DriveThruRPG pulls Alpha Blue from distribution, pending review

You may remember Venger Satanis' game Alpha Blue, which was successfully Kickstarted a while back; it had some interesting discussion here when the PDF went live back in December. If you don't recall it, then it's an OSR-style sci-fi set piece in a space prison-turned-brothel. It's fairly in the style of Heavy metal, being R-rated without quite crossing the line into X-rated (to me, at least).

Two days ago the PDF of the game was pulled from DriveThruRPG, citing that it had been flagged under their new content-reporting system. According to Venger's blog, the product is currently being reviewed internally by the DTRPG team, with an expected decision "within two business weeks." Rather oddly, Alpha Blue's companion adventure Girls Gone Rogue - which has the same tenor and style of art as the original - is still available for sale.

Currently, the PDF of Alpha Blue cannot be obtained legally. Venger's publishing company, Kort'thalis Publishing, doesn't have a presence on Paizo.com, Warehouse23, or Tabletop Library. Print copies of the book can still be ordered from Amazon or CreateSpace.

Alzrius said:

Two days ago the PDF of the game was pulled from DriveThruRPG, citing that it had been flagged under their new content-reporting system. According to Venger's blog, the product is currently being reviewed internally by the DTRPG team, with an expected decision "within two business weeks."

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It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Hopefully, they'll come to the right decision and show that their new Reporting system is working as intended. (Not being familiar with the product in question, I'm not going to venture an opinion on what the 'right' decision is.)

Meh.

Everything I see that author post on the various G+ communities seems like a product created for shock value and attention whoring. Doesn't surprise me that dtrpg feels the need for further review.

And Venger has just announced that the book has been white-listed and put back up for sale!

Yep, it sounds like the system is working as intended - a product can be flagged as problematic, it gets checked and then either restored or removed. Once restored, it's then whitelisted to prevent someone trying to suppress it by constantly reporting it as a problem.

That all strikes me as pretty much right - even with an "adult" tag in the system, there are probably some sorts of material that they don't want to be associated with (or, indeed, perhaps legally can't), so it's right that that tag isn't just a carte blanche.

There are still two lingering not-quite-issues that I have about the system, though...

1) If there are some kinds of material they simply won't/can't accept, it would be good if they put up a list, albeit with the disclaimer that it's not comprehensive.

2) It remains to be seen what happens if they do deem a product to be unacceptable, especially if that product only has a small amount of unacceptable material - will they simply block it, will they block it but explain why, or will they work with the publisher (potentially allowing him or her to excise the problematic material and return to the site)?

But those are fairly minor things. Mostly, it's just good to see the system working when put to an actual test.