I've finally decided to post my thoughts on the molehill that people are turning into an imaginary mountain over the Rebel Scum/DrivethruRPG thing going on. You know where people are raging over a decision from a year ago. But first I'm going to be posting some information via screenshots from the other side of the coin that nobody seems interested in hearing about. That is from the DrivethruRPG side. These are on their official discord server and are from a person employed by OBS.
Probably going to piss some folks off. But damn, that seems to be my hobby somedays without even trying to do so.
First Rascal News, the ones who released the news article starting this dirt pile, didn't share all the information they received in their article.
Now this isn't all that unusual. Reporters have to select what information to present and what actually matters to the article. But I'm wondering what they didn't use. I'm not paying for Rascal News so I can't see past their paywall to even have a clue.
Next up is how they've done this before. Had to ask publishers to change or edit something to meet their guideline. So this isn't anything new at all. They just don't publicize it.
After that they admit they have mostly had to do this from products that fall on the right side of the political spectrum. Just that this time they had to do it with a product that was from the left side of the political spectrum. But folks don't like equally applied rules on either side of the spectrum, that much anybody with any common sense knows.
Then finally we have a timeline. That the book was on DrivethruRPG for several years and that the forward in question was added in later. They received complaints about it, reviewed the material and contacted the publisher asking them to change it. The publisher refused and the game was withdrawn from the DrivethruRPG site.
Then the timeline gets interesting. All that happened a year ago. Nothing was said, nobody raged, nobody cared and for the most part apparently very few folks gave a damn about Rebel Scum. Until they were ready to release their second edition. Then the "banned by DriveThruRPG" bit was added to the cover of their new edition (which I'm wondering if the NEW version was ever submitted to DrivethruRPG for review) and I would bet money that somebody involved with the game tipped off the folks at Rascal News about what had happened before in hopes of getting some extra publicity.
So in the end my views of DriveThruRPG remain unchanged. I've been very critical of some of the things they've done over the years, but not in this case. They are attempting to apply rules equally in an atmosphere that is absolute nightmare material. The fact that this occurred a year ago and nothing came of it until now when there is suddenly a new edition available is suspect. I will continue to use DriveThruRPG.
I'm a very liberal minded person and have never supported a right wing candidate for decades. If there is a Democrat on the ticket they got my vote almost every single time (there have been two occasions where I voted for an independent in the last 20 years, both times in very local elections). If there is no Democrat I either don't leave a vote in that category or write in my own name.
That being said this entire thing looks like a bunch of left leaning folks clutching their pearls and saying "But you can't do this to US as well" to a company that had to do it to several right leaning folks over the years. Equal means equal and sometimes it sucks when the rules get applied to you. But that is something you have to deal with in life.
