communication your term of dumpster fire is very good. But at the time I saw each one individually all I saw was 'one internet spat about X'.
- I do think Zak S getting credits on printed books created a level of authenticity. I think (much like Gareth-Michael Skarka) he was very good at playing nice/nice enough with those whose complaints would be taken seriously.