Questions about Sean K. Reynolds and Roger Moore?

[CruelSummerLord]

In reading the Lorraine Williams post, I came across this quote...

There is significantly more to it than that.

First, think of your favorite RPG. You have purchased the core rules, and a few expansions, and you are looking forward to two major setting releases (the city of Ascalon and the City of Ys). Additionally, you just paid for a subscription to the new supplemental 'zine, and you are waiting for your first issue. You are working on a campaign, and your players have designed characters.

Then you find out your game is dead because the T$R has clubbed the creators into submission with relentless lawsuits and legal fees they can't hope to pay.

Even though the grounds for the suit (that it is a derivative of D&D) is pure garbage, and that fact is obvious to anyone with a brain.

And the sole purpose of the lawsuit was to crush Mythus. The game didn't fail against the competition. It didn't fail because it was managed badly. It was crushed by the biggest and oldest player in the industry, purely to destroy it and end its existence.

And that cash you shelled out for that subscription: kiss it goodbye and eat the loss, fool. That was Sean "Veggie boy" Reynolds answer, if couched in gentler diction.

What was this about? Was SKR part of the lawsuit that stamped out this Mythos game? I admit I'm curious, and I'd like to know more. What do most people think of Reynolds, anyway?

My other question has to do with the "anti-dark gaming" thing that Roger Moore had going. I noticed in one of the 2E Greyhawk products I owned, there seemed to be a move to generally sanitize the City of Greyhawk, mentioning at several points how establishments such as taverns and guilds that formerly excluded women or demihumans have become more inclusive and open to anyone, and how those that do not have attracted the disgust and scorn of many in the city. Simillarly, I noticed how the City had abolished slavery-something that struck me as very odd, since I never would have figured Greyhawk to let morals get in the way of profit.

Was Moore involved in "sanitizing" any RPG products, or making them more politically correct? I admit, that was something that irked me, and in my own Greyhawk work at Canonfire I went out of my way to make things more grey than that-many realms allowing slavery in one form or another, or practicing discrimination either open or subtle, more to keep Greyhawk a grim and gritty setting. If there are still exclusiveness, racism and sexism in the real world in the new millennium, I simply see no reason why a gritty pseudo-medieval world would necessarily be any more enlightened.

I'm just curious about these two topics.

 

[Henry]

My opinion of Sean K. "Opinionated Bald Man" Reynolds is a very favorable one. I've disagreed with him on personal views, before, but he's a pretty decent guy in person. Of course, others will differ. Part of the territory for being a semi-public outspoken figure, especially one who has a blog and a website.

 

[Odhanan]

I don't know the specifics of the situation with Mythus, but I know Sean and he's a good guy. I too can say I butted heads with him, like any other opinionated guy would sooner or later I think, but at the end of the day, he's a really good, decent person, and a good friend.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

I suspect, but cannot personally confirm, that the "sanitizing" of Greyhawk and other products is less to be blamed on Roger Moore, and much more to be blamed on the "family friendly" approach that TSR took with 2E, which included eliminating differences in stats between the sexes (yay!) and demons, devils, half-orcs, and assassins (boo!).

 

[Contrarian]

What was this about? Was SKR part of the lawsuit that stamped out this Mythos game? I admit I'm curious, and I'd like to know more. What do most people think of Reynolds, anyway?

The Mythus lawsuit was filed in 1992 and settled in 1994 -- Sean started working for TSR (as their online coordinator) in 1995 -- before that, he was just another gamer on too many mailing lists.

(Remember mailing lists? We had those before the web. They was kewl for the 1990s.)

 

[prospero63]

I suspect, but cannot personally confirm, that the "sanitizing" of Greyhawk and other products is less to be blamed on Roger Moore, and much more to be blamed on the "family friendly" approach that TSR took with 2E, which included eliminating differences in stats between the sexes (yay!) and demons, devils, half-orcs, and assassins (boo!).

I agree. Personally, I got rid of most of that in my game world. There's a reason most of the world is a human world, not the least of which is that elves roaming the streets at night have a chance of getting the crap beat out of them due to their hollow elf bones and pointy little ears.

(obviously not every city/locale is this way, but some are)

 

[Friadoc]

I like SKR, even if he killed my halfling rogue right before the end of an on-line tourney he was running just prior to 3e coming out, but it was still cool to play in something he ran (I think my prize for the whole thing was a copy of a Paladin in Hell).

Over the years I've talked to him now and then, always on-line (thus far), and while we do not agree on everything, he's still a civil guy and it all works out in the end.

JD Wiker and Monte Cook game with him, so he can't be that bad. *chuckles*

Basically, in my opinion, he's good folk, but that's coming from me and I've been told I'm an aquired taste...so, *grins*, take it as you will.

 

[trancejeremy]

SKR was the online net rep for TSR back in those days, and he was rather, uh, vitriolic in how he dealt with people online. Especially regarding TSR's legal matters and anyone who had a different opinion than what TSR thought.

He was why I quit playing AD&D. Not until he was replaced by Jim Butler did I come back.

I imagine a lot is in the usenet archives, if you really want to dig things up.

 

[Orius]

I suspect, but cannot personally confirm, that the "sanitizing" of Greyhawk and other products is less to be blamed on Roger Moore, and much more to be blamed on the "family friendly" approach that TSR took with 2E, which included eliminating differences in stats between the sexes (yay!) and demons, devils, half-orcs, and assassins (boo!).

I'd agree. It's one thing to make the game more appealing to female gamers, it's quite another to completely Disney-fy it.

 

[Sanguinemetaldawn]

What was this about? Was SKR part of the lawsuit that stamped out this Mythos game? I admit I'm curious, and I'd like to know more. What do most people think of Reynolds, anyway?

I guess this question is aimed in my general direction, so I'll give my take...

First, I don't hate SKR or anything like that. From what I remember, he was their "web rep" type guy...sort of a proto admin in some cases, IIRC. It was sort of an intern-like position I think, and basically he was doing internet POC stuff during the TSR IP lockdown. I suspect he was employed as a sort of PR person to try to improve relations with the online community, which was basically impossible, and as such was almost certainly exposed to a tremendous amount of abuse. So IIRC, he was the lowest man on the totem-pole, so to speak, and almost certainly not directly involved in the lawsuit proper.

He also struck me as bit of a pro-TSR partisan, during TSR's ugliest era, which made it rather difficult to like him. Usurprisingly, I disagree with a quite a few of his views.


Personally, I just remember vividly having some guy called Sean "Veggie Boy" Reynolds respond to the listserv I subscribed to, and finding out from him that anyone who paid for the subscription was straight up ripped off.

They couldn't even give a free one year subscription to Dragon or something to the hundred or so subscribers to make up for it.

That sort of thing is really stupid when you think about it. Its almost as if they were deliberately setting out to make people hate them.

I suppose that falls under the rubric of overall mismanagement.


My understanding of the Mythus lawsuit was that TSR was suing all parties, and Gygax/Tri-Gee/GDW/etc essentially just gave up under the crush of legal bills, and were forced to settle, with bankruptcy as the probable alternative to a settlement/buyout.

The situation ended up being a total loss for TSR, because for a) the legal bills TSR was paying for the lawsuit and b) the cash TSR paid out for the settlement, TSR recieved essentially nothing. Yeah, they got the properties (and they sometimes pop-up in various WotC books), but financially it just wasn't worth it. The only conceivable benefit would be the elimination of a competitor, but focusing on Mythus and ignoring the then growing White Wolf and WotC's Magic was obviously extremely stupid in retrospect.


What interests me about all this is that it seems like lawyers were running the show at TSR. The only people who really won as a result of the lawsuit against Mythus were the lawyers. Combined with the net-policy, the mid-90s can probably be thought of as the dominion of the TSR lawyer.


On a personal note, I submitted some material and sent a letter to Gygax for the Mythus game, and Gary responded both with a several page sort-of form letter that he evidently sent to several people, and a single hand written page to me. In the "form-letter" part he detailed his fight against TSR to keep his game, which he eventually lost. Even then, the "old gnome", as Dave Newton called him, responded to the community and to individuals.


And I am still trying to find some version of Unhallowed, Gary's horror RPG that was the rules foundation for Mythus, also buried by TSR.