Another day, another MTG and Warhammer controversy. Today's episode actually begins with some YouTuber on a one man crusade to destroy Kotaku. Some jurnalist took issue with this and the YouTuber started making fun of her. In a reasonable escalation of the situation, the jurno tracks down the Tuber's wife and starts DMing her. They go back and forth slinging shit at each other and of course the j*urnaloid can't help but claim harassment. This is where the story proper begins:

Paul Scott Canavan, a MtG and Warhammer artist tweets the following:

This is absolutely the play - we should be doing this with all these weird creeps. Track down their significant others and mothers and string them up.

Surely, this was posted in good faith. Unfortunately, bigot chuds took issues with his tweet and Paul doubled down until bravely private his Twitter and Instagram.

The following threads have some good redditard discussion on it. /r/freemagic will likely go on a campaign to get him fired, and even /r/mtg seems to largely denounce his behavior.

https://old.reddit.com/r/freemagic/comments/1cnants/how_is_this_okay_with_wizards_mtg_artist/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/mtg/comments/1cnl4yd/magic_the_gathering_and_warhammer_artist_paul/?sort=controversial

Some choice comments:

Guess this guy has never heard of a slippery slope.

What a loser.

He meant proverbially. Like held accountable.

His wording was flagrant. But I do t think he actually meant to hang people.

It's hyperbole I believe.

It's another episode of the words we say don't mean what they mean!

I am not one for cruxifying people for their opinions, but holy shit threatening peoples family because they don't agree with this jerk offs opinion and ideology is a new fricking low.

That's not what happened here, though. If you look at the context, what he was saying is that if someone is harassing women online their actions should be shown to the women in their life.

He's not saying kill the families of online trolls, the title of this post is really misleading.

"Track down their significant others and mothers and string them up.”

That is verbatim what his tweet said. How is the title misleading?

Several other redditards crawl out of the woodwork to explain how Paul is defending women, so his calls for killing are good, actually.

I believe unfortunately he has a history of sketchy behaviour. He is the one who posted sales of his artist proof cards and then ghosted people and scammed them out of some money.

Hmm, maybe this guy is based after all…

I think you are perpetuating a bad faith interpretation of a poorly worded tweet.

“Bad Faith! Bad Faith! Bad Faith!” say the line, redditor!

Anyways, place your bets on whether or not this brave woman defender will keep his role as a Magic and Warhammer artist. Personally, I hope he gets fired because he already seems like a schizo. Losing his job would likely make him even more deranged.

!chuds !nooticers

Since Warhammer 40,000's 10th edition was released last year, each of the wargame's factions has been getting the traditional rules refresh in the form of a new Codex book. The latest deals with the Adeptus Custodes, genetically engineered bodyguards of the Emperor so gigantic they make space marines look weedy. (They also happen to be Henry Cavill's army of choice). There are 10,000 of them and in the past they've only ever been depicted as men. In this latest iteration, shock horror, at least two of the Custodes are women.

Most players seem to have responded to this by shrugging and getting back to arguing about the new rules, but there's always a vocal minority who go on a tear. The Mail Online ran a typically subtle and understated headline that declared "It's Wokehammer!" and the meme community Grimdank has declared posts about "Femstodes" will only be allowed for one week before they join "Female Space Marine posts" as a banned topic. Games Workshop's official response is a tweet that says, "In regards to female Custodians, there have always been female Custodians, since the first of the Ten Thousand were created."

Is this a retcon? Yep, and it won't be the last. Warhammer 40,000 has had fluid "lore" right from the start. The original Custodian Guards were depicted as shirtless hunks who never leave Earth---a long way from the heavily armored galaxy-spanning golden gods they became---to say nothing of tweaks to the 40K canon like ditching half-eldar space marines and rewriting the Horus Heresy from a short story a handful of pages long into a series of 60+ novels.

The Adeptus Custodes aren't 40K's only genetically engineered supersoldiers, of course. The setting's flagship faction are the space marines, who are created differently---where Custodes are enhanced via a unique process begun when they're infants, space marines begin being grafted with a "gene-seed" when they're on the verge of puberty. And while the explanation that space marine gene-seeds are "keyed to male hormones and tissue types" goes back a way, it's not the real reason Games Workshop made a whole army of dudes who are men.

As GW's former head of IP Alan Merrett once explained on Facebook, "The reason there aren't female Space Marines has nothing to do with lore, or background or character of Marines. It's to do with [the] simple logistics of making miniatures and selling miniatures." In the 1980s GW sold miniatures in sets called blister packs, and as Merrett explained "the intention was that upwards of 25% of all models would be female." That didn't last because "retailers kept complaining to us that customers weren't buying the female models and could we not include any in their restocks." By the time Warhammer 40,000 was designed, GW made sure its poster boys were, well, boys to ensure they'd sell. As Merrett put it, "All the background fluff about why there are only male Marines is there to justify a commercial logistics issue."

And the same was true of the Adeptus Custodes, until it wasn't. Though the customers at the average Warhammer shop are mostly men, these days there are usually one or two women as well. And the men are a lot less likely to throw a hissy-fit about having women in their armies than g*mers in the 1980s, despite what Reddit and Twitter might suggest. All of 40K's lore and storytelling exists to provide context for selling toy soldiers to people, and as the customer base changes so too will that lore.

So you agree? The only reason abled people want disabled people to be cured ASAP is because they're "a liability", pretty much treating people like tools who need to prove their worthiness to exist by providing? https://t.co/5UyWdqETgA pic.twitter.com/UvMI7O8nSZ

— give me kynesis (@marysunshine_7) March 18, 2024

Once thought a meme, now an actual talking point for leftoids (I even seen one unironically post making a wheelchair dnd thing on heroesforge).

It's that thing once again, leftoids are trying to push a certain thing in a fantasy hobby that fits their political worldview of idealism that usually makes no sense and requires even more suspension of disbelief than roleplaying in a magic land with dragons and unicorns.

WHEEL CHAIR ACCESSIBLE DUNGEONS

WHERE IS THE ADA ON THIS?

Anyway there is plenty of "right wing extremist" dunking on the thread, so I picked some replies/subthreads from lefties since those are more interesting to read.

Reading all the comments here, there's so much vitriol for just wanting for disabled people to be treated equally.

They WILL pull their weight because they ARE heroes, simple as that.

Complete with PF card for said wheelchair

Some friendly fire:

https://twitter.com/StrixObscuro/status/1769843234568638931

Few more choice pearlclutching.

https://twitter.com/OddishHime/status/1769994460786499808

https://twitter.com/AquamarineFB/status/1769858783075766663

Last time I read a thread on this I think the "adventureres wheelchair" I saw was something that basically couldn't be broken unless there were two crits against it, which makes you wonder why not every wagon and vehicle was made with this cheap wheelchair technology. These people can't even design something with some risk because they're so afraid of losing so they need an invulnerable wheelchair.

And why even a wheelchair? Learn to levitate or something. If you're a wheelchaired martial character just go home

I can't take this shit anymore. I've been playing online RPGs with this guy for three years now and yet, somehow, EVERY CHARACTER HE EVER MAKES IS ATROCIOUS. There's bad characters, like obvious fetishes. Khaoskid's characters are something different. They are inspired in their awfulness. Let me go over some of my least favorites with you.

Sans Undertale

• System: D&D 3.5e

• My status: DM

Sans Undertale was a Bone Creature template Dwarf. His class was Truenamer. For those of you who do not know, Truenamer is the worst class Wizards of the Coast put to paper. Rules as written, it doesn't work. The difficulty of use for their truenaming powers grow exponentially as they level. Sans was optimized to heck and back in order to be even slightly useful. Outside of his ridiculous character name & art, he was actually a useful member of the party. I am simply amazed that this man played as a solo-classed truenamer for multiple years over the course of a level 1-20 D&D 3.5e campaign, and survived. Also he carried around a body pillow of Shinji's Right Hand everywhere he went.

Kasan Eteto

• System: D&D 3.5e

• My status: Player

Kasan Eteto was a succubus, using the Savage Species monster class. She had taken the Vow of Nonviolence and the Vow of Peace feats. This means she was forbidden from fighting any living creatures. She was an extremely talented diplomat, at least. She also went into Apostle of Peace once she finished Succubus' progression. Like Sans, she wasn't so much disruptive as she was shocking. Using Savage Species is insane. Using Apostle of Peace is insane. Combining the two is even more insane. In a strange act of self-awareness, Khaoskid realized he hates playing female characters and had Kasan kill herself. This is the only time he's ever played a female character. Her art has been lost to time, but she was literally just Kasane Teto.

The Mathemagician

• System: GURPS 4e

• My status: Player

The game was a light-hearted fantasy game. When we got into our first fight, the Mathemagician cast his first spell: Math Beam. We all asked him how it worked. He told us how much damage it did, and said "math." It wasn't terribly strong so we shrugged it off. Until he told the GM that he was casting it again, on the same turn. Then again. Then again. It turns out, he took Lightning Calculator, a trait that lets your character perform math instantly. Since Math Beam is cast by solving an equation, he could cast an infinite number of Math Beams per turn. The GM ended the game after that first fight.

John Matrix

• System: GURPS 4e

• My status: Player

The game was a Jojo's Bizzare Adventure game. John Matrix was a high school IT guy who thought he was a hacker. He had a Wildcard skill called "The Matrix" that could do anything. Literally any roll the GM asked for, he would simply use The Matrix in place of the normal skill. His stand was "Fear of the Dark." It was the creature from the album's cover, and it was extremely physically powerful. It also projected an aura of darkness that no light or sight could penetrate, not even John Matrix. It was also an independent stand, and evil. He could not de-manifest it. Against all odds, he made it to the end of the game. Khaoskid then warned me that if I ever ran Mage: the Ascension, he would play John Matrix as a Virtual Adept.

Jimmy Hoboken

• System: GURPS 4e

• My status: Player

The game was a Zoolander X JJBA game. All of our characters had to be male models. Jimmy Hoboken was a body positivity model. He was fat, r-slurred, and useless. His stand was Fat, which could eat any material and did a ton of damage with its bite. It ended up being very useful, as it could eat holes through walls and ruin the GM's dungeon designs. He ended up growing 30 feet tall and turning into a woman after playing a cursed game show. He died after rolling a nat 1 on the Die of Fate.

John & Monkey

• System: GURPS 4e, Call of Cthulhu 7e

• My status: GM

The game was initially titled "Black Friday Shopper Simulator 2021," and was in GURPS. The party's goal was to get the last Game Bronus at their local shopping mall, and to kill anyone who got in their way. Eventually, the game morphed into a Call of Cthulhu 7e game where the party were special agents for the United States Department of Unusual Incidents, and were stealing anomalies from the SCP Foundation. John is just an ordinary guy who is really, really good at biking. He knew special moves like "Bike Jump" and "Bike Spin." His skills impressed Jeff Bezos, who hired him to babysit his pet monkey, Monkey. Monkey is incredibly rich and has a smart phone. Somehow, the two are an effective duo, are still alive, and haven't driven me to end the campaign. Like Sans and Kasan, they are insane character ideas, but surprisingly functional.

Scholar

• System: D&D 3.5e

• My status: DM

The game is set in the Eberron setting. Scholar is a warforged artificer. He's mostly functional, but has made some deranged magical items. Most notable is his Wand of Locate Bars. It does exactly that: magically locate nearby stores that serve alcohol. Also he's useless during fights, as his signature move is to use a Scroll of Tree Form to turn himself into a tree for an hour. Mercifully, last April Fool's Day, I let all of my players draw from the Deck of Many Things. Scholar drew "Donjon" and was sent to the Lair of the Keeper.

Thrikeepagh Dhakaan

• System: D&D 3.5e

• My status: DM

To replace Scholar, Khaoskid made Geldrin d'Kundarak. Geldrin is actually a good character. His cohort, Thrikeepagh, is not. Thrikeepagh is a blue (psychic goblin subrace) weretoad. He has no class. Every time he levels up, he takes another toad hit die. Toads fricking suck. They have no attacks. Their movement speed is 5 feet. In order to move faster, Thrikeepagh took the Speed of Thought feat, which increases your movement speed by 10 feet if you are psychic. This is why he's a blue. He has no combat ability, and his only support traits are being able to turn into a toad. At the very least, he's relatively tough since werecreatures resist damage from non-silver weapons.

Gary Ryals

• System: Motholam

• My status: Player

Motholam is an AD&D retroclone. Gary Ryals was a fighter who refused to use weapons, and fought with his bare hands. Motholam has no martial arts system, so he sucked. While we were exploring the swamp, Gary picked a fight with a friendly giant toad. It swallowed him whole then swam away.

Utyronimar

• System: Motholam

• My status: Player

My character in the Motholam game we were in was Utumar the Somniferous, a wizard.

Khaoskid thought Utumar was really cool, so after Gary died, he made his new character Utyronimar.

Tavish McBane

• System: Vampire: the Masquerade, 20th Anniversary Edition

• My status: Player

Tavish' clan was McBane and his Generation was 1st. He was not a vampire. He was a 1st generation Scottish immigrant. He did not use any supernatural powers. He just cut vampires limbs' off with a claymore. Khaoskid would constantly speak in a shitty Scottish accent and pretend to be drunk, and would constantly pick fights with the other players and random bums on the street. The campaign ended when the party broke into the local Tremere's chantry. We had a few newbies playing with us. The newbies thought they were badasses and died horribly. Tavish and my character survived. The newbies quit the game, and the GM didn't feel like running for two insane people.

Yukio Noguchi

• System: Vampire: the Masquerade, 20th Anniversary Edition

• My status: Storyteller

When Khaoskid proposed playing as a Kuei-jin in a V20 game, I knew it was a bad idea. I didn't realize just how bad it was. Yukio Noguchi was a Devil Tiger, meaning his dharma required him to make people suffer. He was an expert martial artist, so he would just pick fist fights with people, beat them up, then torture them. He was also an overweight Japanese salaryman. I ended the game after zero (0) of my players came up with even slightly reasonable characters.

Nikolas Heidinger

• System: Vampire: the Masquerade, 20th Anniversary Edition

• My status: Storyteller

The follow-up game to the game with Yukio Noguchi, I instructed my players this time to come up with reasonable characters. Nikolas is so, so close to being one. He's a 10th-generation Tremere. He's loyal to the Pyramid. He doesn't breach the Masquerade. So what's the problem? He has dementia. The Tremere found him too late, and Embraced him while he was in his nineties. Now, he can learn Thaumaturgy, but still forgets his name. He is perhaps the most destructive character Khaoskid has ever played, because he's the most subtle. He's not literally Sans, nor does he run around with a claymore in the streets of Chicago, but he's still terrible. Like a real demented old man, he wanders away from the coterie while they're preoccupied with something. Whenever he gets a chance to talk, he rambles for minutes, if not hours. If this character was my first experience with khaoskid, I would fully believe he is a demented old man in real life too. His ability to waste time is unreal, and can only be truly understood if experienced first-hand.

!enemiesofkhaoskid This is why I hate him. He sucks so much.

@sneedman

Youre not a hobbylet, right?

just fricking kill me

Seems like a cool system at least better than 5e lol

https://old.reddit.com/r/Grimdank/comments/1c8dmub/the_call_was_coming_from_inside_the_palace/?sort=controversial

Mörk Borg is my favorite RPG of the last few years for its very elaborate aesthetic and great setting.

Mörk Borg is a setting where the world is prophesied to end and everyone knows it.

https://www.morkborg.com/

The thing about this game is that they've adapted a 3rd Party Liscense for anyone to make homebrew content for the game and be able to sell it. Already there are 1000s of custom campaigns and characters

https://exlibrisrpg.com/

The core game is based off Old School Essentials with the lethality of Warhammer Fantasy and Lamentations of the Flame Princess. A more "rules-light" approach where the GM is meant to reflect the cruel and capricious nature of the doomed setting.

https://anyflip.com/crvdx/aiob/basic (pdf of core book )

Cy-Borg is a sci-fi twist on Mörk Borg where the world is again doomed to apocalypse. They will allow you to take whatever from Mörk Borg over too as the world seems trapped in a cycle of suffering.

Basically like the /r/Polandball joke life preserve, because much of the front page is now spammed by colonizers who basically spam memes