MU Podcast Episodes – 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

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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!

We have our MUP Discord and we are all there! We invite all of our  listeners to come and enjoy the community of Call of Cthulhu fans. 

https://discord.gg/vNjEv9D

We have a Patreon! To back us you can click the button on the sidebar of our website, mu-podcast.com or head over to Patreon directly at www.patreon.com/mup!

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

• Robert Sager
• Eric Christensen
• Ryan Douglas Macy
• Weston Flippo
• Patrick Groulx
• Frank Delventhal
• Jesse Aponte
• Tim Collins

Diversity and voting with our dollars in today’s RPG market-space to affect change.