MUP Ep 203 – Voting with Our Dollars – Miskatonic University Podcast

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In this episode, Keeper Murph returns from his yearly sabbatical to speak with Keepers Jon & Dave about diversity in the RPG market-space and how we can affect change by voting with our dollars. Huge thanks should be given to Jo Kriel and Dean Englehardt for recording a different episode 203 twice before that was lost due to technical issues on our side.

This episode was recorded on July 5th, 2020.

More trouble is brewing at Dark Onyx Press and DriveThruRPG as yet another employee has been accused of sexual misconduct.

Matt McElroy the operations manager at Onyx Path and an employee at DriveThruRpg had been accused of grooming, gaslighting, and abuse. This is coming just days after his predecessor, Shane DuFreest (not employed with Onyx Path), at DTRPG was accused of rape.

This is a tragedy for Jaym, the accuser. And it appears that Onyx Path is in CYA mode. They have stopped the sale of the Vampire line of books which contains art from DuFreest from the White Wolf days. And they are suspending McElroy and doing an internal investigation, while also asking him to attend sensitivity training.

In an article in GeekNative, it appears that the accuser attempted to tell Onyx Path of the abuse before going public, but it fell on deaf ears. They mention hiring a new HR manager to make sure that doesn’t happen in the future.

Needless to say, these are extremely disturbing allegations stemming from actions that should never have taken place. All of us here at MUP stand with the accusers and demand that this sort of systemic abuse, and the abusers that cause it, be removed from the hobby that we all love.

Jacym’s accusation: https://www.facebook.com/mornara/posts/10157255496355753

McElroy’s Response: https://www.facebook.com/matt.m.mcelroy/posts/10157540571638443

Fans of Berlin: The Wicked City have a resource available to them, it’s a wikipedia article with terms, concepts and ideas that are useful to understanding the political situation in the Weimar Republic.

Comic book writer (and super-cool dude), Cullen Bunn is about to write an illustrated sequel to H. P. Lovecraft’s Re-Animator. Bunn’s project is titled, “Reanimator: The External Lie.” The graphic novel is soon to be available for pre-order through IndieGoGo. The link in the show notes opens a sight for interested fans to sign up for a newsletter so they can be informed once the IndieGoGo funding site goes live.

For your quarantine listening pleasure, the nearly 3 ½ hour long BBC 4 radio drama of Steven King’s story, Salem’s Lot, is available for free on YouTube.

Indie game designer Orion D. Black (them/their), known for “plot Armor” and “Mutants in the Night” has quit Wizards of the Coast citing racism, plagiarism, and generally crap behavior on Wizard’s part. Their struggle with WotC culminated as the BLM movement forced the company to make a recent statement that they valued their employees’ diversity and will be redesigning the races within D&D to eliminate the presence of “evil races,” a move that while lauded, many say should have come about years ago.

“Then, as social unrest continued global due to BLM, the D&D team comes out with their statement. It was like a slap in the face. How much they care about people of color, how much changing things (that I and others had been pushing for months, if not longer) was just going to happen now. It took weeks of protesting across the globe to get D&D to do what people they hired have been already telling them to fix. You cannot, CANNOT say Black lives matter when you cannot respect the Black people who you exploit at 1/3rd your pay, for progressive ideas you pick apart until it’s comfortable, for your millions of profit year over year. People of color can make art and freelance, but are never hired. D&D takes what they want from marginalized people, give them scraps, and claim progress.”

Orion goes on to detail the company’s use of freelancers as diversity hires and using those people to prop up their own marketing value.

“EVERYTHING involving D&D will continue to farm marginalized people for the looks and never put them in leadership. They wont be put on staff. They will be held at arms length. I hope they prove me wrong.”

You can read Orion’s full text at the links provided in the show notes. And we at MUP have comments on this very thing in this make-up episode.

https://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sra9pq

Jon – The 2020 ENnie nominations are out, and there are a lot of amazing products this year.

And thank you beaucoup to Murph for editing this episode! (The audio actually says Max, but something came up and so I stepped it!

Discord

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https://discord.gg/vNjEv9D

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We also have a bunch of new backers that we need to mention!!