OSR: On Zak (Sabbath) Smith

If you're not sure what all this is about, Justin Stewart (Dragons Gonna Drag) has an excellent summary post linking to several stories and accounts. You can also look through the Old School RPG Planet list. I'm not going to try and repeat any of it. Other people more closely connected to the entire event have already covered all the major points. So if this post is mostly about trivia, it's because I don't have much else to say. As usual, Cavegirl's got it covered.

 I believe women. I believe Mandy, Hannah, Jennifer, and Vivka. Their abuser cannot debate, intimidate, or manipulate me into silence. There is no place for abusers among us. 

Everything below the jump is significantly less important than the preceding paragraph.

Monstrous Regiment - Terry Pratchett

My Interactions With Zak

When I told people I was thinking about starting a D&D blog, several people warned me about Zak Sabbath (DnD With Pornstars). Nothing clear, nothing concrete, but the equivalent of "don't get into an elevator alone with this guy" or "watch your drink" or "there's something off about him".

Zak is one of the main reasons I keep my real life completely separate from my RPG work. I'm so glad I set that up from day one.
 
I joined G+ at Arnold K (Goblin Punch)'s invitation and puttered around, blogging away. Zak turned up in a couple of comment sections, being charming and helpful and welcoming and all that, but we didn't really have an interaction until Sept. 2017. 

You can read the full thread here. I'd asked for advice on heist modules. Someone recommended Blades in the Dark. Zak replied immediately with "never promote Evil Hat", and I replied with.

"If I added the disclaimer "only post modules published by people n feuding, potentially feuding, offended by, or offending Zak S."... I'm not sure how many responses I'd get. Ever. To anything."

Not the most mature response, but by this point I'd read enough to start to get a sense of how Zak worked. I thought he was an internet tough guy; an alpha nerd with a Faberge ego who'd pick a fight with the sky on a cloudy day. And I had nothing to lose by calling him on it. I don't mind losing fights. If things went nuclear I could delete everything and walk away.

Because there were rumours. Call out Zak and "They" would start harassing you. "They" never turned up, but Zak did. We had a discussion in a private thread (which you can read here). In 6 posts total, he told me everything I needed to know. Please, read it.


Some of his arguments were logical. Some were appeals to my good nature. But they all lead to the same place. Arguing with Zak is like fighting smoke. You stop believing yourself. You lose track of your own principles, your own views, until eventually all that's left is Zak. The only way to make him go away was to make him think he won.

After that discussion, I could never see Zak as anything other than a liar, a manipulator, and a hypocrite; a Nixonian troll with a silver tongue and an Enemies List. I showed the conversation to a few people over the years. Some saw what I saw. Some didn't. Most just weren't sure.

And despite "knowing what Zak was", despite calling him out once or twice, what Mandy, Hannah, Jessica, and Vivka described shocked me.

If someone I trust had come to me on Feb 9th and told me, in point form, all the things in Mandy's post, I wouldn't have believed them. It's just too awful, too cartoonishly evil. Sure, Zak was a blowhard and an old-school intellectual troll but he wasn't a monster. 

But by Feb 10th there could be no doubt.

I was fooled. We were all fooled. Just because I poked fun at Zak doesn't mean I had any better idea of what was under the shell than anyone else. The revelations surprised and frightened me.

Common Questions

What Should I Look Out For?

Alex Schroeder (of, like, everything) has a great post on narcissism. Start there.

Zak worked by finding new people and love-bombing them, building up a web of charisma and obligation. He demanded apologies (like the one in my PM thread, or the one Brandon D describes in the comments here) if you crossed him, as a means of control and gratification. He recruited isolated and vulnerable people and stood "on their side", and when things got heated he used them as human shields.

So, going forward.
1. Watch out for Inner Rings. I read that famous C.S. Lewis essay when I was very young and it stuck with me. People will invite you into secret, intimate little clubs and you'll be gratified to be there... but you'll often find it's just a hollow shell. The mystery is greater than the contents.

On G+, Zak posted to private circles. To get in you had to petition him. Nobody else did this. Classic Inner Ring. And there were rings within rings.

2. Watch out for hypothetical fights. "If anyone ever came after you," Zak would always say, "I'll be on your side." It's nice to be supported but it costs nothing for someone to say this. You probably don't want people giving you unquestioning support all the time anyway. You might be wrong.

3. Watch out for people who can't laugh at themselves and can't allow others to laugh at them. To mock yourself implies you're not perfect. Most people know that and are fine with it. Some people want the world to see them as perfect, all-knowing, all-loving, always right creatures. It's not foolproof, but self-deprecating humour is a sign someone knows what they are; an ugly giant bag of mostly water.

4. Try to avoid secret disputes if one side has significantly more influence than the other. Zak had a flowchart (!) for how to deal with a disagreement. According to him, if you have concerns, gather up all the evidence and go to that person privately. If they're charismatic and clever (like Zak), they'll dismiss your concerns, make you feel awful for having raised them, and then add your evidence to their defense systems.

I had a brief and very minor disagreement with Patrick Stuart (False Machine). I went public with it (when I really should have spent more time talking it over with Patrick) in part because of Zak's system of isolating complaints and dismissing criticism. In retrospect, I was wrong. I should have handled the whole issue - from the very beginning of the project - with more sympathy and intelligence.

For the sake of completeness, there was also a later, separate but related issue where I turned one of Patrick's old posts into a PDF dungeon by putting in maps, but the less said about that the better. It's gone, deleted. I was moving very quickly on a project and the bit of my brain that would normally handle "how will people feel about this" was apparently on vacation.

Anyway, point is, it might be good to sometimes drag this stuff out into public view. Sure, you might come across like an idiot, but it's worth the risk if it exposes a systemic issue or a pattern. You shouldn't be afraid to call out the great and lordly if you think you need to.

5. This isn't directly related, but it's good advice for avoiding cult of personality traps. Do more work and less theory. Leave theorycrafting to people who aren't getting shit done. Let them write theories about the work you did.

EDIT. 6. Talk to any of your gaming groups about Zak. They might not be up to speed. They might not interact with the online community at all. Give them a summary. Link them to the statements. Warn them about people like Zak.

EDIT. 7. Anne Hunter (DIY & Dragons) has some suggestions on moving forward as a community.
 

I Own Zak's Books, What Do I Do?

That's on you. If you can use them without feeling guilty, use them. If you can't, get rid of them. You've got enough materialistic crap in your life. No need to boast or hand-wring about it online either.

RPGs are weird because there's a certain level of trust needed. Running a game using someone else's materials is like reprogramming your brain. It gets way deeper than a novel or a film. If you're going to open up your brain, and your friends' brains, you need to trust that what you're putting in isn't subtle poison.

If you buy his books in the future, a portion of that money will go towards supporting his abuse-enabling lifestyle. Don't do that.

So What About the OSR?

Joseph Manola (Against the Wicked City) has stopped using "OSR" to describe his work.  I respect that, but  I'm going to keep using it for 3 reasons:
1. I'm very lazy.
2. I don't think the revival or revolution is done yet. It's changing, but there's still a current of electric energy running through so many people. Content is mutating daily.
3. Zak tainted the OSR brand, before and after these revelations. To some people, OSR means "the old boys' club of neckbeards playing ancient games" or "the hostile edge of homebrew". I'd like to work on reclaiming the space, until Zak and the environment of fear he created  is just a bad joke and a distant memory.

Zak once said

Fuck that then and fuck it now. This was only Zak's world in his head.
Not only did the Emperor have no clothes he wasn't even an Emperor. He was just an angry naked dude on a soapbox.

Should I Be Mad At People Who Worked With Zak Or Defended Him?

I'm not. He was good at seeming. He had all of us fooled to one extent or another. And with rounding, given the horrific things he did to the people close to him, he had us all fooled to the same degree.

Zak never seemed to say "go send death threats to this person" or "go hunt down my enemies". He'd just say "someone should go after X" or "hey, have you seen anyone post on Y forum about me?" People would oblige because they wanted to be close to him.

But anyone who works with him in the future, beyond contractual obligations and edge cases, is done.

The whole community - people who can't normally agree if AC goes up or down - has come together to kick Zak to the curb. He has no place here, no dens he can slither in to hide.


EDIT 2019/09/24Except for Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

The full writeup is here.

If you're into Lamentations of the Flame Princess, or if you work with them,... you should know this book exists, that Raggi wrote it, and that he sold it for money. And you should decide how you feel about that.

EDIT 2019/10/12
Or Jeff Rients, I suppose.

I'm going to repost my comment from there because it's relevant.

There is a group of people who know Zak IRL who have said something like "I did not see these events occur. Some details of the accounts do not match with events I observed."

Zak - and you - frame these groups as incompatible. I say they're not.

Abuse is not something anyone spots right away. It's often not like it is on TV sitcoms, with the black eyes and broken furniture and waving guns around. If it was, I'd hope Zak's friends, many of whom seem to be decent people, would have stepped in.

Abuse is often very slow and very subtle, and Zak, by all accounts, is very good at steering and manipulating people away from anything that might expose a crack in the facade. It's a pattern of behavior over a long period and it mostly happens when the door is closed and the public mask comes off. I am not at all surprised people close to Zak and Mandy say they didn't see anything; what would it mean if they had?! Good lord, they'd be monsters.

Therefore, the testimony of friends and relatives doesn't amount to much. To a friend, even to a close friend, or even to the people inside the relationship, an abusive relationship can all look completely fine and normal. There is love and trust and people lying to themselves and minimizing evidence. And then when the truth comes out, those friends have a terrible soul-destroying fact to face. A good person would not support an abuser. A good person would have noticed, would have done something, would have helped... right? They consider themselves good people. Therefore, their friend can't be an abuser. And I think that's pretty much what we're seeing here.

But that's not how it works.

A Final Note On Consent

I never thought I'd be blogging about BDSM but here we go. I want to get back to medieval book quotes with statblocks.
Zak's official response is a bit difficult to find. It's not on his main, famous, well-known blog or his personal twitter (because, I think, that'd associate it with his name, and that might tarnish his personal brand). It's on a newly created side blog. You can find it if you want to.

Anyway, in it Zak says:

As for Hannah’s allegations – what I say now is not an excuse but to simply point out I had no idea and no clue about any of this. She said that I slapped her and choked her “out of the blue” and in public – this was during a day when Hannah and I were talking and making out in broad daylight near a wall and Hannah said something about BDSM and I said something like, “do you like to be choked and hit?” and she smiled and said, “yes”. If I’d known there was anything to apologize for I would’ve immediately.

Hannah's take on the same incident:

There was also a strange incident when we were first hanging out together during which he asked if I was into kinky stuff, to which I replied yes. He proceeded to slap me and choke me against a wall, in public. Now, in a bedroom setting, with clear boundaries and consent, it would have been fine, but out of the blue and in public, it was not okay at all.

There's no contradiction. They both describe the same incident. No he-said, she-said; they said.

But "sex-positive" Zak missed a step and never realized it.

Being into something in principle isn't the same as being into it now with this particular person. You still need to check! I like tea. That doesn't mean I immediately want a mouthful of strong black tea prepared by a chain-smoking diner waiter with dandruff.

"Do you like to be choked and hit?"
   "Yes"
         "Would you like to be choked and hit, by me, right now?"

That last sentence never happened, even in Zak's retelling. He's so wrapped up in his own machismo-fueled world that the question would never occur to him. Of course she'd be into it with him and of course she'd be into it right now because he's into it right now and of course she's prefer his level of intensity and strength because it's his.

And in Zak's world, there are no other people. No other people like him. Just ugly giant bags of mostly water. Some of them he fucked. Some of them he fucked with.

But he can't ever fuck with us again.