Mongrel Banquet Club: The Harassment Group That Controls the OSR

Part of the reason I gave up on writing about TTRPGs.

Yes, this is something they really sold: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product_reviews.php?products_id=219711

“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”

― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

The Mongrel Banquet Club

A spectre is haunting TTRPGs - the spectre of the Mongrel Banquet Club.

The Mongrel Banquet Club¹ is a group that controls a combination of an invite-only Discord server and (now defunct) publishing house. They evolved out of a group of the same name that existed on the Google+ communities.

The MBC claims to be a group of edgy left-wing writers who like to support each other and ensure they are making quality products for people.

The reality is that the MBC is a group of tabletop writers and creators that deliberately target, shame and dogpile any creator that goes against them, while nepotistically promoting their own work.

A lot of the members² are very prominent in the OSR and TTRPG space, and they use this to promote the work of other people within their group. Judging by what they have published, they seem to actively hate tabletop gamers.

They have done this to a lot of people, some of which include:

• Greg Gorgonmilk (creator of Dolmenwood)

• Alexander Macris (creator of Adventurer Conqueror King System and Ascendant)

• Zak S³

• Courtney Campbell (creator of Hack & Slash)

• Noora Rose (creator of Unconquered)

The MBC does this under the guise of protecting tabletop roleplaying games from “right-wing influence”. The eagle-eyed amongst you will notice that 4/5 of the people above are definitively left-wing.

The left-wing people above either went against the group or tried to work together with people across political lines.

The MBCs harassment is a method of power and control, supported by people who enjoy the vicarious thrill of hating people they have never met for reasons that are not explained to them.

Their influence is across Reddit moderators, Discord server moderators and broad tabletop creators. Most of the moderators on /r/rpg and /r/osr are either MBC members or friends with people that are.

The largest OSR Discord is controlled exclusively by MBC members, most of whom have still somehow completely failed to make any impact in the tabletop space.

The point of this post is demonstrating them and their influence, and naming and shaming the ones that I am aware of.

The Expressing of Gorgonmilk

Article here from The RPG Pundit:

Some choice quotes:

So, some of you may have heard by now that the Ctrl-Left has hounded out another prominent member of the OSR: Greg Gorgonmilk.  Greg had a popular OSR blog and was a prominent G+ gaming poster.  But he was also known for posting against political-correctness (sorry for using such an old-fashioned term there for what is actually "SJW propaganda shit"; but Greg's an old-fashioned guy) and in favor of free speech.

The moment he was critically assaulted on multiple social media platforms came, however, when he decided to speak against political violence.  For context, it had to do with something that happened in Seattle this week, where a man with a nazi armband  was spotted wandering around the Seattle transit by someone who posted a picture online. Antifa immediately sprang into action searching for the guy all over the downtown of that city, and when they found him one of them punched him unconscious.  The claim is that he was shouting racist insults at people and that he hurled a banana at a black man; none of that somehow ended up on film even though the punch did (so people were clearly filming; why didn't they film the guy doing the threatening things they claim he was?).  But in any case, it's sort of irrelevant; the core of the story is the guy was a visible Nazi, and Antifa hunted him down and beat him unconscious (admittedly, with a single punch; it looks like Antifa finally found someone with upper arm strength! Or a target with a very weak jaw).

…

P: Ok. So I've heard that there was more behind this story than just what the public got to see. Namely, that there was a connection between the dogpiling and harassment you were the target of, and a secret group calling themselves the Mongrel Banquet Club. Want to explain that?

Gorgonmilk: I was invited to the Mongrel Banquet Club under the pretense that it was a no-holds-barred, post whatever filth you like kind of place. It was started by Beloch Shrike, btw, but nearly everyone there is a moderator. I was chastised for posting an image by Masamune Shirow that showed a semi-naked woman being groped above the waist by demon monsters. I thought it was amusing, but I was told that I could potentially trigger many people there. My response to this was very sarcastic, but I capitulated and took it down. The real salt in their eyes is the fact that I refused to be "taken aside" and talked down to by the group's "moral authorities" (wtf there are pictures of actual poop there!) So even though I did as asked I apparently ruffled their feathers by not toeing the lines of their ideology.

…

P: And that's when a group of them escalated into larger attacks?

Gorgonmilk:  Their whole schtick is that they are unerringly fighting for goodness, as you realize, so my pointing out that they were supporting assholes was serious cognitive dissonance. The final nail in the coffin was supplied by Courtney Campbell of Hack & Slash, who reiterated the whole "Gorgonmilk is Nazi-Sympathizer because he is showing sympathy for a man with a swastika on his arm." 

Courtney Campbell was later also cancelled for working together with Alexander Macris, which is one of the great ironies of this group.

The Burning of Alexandria

Late last year, Autarch (owned by Alexander Macris) started a Kickstarter for the 2nd edition (or Imperial Imprint) of the Adventurer Conqueror King System.

I was one of the individuals that had access to the system through Autarch’s Patreon, and I posted a positive preview and posted it on Reddit.

I was subjected to harassment, accusations of being a neo-Nazi and everything else that the Mongrel Banquet Club loves to do in order to undermine people.

One of the most pertinent accusations was that I was part of a conspiracy to promote ACKS content on Reddit.

Which is ironic, considering that shortly afterwards one of the Mongrel Banquet Club members (Dollface_Killah) posted this and got unnatural levels of engagement for /r/osr:

The arrow in the bottom right of this indicates the number of times this has been “shared”, which means the amount of times that this post has been reposted on platforms that are not Reddit.

In comparison, one of my standard posts looks like this:

The MBC’s brigading and harassment campaign included a lot of private Discord channels but they included some relatively prominent creators posting on BSky and similar places:

Noora herself was shortly cancelled by the MBC after this.

This resulted in the controversial decision to ban any mention of Alexander Macris, Autarch or Adventurer Conqueror King System from both /r/rpg and /r/osr, which resulted in him joining Zak S on the banned list:

Despite being banned from the biggest open markets, the Kickstarter was still a resounding success and gained $250k more than it’s $50k target:

The Worst People That You Have Never Met

Earlier this year, a post was released that demonstrated and evidenced harassment by the MBC and a lot of the individuals involved in it.⁴ This post was deleted within a few hours of being posted.

Luckily, archives exist.

There was a considerable amount of audio evidence which was also deleted. Thankfully, someone went to the effort of backing those up as well:

Within hours of this being posted, the Mongrel Banquet Club deleted everything from their DrivethruRPG page, presumably to stop people being able to find out who was a member:

DrivethruRPG - Mongrel Banquet Club

Unfortunately, I managed to get my hands on some of their books.

The Books

I wish I could say that there is content worth reviewing in these. However, I will not lie to my readers. The image on top of the article is the perfect example of the content throughout.

Puerile, boring and unplayable are the three bywords I would personally use to describe these books.

They do, however, have surprisingly extensive credits lists for books that have less than eight pages:

One of them⁵ also includes a conversation between the contributors and Dyson Logos, on their Discord channel⁶:

Conclusion

There is not much of a conclusion to this post.

If you want to support people who genuinely love tabletop and create good quality content, then avoid anyone on this list:

• Luke Gearing

• Fiona Maeve Geist

• Shoe Skogen

• Olivia Hill

• Jarrett Crader

• Yochai Gal

• Emmy Allen / Scrap Princess

• Brian Yaksha

• Ash Kreider

• Whitney Beltrán

• Acep Hale

• Anthony Fournier

• Adam Thorton

• Beloch Shrike / Nick LS Whelan

• Evey Lockhart

• Max Kielbasa

• Handy Haversack

• Gabriel Perez Gallardi

• Sean Poppe

• James Young

• David Black

• Phil Spitzer

• Noah Stevens

• Nicolo Maioli

• Michael Raston

• Christian Kessler

• Ben Laurence

• Dinkie Rizzle

• Gregory Blair

• James Young

• Oli Palmer

• Reece Carter

• Richie Cyngler

• Tore Nielsen

This group gatekeeps, harasses and attacks anyone who comes out against them.

I do not care. I am done with writing on here now and I am looking to move on.

1. This is the name they call themselves on various platforms. They usually identify themselves as “Mongrels” or similar.

2. List of known members at the bottom.

3. Zak S is insufferable. I greatly dislike the man. I think the failures of his court cases shows he is what I would consider abusive in at least one relationship. However, he was undeniably cancelled by the MBC and should be included in this article.

4. Read up to “The Case Study” and listen to all the audio, as this is where the evidence is very strong. After that, it becomes absolute nonsense defending Zak S.

5. Peepee Soaked Heckhole

6. The link in that conversation now redirects to Dyson Logos’ blog: https://dysonlogos.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/alberts-prints-grid.jpg