Everyone claims not to like (or "care about") drama, and by-and-large I think we do all try to hold ourselves to that standard.
That said, every now and then I find myself tunneling through some rabbit hole of somebody else's problems, and I can't help but feel a morbid fascination. There's a particular brand of drama that can only come from the internet, perhaps because I don't know interesting-enough people. But I probably wouldn't want to.
Today's topic is Zak S. (which stands for "Smith" in the real world, but "Sabbath" online). He's a writer and artist in the "OSR" scene for roleplaying games. OSR stands for old-school revival, and it's a backlash against more modern RPG settings and systems of current day ("safe" and "vanilla" and "accessible"), and often it involves much darker and grittier material, more lethal for the characters, more horrifying for the players. It takes glee in an almost antagonistic approach to "trigger warnings," spending nearly all of its time on the darker side of D&D-style tabletop gaming.
I love it. I mean, the grim and disgusting fates that befall people in these books aside, there's a wild creativity involved in many of these supplements, with words and art blasting off the page into your eyeballs like nothing from Wizards of the Coast (subsidiary of Hasbro) is likely to have done in a long time. One of the biggest publishers of OSR material is called Lamentations of the Flame Princess, if that gives you some idea of the level of grimdark emo involved here.
And "Zak Sabbath" has been a driving force of the OSR movement for ten years, wholly or partially responsible for many of my favorite indie books:
- Maze of the Blue Medusa (with Patrick Stuart)
- Death Frost Doom (revised from the original by James Raggi)
- A Red and Pleasant Land (with Jez Gordon)
- Vornheim (with Mandy Morbid)
These are just the ones on my shelf. Nestled in among many other cool indie books not written by rapists.
Yup, turns out Zak is a huge, huge asshole. And it turns out this is well known in the OSR community online. I don't pay much attention to this sort of thing (it's "drama" and I don't like drama) but man, things have exploded today. So I find myself reading about all the controversies and blowups this guy has had in the last several years. One of my favorites comes from Patrick Stuart (of Blue Medusa) -- some time late in 2017, it seems Patrick decided Zak was a psycho/sociopath, and cut ties. He's been donating his proceeds from Blue Medusa to charity ever since. My favorite line here, though:
Wow, trust a bunch of fantasy writers to go for each others' throats. That's behavior I recognize in myself and others, beautifully encapsulated in just a few words of English in a way I doubt I ever could.Originally Posted by Patrick Stuart
Anyway, I'm getting off track here. I think it's unfair to #BelieveWomen universally, and to blacklist people on the strength of accusations alone. I also think it's unfair to air your dirty laundry online, when you could call the police or a lawyer and take care of yourself in private. That said, there's a great weight of drama here, enough people agreeing with each other and telling the same stories, to convince me Zak is probably a pile of shit. There's also enough people concerned for each other that it does seem like this abusive dick could probably stand to be pilloried in a public way.
What will I do about it? Well, I'm not going to burn my books. They're good books, I like them. And other people were involved in creating them. But if I see Zak's name on any materials going forward, I'm sure going to think twice or thrice about supporting him. Which is honestly a shame.
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