D&D General Companies Cut Ties With Judges Guild After Owner's Racist Posts

Several game publishers, including Bat in the Attic, have said that they will no longer do business with Judges Guild after its owner posted a number of racist and anti-semitic statements. They don't need to be repeated here; but there are several examples.

Judges Guild has been around since 1976, producing products compatible with Dungeons & Dragons; the current owner, Bob Bledsaw II, is the son of its co-founder, Bob Bledsaw, and has run the company since 2008. The company is well known for 1976's City State of the Invincible Overlord, amongst other classics. Bat in the Attic and Frog God Games both license Judges' Guild properties.

Rob Conley of Bat in the Attic stated yesterday that the company would no longer do business with Judges Guild, or its properties. "Sunday evening, I called Robert Bledsaw II and discussed the issue. I notified him that I will no longer be doing future Judges’ Guild projects and will only continue to sell what I have currently listed. I stated that I will be calling the other Judges Guild licensee and inform them of the situation and of my decision."

Frog God Games, which has been working with Judges Guild for nearly 20 years, followed suit. "Recently the owner of Judges Guild made a series of racist and anti-semitic posts on Facebook. We will not reproduce them here; they are shown on Rob Conley's Bat in the Attic blog, and we are convinced of their authenticity. Rob wrote his post because, as a licensee of Judges Guild property, he felt he needed to state clearly that he would not be doing business with Judges Guild in the future. We have also licensed property from Judges Guild in the past, and we are seconding Rob's example by cutting off all future business with Judges Guild. The posts made on Facebook were completely unacceptable."

UPDATE — DriveThruRPG has severed ties. “The Judges Guild publisher account has been closed and they are no longer available on DriveThruRPG.”

A few years ago, Judges Guild ran a Kickstarter to bring back City State of the Invincible Overlord, with nearly a thousand backers raising $85K. The Kickstarter has not yet been fulfilled. The latest update was in October 2019.

 

[lowkey13]

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[Celebrim]

Unfortunately, the hateful ideologies have proven themselves to be incredibly adept at taking advantage of this policy of countering hateful speech with better speech. They know how to communicate their message in a way that speaks to certain vulnerable demographics much more strongly than ostensibly better speech does. The only effective way to combat their propaganda is deplatforming them so that their message can’t reach the people who are vulnerable to it. This has been pretty effectively demonstrated throughout history.

And here we go...

Let's just say I have a very different reading of history than you do, but I think that if I get into this with you, it will stray really far from the topic.

So, yeah, antisemitism. Bad thing. Shame to see such opinions voiced.

 

[darjr]

Link to the post about Bob Sr.

Bob Bledsaw II and III of Judges Guild go on egregiously racist, Nazi, rants

So this is a multi-generational thing? Was the father like this as well, just in an age without social media, or is this a more recent family development? No, Bob Sr. wasn't like that at all. We only discussed race, religion, and politics about the Wilderlands Campaign setting. He was from...

forum.rpg.net

 

[Charlaquin]

And here we go...

Let's just say I have a very different reading of history than you do, but I think that if I get into this with you, it will stray really far from the topic.

Then why’d you bother saying anything about it?

 

[Celebrim]

Which is why I said, very specifically, this doesn't speak to individual experience.

But, it does remind us, that "I have, on occasion, been abused" may not necessarily tell us what it is like to be part of a group that gets abuse more often.

Your second statement doesn't speak to individual experience. It's speaks to a group or collective experience. So, if you were speaking to an Idreth in my campaign world, a species with a collective body of memories and experiences, that would make sense. But I don't have a collective experience. I have only an individual experience. Likewise, so far no one that I've ever spoken to has a collective experience. They have individual experiences. Sometimes, they have experiences that resemble the presumed stereotype. Sometimes they don't. But I've never yet met the person who, if they are willing to relate to me as an individual, that I can't relate to. The experience of division I've experienced most often is when they insist they are a collective and equally insist I am a collective. That divide, I cannot breach, because usually the person on the other side of it doesn't want it breached. If I were to breach it, then the circle they've drawn around "their tribe" would be breached. They'd have stop looking at the world as "us" and "them".

I can't necessarily relate to every individuals experience through similar or shared experience. But the whole, "You can't possible know what it's like to be routinely victimized" thing... tends to be thrown at me by privileged people. Nobody working minimum wage jobs with me ever told me that, no matter what their skin color was. It was always some person with an expensive education.

 

[lowkey13]

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[HarbingerX]

Here's a video I like sharing when things like this come up. The internet helps people find suckers.

 

[Michael Silverbane]

Where is the freedom of association in the Constitution?

What has the constitution got to do with anything?

 

[generic]

What has the constitution got to do with anything?

Only all of American law, free speech in the context of the United States, and a whole lot of legal cases.

 

[lowkey13]

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