Beasts at the Tabletop - II

Abuser: The Gaslighting.

Previously.

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The tenth installment of the table-top role-playing game series Chronicles of Darkness, Beast: The Primordial, occupies a contentious place in the over-arching line’s continuity. Opinions are, to say the least, polarized. A small number of players like it and will zealously defend it as an integral, if not outstanding, entry into the series. A larger number view it as the series’ nadir, and will lambast its shortcomings with the same enthusiasm its defenders shield it with. So far as I can tell, it seems as if the majority of players are lukewarm on it and, for the most part, appear content to forget it exists.

Who’s right? Who’s wrong?

Like assessing any piece of media, it’s largely subjective. Of course, there are objective merits a piece of media can be judged by - does it look good, is the writing solid, does it play well, so on and so forth - but whether or not something is objectively good has never been much of an impediment that keeps people from liking it. I mean, the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise has spent well over two decades in the doldrums without an objectively good new release to its name (I’m not sure it’s broken that trend, either), but there’s still tens of thousands of Sonic-o-philes that would take a bullet for the little blue bastard.

Even Sonic ‘06, roundly decried as the worst installment in the over forty-year long history of the franchise, still has it’s defenders.

When it comes to Beast, however, I find myself comfortably at home with its detractors. I would hesitate to say it’s the worst game that’s ever been published in the TTRPG scene, but, er… well, it certainly isn’t good by any measure. It’s actually stunningly bad, but more than anything, it’s disappointing.

As I said in the precursor to this article, the central premise of Beast was not without potential. It wasn’t what I would have chosen to do with the series, but I’m also not employed by White Wolf Games - thankfully - so I didn’t get much of a say in that. A lot of players were cautiously optimistic about the main conceit; basically, that you’re a primordial monster that quite literal derives sustenance from the terror and fear you instill in humans. Dark? Yes. But, sometimes, it’s fun to play the baddie. Also, it’s called the fucking Chronicles of Darkness, so… I mean, it wouldn’t be totally out of left field, would it?

Unfortunately, the original pitch was something of a false bill of goods.

Oh, you were playing a Beast, that much was true… but Beasts weren’t quite as beastly as many had hoped they would be. Beasts, as it turned out, were not actually giants, dragons, gorgons, and other such fantastical creatures of mythology and fairy tales - they were humans with the souls of these monsters.

And, no - it isn’t as if said humans could shapeshift into these things, which is what people were expecting at the very least.

You just can’t actually play as a dragon. Like, at all. Even when aspects of a beast’s “soul” manifest - say, changing one’s hand into a dragon’s claw to rip a locked car door off its hinges, or altering one’s height to match that of a hulking, lumbering ogre - those traits are invisible to average humans. The only caveat to this is when the Beast takes a human to their lair, which is basically some nightmare hell-scape pocket dimension where they can take on a monstrous form.

But that isn’t really what people were expecting, nor is it what they wanted. What sounds more exciting to you - a three-story tall dragon slinking around the perimeter of a remote mountain cabin like the T-Rex scene from Jurassic Park…

“Hey, dude. Unlock the door. I just wanna talk.”

Or some totally normal looking dude standing on the doorstep of a remote mountain cabin saying, I’m gonna getcha! Oh, I’m gonna getcha!… but he’s got the soul of a malicious, fire-breathing dragon.

This humans but with monster souls bit immediately drew the ire of online communities who quickly slapped the label of Otherkin Bait on the game. If you’ve never heard of Otherkin before, I genuinely apologize for being the one to tell you about them.

Remember when furries were squarely ridiculed as the single most out-to-lunch demographic on the internet?

Oh, if only we knew how good we had it…

Yeah, Otherkins were the demographic who one-upped them to take that title in the late Oughts and very early 2010’s. The main difference between the two was that while furries were under no delusions that they weren’t actually upright cartoon dog people, Otherkins were adamant that they were… something else. Human in body, maybe, but at heart? They were elves. Wolves. Cats. They ran the gamut of such things. If you’ve heard that viral story about the high school student who identified as a cat - Otherkins were the precursor to that phenomenon. And even they were a bit too odd for most furries.

They’re still around these days, but much like the bronies, who shoved them off the pedestal of peak internet weirdness, they’ve been lapped on that particular track by the various flavors of criminally insane that emerged in the late 2010’s so many times that they’ve largely faded into irrelevance.

With this in mind, it’s easy to understand why many players saw this installment as Otherkin: the Fantasy rather than a game about playing as a true, legitimate, ancient terror from time immemorial.

Things didn’t get much better when players discovered the antagonists of the game would be Heroes. Simply put, Heroes are the natural antithesis of Beasts. They hunt them down. They kill them. Understandable, right? That’s kind of what a hero does - kill things that tend to ruin the lives of normal humans.

Now, if the game, as many had suspected it to be, featured Beasts as unambiguous villains, this would be perfectly fine.

But they weren’t. As it turns out, the Beasts aren’t just out-and-out baddies; they’re also misunderstood woobies. Beasts did not do what they do because they needed to sustain themselves on humanity’s fear the same way a vampire needs blood; they were doing it to teach humans a lesson. Because something something pain is the best teacher, which… is it? Is it always? I’ve never needed to shoot myself in the foot to understand that bullets hurt.

For instance, in the actual game book, there’s an example of a Beast that permanently traumatizes a young teenager for stealing Halloween candy from children. And continues to do so for the rest of this kid’s life. Like, sure, I’d get it if this Beast popped up in their room and scared the piss out of them one time to get the message across, but haranguing them for the rest of their natural life for an act of stupid, juvenile petty theft that they probably would have grown out of on their own seems a bit extreme. But there’s really no nuance at play, here. There are no shades of gray whatsoever - the Beasts are always righteous, the Heroes are totally icky meanies.

This got messy when the chief author of the book - and we’ll get to him shortly - came out and began to chide people who said, Well, this doesn’t seem right, as hateful bigots, man-babies, so on and so forth. He even went so far as to compare Beasts to persecuted minorities. In particular, he drew parallels between beasts and members of the LGBT+ Rainbow Brigade, which even most of them didn’t like for reasons that will become blatantly apparent.

This really wasn’t anything the author needed to explicitly state, though; the sentiment was plain to see in the text of the book.

Most of the Heroes presented are, I shit you not, internet trolls, pick-up artists, men’s rights activists, and other such naughty no-no people on the Progressive Left’s shit-list, while more than a few of the Beasts portrayed in given examples are gay, trans, non-binary with neo-pronouns, so on and so forth. Heroes are described in the text as highschool bullies with the personality of rabid dogs. Again, even for many members of the Rainbow Bloc, this was way too on the nose. Also, understandably, they didn’t exactly like being compared to abusive monsters.

Because the more information about the game came out, the more that’s what the Beasts appeared to be - abusive monsters. Literal nightmare creatures invading the dreams and impeding on the lives of mortal humans to teach them hard lessons that were being unfairly bullied while fulfilling their God-given mission to enlighten humanity by filthy chuds who just didn’t understand their glorious work. The Beasts feel less like strict teachers and more like a sociopath that would beat you with a belt because, Fuck you, you made me do this, if you just learned your god damn lesson I wouldn’t have to do this!

It gets even worse when you take into account that Heroes don’t just pop up of their own accord; someone becomes a Hero when they’re victimized by Beasts. Not every person targeted by a Beast becomes a Hero, but everyone who is a Hero was someone tormented by a Beast to the point they psychologically broke. And, yet, it’s said that they really should just chillax let the Beasts do as they please, because, er… well, it’s not cool to harsh their mellow like that. The Beasts are just doing their thang.

But, hey - the heroes are just stupid trolls, and if they didn’t want to be permanently traumatized by abuse, well, maybe they shouldn’t have been a stupid troll? Case in point - here’s a Hero that is an oblique jab at GamerGate. Read the text yourself. It’s so fucking oblique it’s self-parodical.

The art in Chronicles of Darkness took a huge step back from Meatloaf Album Cover, too. If it wasn’t obvious.

Another example presented in the text is a Hero that was your normal, every-day, catty high-school mean girl. For the crime of being a run-of-the-mill bitch, a Beast hauls her ass into their lair and tortures her to the point that her soul becomes disconnected from her body, leaving her stranded in the nightmare world of the Beasts while her physical body lays comatose in the real world. Oh, and the only way she can escape is by killing Beasts, otherwise her soul will literally dissolve into nothingness.

The words disproportionate retribution comes to mind.

The text performs eye-popping feats of mental gymnastics to justify why she’s in the wrong for killing Beasts, even though it’s just what she has to do to get out of the situation one of them put her in. You know how the Beasts are just doing what they need to do to get by? Well, it’s just not so cool when a Hero does it, because they were mean so they should really take the high road and allow their immortal soul to slowly wither away in penance.

The implications are very, very ugly.

Victim blaming was a word that was thrown around both a lot and understandably. I really do not understand how one might read the various examples of Heroes and don’t come away thinking, as a Beast, Are we the baddies?

Here’s a block of text taken directly from the game, describing the lessons that a certain type of Beast is meant to teach.

A Tyrant teaches people their limits. The modern narrative in many places is that people can be whatever they set out to be, but that’s simplistic and naïve. Some people’s bodies are weak; that’s not a moral failing, but it does prevent them from feats of physical strength. A beneficent Tyrant can show people alternate ways to achieve their goals or goad them into pushing past their weakness. A more vicious Tyrant might teach through despair, terror, and even shame — you are not strong enough to best the dangers of the world alone.

Look - I don’t disagree with the sentiment, here. In America, we’re always told you can be whatever you want to be; it’s not entirely true… but it’s also not entirely false. And, yes, sometimes people need to be taken down a peg for various reasons. I get it.

Still, all I can envision from this is some dickhead Beast who gets their kicks telling kids in wheelchairs they’ll never be one of the Dallas Cowboys, or crushing the dreams of aspiring actors working as waiters in Los Angeles. And stiffing them on the tip.

More than anything, everything about Beasts just seems… petty. There’s another example given of a teenage Beast in a high school cafeteria dreaming about eating the entrails of another student for the crime of bumping into her and spilling a drink on her. I don’t need to explain why this is stupid, but this one… it just rubs me the wrong way. See, I know someone who’s very close to me who, when she was a child, knocked over a glass, broke it, and her father, without saying a word, backhanded her across the face so hard her feet left the floor. To this day, decades later, she still seizes up and gets antsy when someone breaks a glass. It’s not debilitating, but I also can’t imagine being walloped so hard over a fucking accident that it Pavlovianly conditions you to feel anxious over broken glasses for the rest of your life.

So many times, Beasts are depicted ruining the lives of hapless people for trivial sleights, immature behavior, or plain accidents. And, somehow, every time, they’re still the aggrieved party, and they always find some reason to justify themselves and their ludicrous actions. That is textbook abusive behavior.

And, again, if they were meant to be villains, that would be all well and good. But - and I cannot stress this enough - they aren’t.

So, you’re probably beginning to see why even the crowd that Beast was ostensibly pandering too weren’t all that happy with what they were seeing.

Oh, did I mention that every other supernatural race, from vampires to werewolves, so on and so forth, are naturally predisposed to like Beasts? Yeah, for some bullshit reason, every other race of things that go bump in the night - who usually try to kill one another on sight - just lo-o-ove them Beasts. Beasts are allowed at the werewolf clan cook-outs, hobnob with the vampire aristocrats, and do shots of Malört with the Chicago-area mummies.

Pictured: literally every supernatural entity when the Beast shows up to the Monster Mash.

The only exception are demons, and they’re never given a good reason as to why they don’t jive with the Beasts, which, naturally, makes them icky.

Taken all together, the entire conceit of the game is not just disappointing and lackluster since it doesn’t feature any, y’know, cool monsters, but it’s dressed up in extremely condescending and demeaning language that nakedly justifies abuse against people who think the wrong thing, and written by an extraordinarily bitter, resentful, and malicious author who was using the game to project juvenile revenge fantasies, as well as utilizing the Rainbow Bloc as a shield to deflect criticism.

And this was all after White Wolf ordered a rewrite of the game.

Believe it or not, most of these criticisms were lobbied against the preview of the game that was released to backers that supported the game’s crowd-funding campaign on Kickstarter. In response to the criticism, the game was overhauled. Unfortunately, however, White Wolf did not see fit to replace the author, who in turn doubled-down on just about everything everyone hated by trying to make the Beasts even more sympathetic and the Heroes even more unlikeable.

There were many, many other problems with the game that we could spend hours picking through. Perhaps most damningly, it’s just not a great game, even if you overlook all of the very questionable undertones, ugly implications, and outright nastiness. If you’re really interested, one of the writers at FATAL and Friends wrote a full review that is as scathing as it is comprehensive, but be warned - if you think my articles are long, this guy puts me to shame.

As a brief aside before we continue, it seems as if Beast brought the entire series to a grinding halt. In the early 2020’s, after an agonizingly protracted development cycle, the eleventh installment in the series was released, featuring a vague collection of Cronenbergian-body horror mutants called Deviants was released. Again, not the worst idea in the world, but White Wolf needed a home run pitch to win back those that had checked out after Beast, and it turned out This time you get to play as Jeff Goldblum from The Fly was not it. If I recall correctly, the broad response was a shrug and an, Okay?

It was, again, met with a lukewarm reception. What would come next? Well, no one’s sure. Paradox Interactive has been mostly mum on Chronicles of Darkness since. Like a mediocre band that has no new material but still wants to cash in on name recognition, they drop a remastered edition of an old book that changes very little and adds nothing, or updates to old books that bring them up to speed with the overall games current edition (to very mixed reviews), but as for a new installment into the mainline series? No word so far as I’ve seen.

The silence on the series leaves many wondering if they have any plans for it going forward. As of this writing, a new creative director was appointed to oversee Chronicles of Darkness by Paradox Interactive, but given that this individual has spent the past eight years working for the slave driving simpletons at Wizard’s of the Coast, I’m not sure they’re going to be able to course-correct the listing ship rather than find a way to monetize every aspect of any future releases.

That, and frankly, I’m not sure where they can go with the series - one the most damning elements of Beast was that they wiped out a wide swath of potential monsters to base future games off of in one go, throwing in dragons and giants and just about every beastie that wasn’t already accounted for in the line-up already. If, hypothetically, they did add a game centered on dragons, it would contradict with the lore previously established by Beast. They could find some way work around it, sure, but it’ll require yeoman’s effort to dig themselves out of the creative dead-end that Beast put them in.

It is a disappointing, but perhaps predictable end to a series brought about by a small outfit that was snapped up by a larger corporation. We’ve seen it play out time and time again, where companies like Hasbro, Paradox, or EA buy small developers and/or publishers, gut the teams that made their IPs successful, and squeeze them for a few more dimes before leaving it bleeding out in an alleyway to slowly, gracelessly expire. It might be for the best. Everything has a shelf life, and a lot of fans outright abandoned the game after the next series of events that followed the release of Beast: The Primordial.

At the heart of all of this controversy surrounding Beast is the author. It’s time I introduce you to Matt McFarland.

Also known by his online moniker of Blackhatmatt, McFarland was an active and well-respect oldhead among the TTRPG community. The man was a moderator on the online discussion hub for TTRPGs, RPG.net, for many years, and worked for decades as a free-lance writer for several different game publishers. Including White Wolf Publishing. He was also an outspoken Progressive. He was not shy about voicing his vehement dislike for the conservative politics - especially the alt-right - nor his support for feminism, trans rights, and just about every other Progressive cause du jour. From what I understand, he was one of the central characters in the RPG.net theater of GamerGate, and one of the reasons the conflict became so contentious in a community that was only adjacent to video games. Given the leftward slant the community always had - especially on RPG.net - he was considered one of the good guys.

Now, prior to the release of Beast, McFarland was riding high on the warm reception of his the last RPG he served as the lead for - Demon: The Descent. If you read the prequel to this article, you might recall that the game was very well received by the community. Even I liked it, albeit I suspect that’s in spite of McFarland’s contributions.

As I already mentioned, as previews of Beast were drip-fed to the Kickstarter backers - which was funded quite literally overnight due to the goodwill McFarland had garnered from his Demon success - McFarland frequently antagonized detractors in the comments, smearing them as right-wing trolls, GamerGaters, and the like. Even critque given in good faith was dismissed out of hand and those who contributed it were labeled with the usual accusations of bigotry, usually in an aggressively passive-aggressive manner. Pretty bog-standard behavior in the realm of online bloodsports, really. Still, it rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, so much so that some withdrew their monetary support for the project entirely.

The promised rewrite did buoy hopes that the project could be salvaged once again, but, as I said before, when it was delivered, it did little to remedy the chief complaints lodged against the game - namely, the Beasts sucked. Among some, the game developed the unsavory but not inaccurate nickname of Abuser: the Gaslighting.

In 2016, the final, revised edition of Beast: the Primordial would limp to the finish line. The controversy was quick to subside as most people who had issues with it simply didn’t play or buy it, and the large majority of fans seemed eager to forget about the whole debacle.

Now, many of the sources for what transpired next have been lost to time, vanished into the digital sands. But I’ll try to pull together what I can.

In 2017, on RPG.net - the site that Matt McFarland was a long-time moderator of, remember? - a thread was started to discuss one of several allegations of sexual misconduct committed by people in the TTRPG industry and community that had ignited a firestorm. This thread would be carefully moderated by Matt McFarland. And someone had a problem with that.

I’ll let the posts speak for themselves.

To say that this was a shock would be an understatement. Within less than twenty-four hours, McFarland would voluntarily resign as a moderator and was subsequently banned from the site.

The RPG.net staff launched an investigation into the accusations. But it would take two years - two years - and two more allegations for the real consequences to come.

In 2019, two more women would step forward and accuse McFarland of not only sexual misconduct, but also plain workplace abuse during their time working with him. While the first accusations of sexual impropriety were claimed to have happened almost two decades prior¹, these were much more recent. The finer details of their accusations have unfortunately been lost with the deletion of their Twitter accounts, as well as those who investigated the matter further.

During that two year window between the allegations, McFarland was allowed to quietly continue working in the industry; writing for various RPGs, attend conventions, and run Kickstarter campaigns. It was assumed that he was still employed or getting work² by Onyx Path Publishing - a company with ties to the then defunct White Wolf Publishing - as they never made a public statement on the matter when the first accusation was made.

They said nothing on the matter until the 2019 allegations came forward. Then - and I must stress this was two years later - they revealed that they had quietly let him go in the wake of the first allegations in 2017. Which, if that was the case… why not say it at the time, then? It’s laughable that, in their statement, they say the following:

We hear his accusers and believe them.

I guess you only hear them when it’s convenient, huh?

Now, I’ll be the first person to say that accusations does not a guilty party make. In fact, I think that, in today’s day and age, we’re all too quick to banish someone from polite society for allegations that, with a little bit of investigation, are easily disproven. Many wrongly accused individuals have managed to refute the claims made against them, but only a few have managed to salvage their careers afterwards.

I will say that RPG.net did the right thing by launching an investigation into the matter and doing their due diligence to ensure that McFarland was not being maliciously maligned, and if he had done what he was accused of doing.

Which he copped to… with an asterisk the size of Alaska tacked on.

I cannot find an archive of the post, nor do any of the sources I’ve found quote it in any capacity, so I’m going to tread carefully here since I don’t have the actual text of his apologia. Without the actual first-hand source, written by McFarland himself, I must state her unambiguously that I am not making any claim that he did what he was accused of. You can very plainly tell what I believe - but I am not telling you what to believe, nor making any concrete allegation of culpability or guilt³.

But in every resource I found on the topic, it is clearly and unambiguously stated that he apologized for… things that may or may not have happened. The sources I find seem to view his “apology” as a tacit admission that something may have happened, but it’s one of those cases where he’s like, Well, I don’t remember it happening that way, but I’m sorry you took it the way you did.

He simply gave some mealy-mouthed explanation that, yeah, some things might have happened, about how he had grown during the intervening years - laughable, since the workplace abuse and sexual harassment claims were still fresh enough to have steam coming off them - and ultimately laid the blame at the feet of his depression and how he had been blinded by his white male privilege at the time.

Shortly afterwards, his wife - who was also a mod on the RPG.net and a very active participant in the community - was similarly exiled from the site as Matt had been. The site’s staff stated that she had not acted in good faith with the investigation. Again, the details are scant and mostly hearsay, but word is that she actively worked against it by withholding information from the investigators, stalling for time when asked to provide it, and generally being uncooperative.

Worse still, it was said that his wife was using her position of influence as the President of the Indie Game Developer Network to cover her husband’s tracks. She had lots of connections in the industry and lots of favors she could call in. These people were known quantities. They were respected and had been for a long time. A lot of other high profile people around them either didn’t want to believe these allegations or, more likely, I presume didn’t want the stank from the accusations against McFarland to stick to them by dint of association. I found multiple comments while doing research of people alleging that many people in the industry were warning one another about McFarland, his wife, and how insulated and protected they were from consequences because like protects like. Obviously, I can’t speak to the veracity of these claims.

Make of them what you will.

Apparently, the 2019 allegations were not the first time allegations of sexual harassment and workplace mistreatment had been made against McFarland or his wife, but it was the first time anyone was hearing about it due to her pulling strings and tapping on insider connections within the industry. It’s been alleged that the reason it took two years to reach a decisive conclusion on McFarland’s allegations was because she played a very active part in stalling the investigation.

Some people really do deserve each other, don’t they?

It was then and only then, in 2019, that the harsh consequences came down on the lovely pair. McFarland’s own independent game publisher, Growling Door Games, was shuttered. Games he had worked on stripped his name from the credits, and the flow of royalties he was entitled to shut off. In one case for a game called Chill, the rights to the IP were transferred to someone else entirely. Their membership among the community roundly revoked, and the two slunk off into obscurity.

Oh, I forgot to mention - and this’ll really make your stomach turn - that this entire time, McFarland had a day job. The RPG stuff was a side hustle. His main grind was working as a Speech Language Pathologist. At an elementary school.

For all we know, he still does.

Let’s not mince words; if… and that is if the allegations are true - and remember, he (allegedly) never outright refuted any of them - Matt McFarland deserves to be under a prison. Similarly, it is nothing short of appalling that not only was he allowed to skate by for decades with no consequences, but actively protected from them by equally detestable wife and his buddies in the industry, all the while wielding Progressive politics as a shield he could hide behind and a cudgel he could bash detractors with.

With hindsight being 20/20, Beast: the Primordial looks awful different. Prophetic, almost. Here, you have a game about a victimized, stigmatized, and “unfairly” put-upon group of literal predators who need to indulge in unconscionable (but pleasurable, because monsters love eating fear) acts against innocent people just to survive. They harm, traumatize, and torment random people for what is, ostensibly, their own good. To teach them lessons. To help them grow.

Ostensibly.

And, in their opinion, that justifies their heinous actions. At least, in their mind. And if the victims of these acts don’t accept that? Well, they’re bad people who deserved to be hurt, anyways.

The only people who stand against the “Beasts” are besmirched as lunatics, puritanical prudes, radical political partisans, sexists and racists and every other -ist and -phobe you can think of, and generally bad people who don’t understand them Beasts or what they’re doing. In the opinions of these monsters, the best thing their detractors could do would be shut up and look the other way. And if they don’t stand down and remain in the monster’s way, then they deserve to be ruined.

After all - the monster can’t help what they do. They were just born that way. It’s in their nature. They’re the Beasts.

The implications evolve from ugly to hideous. Hilarious as the nickname Abuser: The Gaslighting is, I think a more apropos name would be Predator: The Assaulting. It reads not like a story of a persecuted class of outsiders being unfairly maligned by ignorant zealots, but a victory lap penned by a criminal writing apologia for himself and rubbing the proverbial noses of his detractors and victims into the dirt. It seems like the smug, guiltless mea culpa of an abusive predator.

It’s so fucking grotesque that I find it genuinely beggars belief that any of this was allowed to take place at all.

If there’s anything to be taken from this particularly sordid chapter in TTRPG history, let it be this timeless quote often attributed to author Maya Angelou.

When someone shows you who they are…

Believe them the first time.

1. Keep in mind that in many, if not all states, the statute of limitations for statutory rape - which is what was alleged - is indefinite for felony sex crimes. There’s a lot of unfortunately gray areas around these laws that make it difficult to parse, especially without knowing what state the claimed offense was committed in.

2. I’m not sure if McFarland was an independent contractor or actively employed by White Wolf/Onyx Path, but the fact of the matter is he was working for and getting paid by the company in some form or fashion.

3. This is called C.Y.A.