Grummz Profile picture
Nov 21, 2024 8 tweets 7 min read Read on X
DnD creators, Gygax and others, are erased and slandered at the same time.

WoTC and Hasbro just released the new Players Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide, as well at the 40th Anniversary "Making of DnD" book whose foreward slams the original creators and attempts to distance themselves.

I spoke with one of the original creators, Rob Kuntz @threelinestudio , about the problem.

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One of the main issues, cited Rob, the last surviving member of the OG crew, were the "DnD Historians" who write books and articles about the hobby and are left-leaning and continually slam the "problematic" creators and early books.

The problem? Not once did they ever reach out or ask to interview Rob or many other original creators.

Rob met Gary Gygax when he was a teenager, and joined the company soon after. He co-authored "Deities & Demigods with Jim Ward (whom I had the pleasure of playing in his recreation of the Greyhawk campaign. He is greatly missed.). Rob also assisted Gygax with the creation of the Greyhawk campaign setting.

Rob was so upset by the foreward in "Making of DnD" that he posted a rebuttal on his X account.

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There are a few big lies in the Forward to the official WotC DnD history book:

- DnD promoted slavery.

- DnD made evil dragons female to be misogynistic.

- DnD culturally appropriated Deities and made players fight them in an act of (deliberate) disrespect.

These claims were "backed up" by DnD "historian" @BenRiggs_ in his viral thread attacking OG DnD creators, and were echo'd and amplified by others, widely spreading the lie.

The first claim is largely based on the module "Slave Pits of the Undercity", but one glance at the cover shows that the players are fighting AGAINST slavers and called them "the forces of evil."

But that didn't stop Ben or the Foreward from claiming that DnD was "making light" of slavery in his foaming attack thread.

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The claim about deliberately making Chaotic dragons "female" to be "sexist" in fact shows that the cultural insensitivity is not from the original authors, but out of pure cultural ignorance by these modern day DnD authors and "historians".

Rob explained that Tiamat (the Queen of chaotic dragons) from Dieties and Demigods, which was blasted as "sexist" is actually canonically female and that there was no sexism present, it was simply accurate. Hailing from ancient Mesopotamian culture, Tiamat is also referred to in the original myths as the "primordial goddess of the ocean" representing chaos.

Rob wrote the book, so he should know, but again, that did not stop DnD "historians" from completely getting it wrong and lying again.

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The final big lie in the DnD anniversary Foreward is that Deities and Demigods was culturally appropriating, and that players were expected to kill these Gods in some kind of insensitive and offensive manner.

First of all, Cultural Appropriation is a myth, perpetuated by predominantly white authors on "behalf" of the supposed offended cultures who, in fact, have mostly no issues with this in their native countries.

But Rob explained that these myths and gods were painstakingly researched, in an age before the Internet, with many trips to the library, and with great care.

"Nobody was killing gods, you were supposed to be champions of the different gods. They set this up as a false narrative....You have to include HP and AC (for them) in case someone brings the battle to the God, like God vs God. Gods fought each other, they are always trying to kill each other (in myths)."

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The other claims about DnD being against including women, are debunked by Rob, and Gary's own comments need to be viewed in light of the times. It was the 70's, and the media was hyping up feminism, especially radical feminism hateful towards men. They even had a big network game show at the time "Battle of the Sexes" and everyone had an opinion.

While Gary was definitely against radical feminism, he was inclusive as far as DnD and his company was concerned.

Rob explained:

"This thing starts from a niche of a niche, wargaming. When its niche, it started with men, women were not excluded, but they didn't want to play, they excluded themselves. We were thrilled when women wanted to play."

In fact, it was a challenge to get women to play:

"Gary was not against women playing either. These women were not interested in little toy cannons and shooting toothpicks. They thought it was amusing that their men were playing these things. "

Rob said that they were very grateful for a woman, Lee Gold, for promoting DnD in the early days and getting the attention of more female gamers:

"they claim there is no women activity, but it was the Science fiction fantasy fandom and her articles were a big part of that. wargamers were only 10,000 people."

Lee Gold founded and editing "Alarums and Excursions" which was one of the first amateur press associations dedicated to role-playing games and was fully supported by Gary's company, TSR.

The lie told by DnD "historians" also erases the contributions of women like Lee Gold, and others who participated in, worked at TSR, and helped make DnD a success.

"He hired women all over the place at TSR, even his wife worked there. Mary Dale as gamer during the playtest. 2/3 artist who did illustrations for the box set were women. One was Gygax's sister and Cookie Cory."

A quick search also shows notable early DnD women such as Laura Hickman (illustrator) and Jean Wells (designer) who worked on White Plume Mountain as editor and wrote for the Sage Advice Column in Dragon Magazine.

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It's clear from talking to Rob Kuntz, and playing with Jim Ward in his campaign, that early DnD was male dominated not because of exclusion, but because women simply didn't want to play these "toy games."

But Rob, Gary and the other DnD creators bucked wanted women in gaming, wanted them in their sessions, and hired many of them to help promote and create the original game.

The slander and lies out there are simply that, and it is intolerable that WoTC and Hasbro are deliberately spreading these lies in their official books.

If you look at the current roster (some laid off already), you can see that the current creators of DnD have an agenda and false narrative that they wish to promote.

Don't let them. DnD was ALWAYS inclusive, and the original creators should be applauded for their work, not memory holed.Image
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"bucked the trend, and wanted"

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More from @Grummz

Feb 9
X is pretty good for gaming news, but could be better. Instead of starting a new website for gaming news, it would be cool to be able to build a hub on X.

One feature that would be neat is if you could create a "landing page" for your account that let you tile and arrange your current X posts and articles, almost like a front-page.

I think this would be useful for getting the top stories you cover on X and establishing your profile brand at the top.
The best trust is your own eyes. That's why video is the number one way that people form their opinions on games. They want to be able to see the gameplay and judge for themselves, rather than have it filtered by an article.

Even if there is commentary, people can see the game and tell if they agree or disagree with it.

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The other thing that needs to happen is the removal of access journalism. Game companies offer too many perks, favors and early access to a carefully chose group of streamers and youtubers.

An incentive structure would have to be in place to encourage free and honest speech about games without threat of publisher reprisal by cutting off access.
Read 4 tweets
Feb 2
A modest plan to preserve the purity of Warhammer 40k.

I know many 40k fans are disheartened and angered by the gaslighting female Custodes debacle, and now there is more and more pressure to make 40k female Space Marines and Emperor knows what else.

Games Workshop continues to entertain the destruction of their lore and their game to satisfy the mythical, non-existent “modern audience” while spurning and even disparaging their core tabletop audience, who buys thousands of dollars worth of minis, codexes and supplements, by calling them all sorts of nasty names.

I also know that you love the hobby and many are loath to abandon it or are unable to resist the plastic crack to do anything like a full boycott (I’m there with you, but I have a technique).

You don’t have to.

For over a year, we’ve run a successful campaign in video games to push back against the mind virus ruining our hobbies.

We did it by voting with our wallets and being very vocal. Now, giant companies like Ubisoft are on the edge of folding, and medium and small publishers are embracing gamer feedback and sentiment. You can do this too, and you don’t need to swear off 40k to do it. You just need the mantra “underperform expectations.”

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Games Workshop is a public company. They are very sensitive to their stock price and investors sentiment.

They are also expected to deliver results quarter after quarter, year after year. If a single quarter shows a decline, it’s a big headache for management.

You must rally and time your activities to these quarters, which often have major releases to try to “goose the numbers” and show demand, which increases the stock price. It’s like when rent is due at the end of the month, except on a stock basis.

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GW will issue “stock guidance” which is their prediction of sales and how well they will do based off sales predictions.

If they fail to meet their guidance, the stock market punishes them heavily.

This is why you don’t need an absolute boycott to win. You just need them to “underperform expectations.”

This is exactly what happened with Star Wars Outlaws and Dragon Age Veilguard. They still sold over a million copies, but they missed internal targets. For a public company, underperforming, even while selling well, is enough to cause and emergency panic with shareholders.

So what can you do with this info?

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Read 4 tweets
Jan 19
BREAKING LEAK:

No, Kingdom Come Deliverance is NOT woke.

I received exclusive information from someone who has completed the game which clears up many rumors.

(Note, game director Daniel Vavra JUST posted clarification, he is 100% telling it to you straight)

According to this player, who wants to clear the air so the game can succeed, this is the exact content of the game’s main storyline (not all side quests completed):

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- Yes, Henry can romance other characters in the game.

- Henry can romance another male, however, this is not forced upon the player in any way.

- Similar to how Bioware did romance checks, you must a) Initiate the dialog and b) pass around 5 dialog choice romance checks without missing one in order to unlock this romantic partner. You have to go out of your way to do this and do it over the course of half the game.Image
- The dialog options for the male romance are treated very secretive, VERY taboo and in line with the historical times.

- The romance scene is extremely brief, and entirely skippable. 5 seconds of kissing total and 5 seconds of them on the bed naked: “No one is hanging dong and they are just on top of each other kissing. The other cutscenes with Henry and women are much more vulgar haha.”

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Read 7 tweets
Jan 5
They are trying to cancel Notch and Minecraft 2 all over again, including using AI run accounts to do it.

I dissect the playbook here and how they go after targets.

This post went viral attracting the creator of Minecraft through distortion, false implications and outright lies.

I've seen these tactics before, they've been used to try to cancel myself, and I can't stand to see it being used against Notch just because he is making Minecraft 2.

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The first attack is to falsely correlate Notch's sale of the company with some bad event.

This is untrue, as Notch corrected himself.

He is no longer with Minecraft not because of "bad rerasons" but because he sold it...for 2.1B (Billion) dollars in 2014. This is a great success story and has zero to do with any controversies or "bad things" as the attacker is trying to imply here.

In fact, at the time, the mainstream press wasn't busy cancelling him and held him up as the success he is, giving him full credit and lauding how he awarded staff with huge bonuses at the time of the sale.

This is what I call a timeline fallacy. Notch was cancelled later in 2019, many years afterwards. But when doing a timeline fallacy, what they do is to imply causation even when the dates are flipped or do not support the argument. They try to imply a later event is what drove some earlier event to make it seem like a bad thing.

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The attacker then uses the JK Rowling attack against Notch.

They made up broad claims about your thoughts, positions and character, wildly misrepresenting your stance, by claiming you "said things" that you actually didn't, never posting the original tweets.

Here the poster is claiming that Notch posted transphobic and racist "shit" but never cites the actual posts. The JK Rowling attack is where you claim someone said X and Y or believes Z, but never cite the actual text, often wildly taking things out of context, or blowing them up out of proportion, or "mind reading" the author.

Well I was there on X when he made them and this is out of line.

Notch has never been against people being trans. What he was against was the persecution and control of everyone else that the trans and woke movements were doing. You can decide for yourself:

- Notch, like Rowling, stated "No, they feel like are" in response to a post that said "trans women are women."

- Notch called feminism a "social disease" during the GG1 days.

- The big one, the one that got him cancelled? He posted "It's okay to be white."

After he tweeted it's okay to be white, the cancellation crowd swooped in and Microsoft caved. They removed him from the title screen, and snubbed him by not inviting him to the 10th anniversary celebration. This was at the height of cancel culture in 2019.

Polygon, and the mainstream media, including Variety, repeated the attack, once again telling you what they thought he said, vs what he *actually* said.

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Read 6 tweets
Dec 1, 2024
Mouthwashing. The popular indie psychological horror game, is embroiled in controversy. A summary of what happened and how Asmongold triggered one of the devs who went off on a rant about how the "anti-wokes" have found the game and are not welcome to play.

Mouthwashing is a short but well received indie game that went viral.

Everything was going great until some very sensitive people started to harass artists for making fan drawings of one of the characters, Anna.

They were upset her breasts were drawn larger, or put into more revealing clothing.

The harassment got so bad that one artist was forced to apologize. It was the usual twitter mob that goes after artists whenever they do a fanart "wrong."

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Source: Art by SpoiledMuffin, Rakusakugk, and USA.Image
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One artist was bullied so hard that they felt forced to apologize to the trolls.

It was then that the developers took a great stand and condemned the harassment.

The fervor died down, but was brought to light again by @Asmongold, who made a video praising the developer response.

This, it turns out, did not sit well with one of the developers of the game.

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It was then that @siarate, one of the game's sound designers and composers, went off on how the anti-woke crowd had found the game, and that this was making him "sick to his stomach."

He blasted Asmongold, but also, earlier, had made a tweet about myself and how I was "not welcome at the table." (I had never commented on the game at the time).

When confronted, he doubled down, saying that Asmongold's comments meant "anti-woke means anti-gay and anti-me as a dev" and that he does not want Asmongold playing because it was "making me feel like absolute sh*t".

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Read 4 tweets
Oct 21, 2024
Dungeons and Dragon's FALLS OFF the WOKE CLIFF in the brand new DM's Guide (Dungeon Master's Guide).

There is an entire section where DMs are encouraged to have players fill out sensitivity forms about what might trigger them, and an emergency X gesture where any player can stop a game if they feel uncomfortable (in a fictional fantasy setting!).

Funnier still, WotC @Wizards_DnD are being accused of STEALING these ideas from other games without credit.

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The new DMs guide features two "core tools" for "player safety" which are nothing more than safety blankets for coddling the perpetually offended and afraid...and EVERYONE at the table has to agree to this pandering where ONE PLAYER can DICTATE what you can and can't have in your campaign.

The first tool is the "Game Expectations" FORM where players list their Hard and Soft Limits. A hard limit is what you campaign can NEVER HAVE, and a soft limit is where you may only "lightly touch on" an area.

What are some of these limits? Here are examples used in the past in the tabletop community:

- Romance
- Mind Control
- Cultural Issues (yes, any snowflake topic)
- Harm to animals
- Natural Disasters
- Paralysis
- Thirst
- Claustrophobia

Here is a previewed pic of part of the form:

The second "tool" that the DMs guide wants you to use is...

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The second tool is an EMERGENCY SNOWFLAKE BRAKE, where players can STOP the entire game if they feel the slightest bit uncomfortable.

To do this, the DMs guide says you must "make an X symbol with your arms"

Once this woke bat signal is given, the entire game must STOP and immediately address the concerns of this ONE PLAYER by SKIPPING or ALTERING the campaign on the fly and force everyone else to go along with it.

You would think wokies would be happy with this, but they are ANGRY.

You see, Wotc is accused of STEALING these ideas from other tabletop creators...

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Read 6 tweets

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