The War Against Desborough and Chronicle City

[Sacrificial Lamb]

Ok. Before I begin, I feel compelled to mention that I don't personally know James Desborough, and I haven't picked up any of his products, but this subject concerns me because it feels a lot like a "gaming censorship" issue. This type of subject matter is normally off my radar, but I discovered that James Desborough was recently hired as Creative Director at Chronicle City. This link to Postmortem Studios explains it in more detail:

http://postmortemstudios.wordpress.com/2013/02/13/joining-chronicle-city-full-time/

Chronicle City Expands
Chronicle City is expanding its operations with the hiring-on of James 'Grim' Desborough as the Creative Director of the company alongside its founder, Angus Abranson.

James will have particular focus on developing new intellectual properties for the company, overseeing product line development and moving forward with licensed properties as the company matures and develops.

"I am excited – and nervous – to be working for Chronicle City. I have known Angus a great many years and have worked for and with him in various guises in the past. I believe Chronicle City has the potential to become a driving force in modern role-playing and I relish the opportunity to work in other arenas such as card and board game development. I particularly hope to bring some innovation and attention to licensed properties and hope that I can bring some of my particular style and thought to everything that we do." – James said.

James is an Origins Award winning writer and has worked for Wizards of the Coast, Steve Jackson Games, Cubicle 7 Entertainment and many others. He has been freelancing since the 1990s and has worked full-time with his own indie company, Postmortem Studios, since 2004.

"Chronicle City has a lot of plans this year, both with the expansion of our third party publishing programme as well as with licensing and in-house design of our own settings and game lines. Appointing James as Creative Director will give our own properties, and the licenses we're working, on a dedicated overseer who can work day-to-day with our design teams and developers. James is the first fulltime appointment to the company and we have a few more team members to be announced in the coming weeks. 2013 is going to be a very interesting year for the company and I'm glad James has been able to join us for the journeys ahead." – added Angus.

Chronicle City is a new British based games publisher set up by multi-award winning publisher Angus Abranson (ex-Cubicle 7; Leisure Games). Chronicle City are working with a number of companies and designers to publish their games, as well as designing their own role-playing, card and board games.

So I think....ok. A new gaming company. Cool, right? Wrong. :pundit:

I'm casually scanning through the verious posts over on RPGnet, and I stumble upon this clusterfuck of a thread:

James Desborough hired as Creative Director at Chronicle City: http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?675494-James-Desborough-hired-as-Creative-Director-at-Chronicle-City

The clusterfuck gets bad....real bad. I had totally forgotten that there was similar drama last year, so when people started carrying on about Desborough, as though he's the anti-Christ, and kept throwing around terms such as "misogyny" and "rape", I mistakenly assumed that he'd gone out and raped some actual women. I had to spend the past couple days to educate myself, and pore over posts from multiple websites, and even now....I still do not possess the full truth. So imagine how a casual observer will perceive this, and assume that Desborough is either a rapist, or at least pro-rape?

Here are the questions I have.

A.) Did the guy rape actual women?

Yes or no?

B.) Does he tell other men to rape other women?

Yes or no?

C.) Does he say that actual rape is a good thing?

Yes or no?

If the answer to these questions is "no" (which they probably are), then the moderators and posters of RPGnet have engaged in a campaign of slander and misinformation. That is fucked, right?

In the thread, Gareth-Michael Skarka is the lone voice of reason and dissent, and initially catches a seven-day ban (from Ettin), which was then upgraded to a perma-ban because of this comment:

Enjoy your lynch mob folks. I'll be climbing out of the cesspool now.

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?675494-James-Desborough-hired-as-Creative-Director-at-Chronicle-City/page9

For perspective, here are similar threads I found from last year covering an incident like this. One was here on therpgsite:

The War Against Desborough and Mongoose Publishing: http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=23210

And here are other threads from last year's incident on rpgnet:

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?...ensorship-quot

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?...-and-reactions

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?...d-rape-culture

There are other posts on the somethingawful forums, as well as other sites, but finding anything useful is incredibly difficult.

Incidentally, Desborough's employer, Angus Abranson, was the only real gentleman in the thread, and he made everyone look really bad, though the other posters are blissfully unaware of it. :rolleyes:

This situation concerns me because it looks like people are resorting to the equivalent of "Internet bullying", slander, and misinformation in order to weasel their way around concerns of censorship, and masquerade as a "boycott".

Now I could be completely wrong, but I do remember now that some woman with the "Maladicta" handle started a petition in order to actual destroy Mongoose for previously hiring Desborough, and she shamelessly used lies and misquotes to do so. :mad:

Again....I could be wrong. Am I just totally mistaken? Or is the rpgnet hivemind slandering Desborough, and transforming a boycott of Chronicle City products into full-blown censorship? Furthermore, how will something like this affect the rpg industry?

It would be great to hear from someone who knows more about the issue than I do. There are hundreds of pages of posts on multiple websites, so I don't know what the heck to think. On the surface, it looks like James Desborough and Chronicle City are getting a raw deal here, but again....I don't know the full story. Thoughts, please..

[Sacrosanct]

I don't know (nor care) about all the little details of that scenario, but I do know 2 truths:

1. Ettin likes to rally witch hunts for whatever cause he wants to stir up shit on

2. GMS got the permaban because like me, he told them to fuck themselves (via PM)

[GRIM]

I don't have the capacity to reply on RPGnet, being banned.

I'm happy to field your questions and any other issues anyone has and I'll try to take them seriously and answer them with the level of concern with which they've been raised.

Have I raped anyone?

No.

Have I told anyone to rape anyone?

No.

Do I say actual rape is a good thing?

No.

I wrote a blog, on my writing - not my gaming - blog about how I felt that anything should be available to a creative when creating stories and drama. I chose rape as my example because it had been coming up a lot in regard to TV, cinema and computer games.

I've always made myself available to discuss and clarify but very few people seem interested in doing so.

[Emperor Norton]

Personally, I don't like Desborough's reactions to things. Truth is I think as long as people are accurate in what he actually did, its up to them to decide whether they want to buy anything he worked on, etc.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a vocal contingent of people who have no problem exaggerating and using hyperbole to describe his actions. Its like a game of telephone, getting to the bottom of what he actually did involves wading through so much shit.

Personally, I don't like what I know of what he did do (blog posts/etc directly written by him). I probably wouldn't stop buying stuff from CC if I bought anything from them (I didn't anyway), but if someone else is choosing not to based on the facts, I'm OK with that. It isn't an issue of censorship. People are allowed to say anything they want, but they have to deal with the social consequences of what they said.

EDIT: Since Grim responded: I don't know you, I'm not making a judgment of you as a person. I don't know you well enough to do that. I don't like some of the ways you reacted to the situation (I also didn't like the way the other sided acted either). Personally I thought the entire thing was a clusterfuck and no one came out looking good.

[Simlasa]

I stumbled on that mess yesterday while strolling through TBP. Took me a moment to remember who the fellow was and what his supposed crimes were (that woman who ranted at Mongoose, etc.).
AFIK he committed no actual crimes of any sort. Lots of TBP nerds hopped on the bandwagon because maybe publicly stating that they didn't like rape or rapists would get them a date.

[AmazingOnionMan]

Rpg.net had actually been fairly pleasant for a while now.
I guess the good month is over.

[GRIM]

Personally, I don't like what I know of what he did do (blog posts/etc directly written by him). I probably wouldn't stop buying stuff from CC if I bought anything from them (I didn't anyway), but if someone else is choosing not to based on the facts, I'm OK with that. It isn't an issue of censorship. People are allowed to say anything they want, but they have to deal with the social consequences of what they said.

You could, of course, always just ask me.

[Daddy Warpig]

I wrote a blog, on my writing - not my gaming - blog about how I felt that anything should be available to a creative when creating stories and drama. I chose rape as my example because it had been coming up a lot in regard to TV, cinema and computer games.

Opining:

1. Rape is horrific and scaring. Rapists should be punished to the full extent of the law.

2. It's a charged issue, one that's easy to demagogue.

3. A lot of writers use rape as a cheap threaten-the-female ploy. (See the problems with Hunter, an 80's cop drama.)

4. Sometimes it needs to be in a fictional work.

5. Sometimes this can be tasteless and gratuitous. But not always. (Repugnant doesn't equal tasteless. Prurient rape is tasteless and repugnant.)

6. Including it in a fictional work doesn't make the author pro-rape.

7. Making these eight statements doesn't make me, or anyone who agrees, pro-rape.

8. People who lob pro-rape accusations (in the case of 6 and 7), are demagogues.

My opinions only.

[Benoist]

2. GMS got the permaban because like me, he told them to fuck themselves (via PM)

Wait. GMS is permabanned?

[GRIM]

1. Rape is horrific and scaring. Rapists should be punished to the full extent of the law.

Absolutely and I have never said otherwise, though you might think I had given the threads.

3. A lot of writers use rape as a cheap threaten-the-female ploy. (See the problems with Hunter, an 80's cop drama.)

This is getting into a matter of subjective taste which I am not prepared to make any sort of 'rule' on. Good, bad, middling a creative person should be free to pursue their stories.

6. Including it in a fictional work doesn't make the author pro-rape.

Why we have to have an argument over this within our own community when we already endured this attitude from Pat Pulling, Jack Chick and Jack Thompson I do not know.

7. Making these eight statements doesn't make me, or anyone who agrees, pro-rape.

This also shouldn't be so hard to grasp.

[thedungeondelver]

whoop wrong thread, nvm

[Emperor Norton]

You could, of course, always just ask me.

Don't really care enough to be honest. No offense meant. Nothing you did was bad enough for me to stop buying something if its something I really actually wanted (though I don't have to make that decision, because I've never bought anything from CC anyway). I try to separate what I buy from how I feel about the author, and honestly I don't even have that strong of an opinion on you.

I don't like how you reacted to something, so what, I don't like how I've reacted to some things and I still like myself OK. I don't see a reason to dwell on it any more than its an interesting bit of internet drama and I occasionally make a post in the rpg.net thread requesting citations for their accusations so that people can make judgments for themselves more accurately on the facts.

[Sacrosanct]

Wait. GMS is permabanned?

Yep.  Again.  He appealed in 2008 and was reinstated.  He was banned at first for calling out the witch hunt and dog pile (a stupid ban if you ask me anyway), and PM'd the admins to fuck off and perma ban him

So they did

Very similar to when I was banned for calling out Kai and Ettin's blatant hypocrisy, and then told them to fuck off as well after that sanction

[GRIM]

I don't like how you reacted to something, so what, I don't like how I've reacted to some things and I still like myself OK. I don't see a reason to dwell on it any more than its an interesting bit of internet drama and I occasionally make a post in the rpg.net thread requesting citations for their accusations so that people can make judgments for themselves more accurately on the facts.

Fair enough.

I don't actually think anything I did or said was wrong. I could have, perhaps, been a little more sensitive in my reaction to the first reaction but honestly I found the initial fuss risible and astonishing.

[Sacrosanct]

Like I said, I haven't been following every blog to know the dirty little details, and therefore I don't know if you're innocent in all of this or if you're really a dirtbag.  But what I do know is that someone posting a pic of you and saying you look like a rapist (Hello!  Have people seen what gamers look like?  You look like an average gamer)  takes a while to get a minor sanction, but someone calling out a witch hunt getting the same sanction immediately is bullshit.