Thread by @OneShotRPG

Reading the #CAHisOver tag is embarrassing and shameful because of how often I was willing to overlook glaring flaws in the name of civility and *potential* opportunity.

CAH (the game) sucks. It feels bad to play and it is nakedly indulgent of privilege and violence.

It's a huge box of micro and macro agressions tailor made for privileged people to splash around in.

That's something obvious that I knew two rounds into my first time playing.

It's a thing that lots of folks who I generally think of as good people ignore when they played the game or tolerated the CAH brand in their spaces.

There are lots of reasons that people gritted their teeth and smiled along.

The most stomach twistingly shameful one (for me) is the hope for prosperity. I hopefully don't need to explain that the tabletop industry is not super lucrative. That's true for a lot of arts.

And that fact is how so many people get drawn into the CAH orbit. Including me.

Back in 2013-early 2014, OSN was in an early infancy Campaign hadn't even started yet, and we were looking to grow.

I was looking for ways to get attention to my show, because it was more popular than anything I had done and I needed that to keep going.

I had been rejected for performance teams from the two thearters I gave a damn about, and felt my dream dying.

Folks involved with CAH were huge targets for me because they were a games company that had real money. Not only that, they were involved with so many exciting *things* in the nerdy art scene.

They had a large office dedicated to game design– and in a way– comedy writing. They had theater, a podcast studio, and huge piles of cash they seemingly wanted to throw away.

It felt like every successful person I knew was somehow working with them or knew them. This company was the key to financial stability, artistic validation, and away from a creeping sense of failure.

Alongside my partners, I tried to meet these people and get in their good graces. I cared about what they could do for me and my company more than anything– which is oppertuistic and gross.

And I was willing to compromise my distaste for the cornerstone of their empire.

I told myself that I would use their notoriety to benefit marginalized designers. That if I could get a CAH founder on the show I would have them play an indie by someone unknown and that would somehow erase the compromise I was making.

I am so grateful they brushed me off.

I asked Tempkin personally to be on One Shot at a live event. He agreed and had an assistant reject me over email when I tried to schedule it.

(Part of me will always think it was because I tried to explain that we had already featured an Avery Alder game after he suggested we play The Quiet Year. I felt CAH noteriety could better help a lesser known designer)

The information about the accusation against Tempkin was out at that time, but we learned about it afterwards.

You'd hope when I found out this would be a lesson learned and bullet dodged situation. But CAH controlled so much of the arts and game infostructure in Chicago.

Sortly after this we were invited to join the Chicago Podcast Co-Op, a CAH backed collective ad selling program. It was supposed to let small and big shows alike profit from selling ad space to clients who normally would never work with shows of that size.

At the time, One Shot and Campaign were *desperate* for money. We had an extremely bad hosting service that was charging us *per-download.*

We worked hard to get in, because any way to mitigate costs and keep the show on the air was worth it.

That led to us reading a ton of CAH ads– which are still on my shows.

When we started producing NPC, CAH was starting Black Box– a fulfillment service for small companies like OSN. They were offering shipping close to cost and handling all the logistics.

Companies like that are everywhere now, but at the time it was a miracle.

I was terrified my lack of executive function was going to ruin our game. So I worked hard to get into their pilot program.

Until very recently, they were *the* OSN distributors.

As recently as last year I was hoping my spouse would be hired by Black Box. Despite it being associated with CAH and Tempkin, because we had no insurance, only my meager income, and we still want to start a family.

All these times in my life I looked past glaring flaws in an organization that relies on a sort of toxicity that is fundamentally opposed to what I believe in and what OSN fights for.

I did it because I wanted security, stability, and comfort. And that was fucking wrong.

It took reading tweets in #CAHisOver to own up to the shame I feel for associating with CAH an their brand even second hand.

I have to reckon with the fact that their ad copy is in my archives and work to get rid of it.

As a person who has recently come to terms with the fact that I was sexually assaulted, I have to reckon with the fact that I looked past the allegations against Tempkin for nearly every one of these situations.

I am pointing this out because I have to aknowlege that any association between myself, my company, and CAH lent them credibility and made me complicit in their ability to hurt people.

My history of hanging around CAH is a detstable expression of my privilege that I have to own and correct.

CAH hurt my friends and made me confront ugly aspects of my own personality.

Which I suppose in a perverse way is what that fucking game is designed to do.