Deathbringer: The Last Dance

This is not an analysis. I'm not even sure if it qualifies as a blog post.

It's more of an exorcism.

In case you were wondering who the Magnolia Mascot is, this is Vicky, an OC adopt I got from Sakkiye. Isn't she grand?

    I spent a good chunk of July in wonderful Vancouver, Canada, with my even more wonderful girlfriend, and something I promised myself was no more blogging about Deathbringer. Magnolia Keep is not a drama blog, and as Lyme and so many others have rightly pointed out, attempting to follow the discourse, especially when becoming metrics-obsessed like I am constantly teetering on the verge of, is bad for the soul. But also, some stuff has happened that I kinda want to talk about, most of it because it's funny, and that is once again going to be you the reader's problem. 

    If I timed this right, by the time it goes up the Backerkit will be closed and Deathbringer will go into playtesting next month as part of the long process towards completion and fulfillment, and if God is merciful there will be nothing else to talk about. So here comes an even more scattershot (and empowered by the miracle of cough syrup, because I'm sicker than the dog I pretend to be on the internet) list of weird miscellany that's been stuck in my intellectual craw.

Hey Liz, Where'd All The Comments Go?

    So, this one is a mea culpa. The blog had a shit-stirrer who shall remain nameless who kept showing up in the comments of my posts with the exact same copy-pasted replies again and again (ultimately settling on the same one posted ten times). Blogger doesn't have a proper "Ban" function, and I was away from my computer so I didn't want to do the "Edit the blog's html to ban this specific person" solution.  After requiring moderation on all my comments, I fat-fingered and deleted everyone's comments by mistake while trying to delete another round of spam. Sorry about that, y'all are wonderful.

Some Good News!

    As said above, I try not be too drama-focused or negative, so I do want to point something out where there was a problem and an improvement was genuinely made. Specifically, the Fungus-Licking Cannibal Cultist. They were the first monster announced, and...well...the Professor later said in an interview made of questions he most likely preselected for himself that they're intended to be akin to morlocks, underground humanoids wearing masks of human skin. This did not pan out in the original design.

The original design, just as a reminder.

 

    Now some people on reddit (both in the OSR and general RPG subreddits) thought that those raising concerns were reading too much into it. However, as it turns out, we weren't! In that same interview I linked above a new design for the FLCC was unveiled, and it actually looks like a person wearing a flesh mask, and not a really unflattering portrait of a black person. 

I'm being serious. This is an improvement. I like this, and I think it's important to encourage people when they make positive changes to their stuff. 

    Speaking of reddit...

On the Audience You Attract

    So, on Bluesky, the piece was a huge hit. A bunch of people I admire suddenly went from being "people I followed" to "my moots," and as of writing ten thousand of you have read the damn thing? Everyone was really nice, and even when folks disagreed it was mostly cordial. Reddit (and at least one Discord I'm in that I won't name) were less so. Along with the typical accusations of me just not liking the art, or being a prude or whatever, some insults were thrown my way, and one guy in said nameless discord got really fuckin' mad that I was accusing the Roll For Combat Team or the Professor of racism. It was funny, and a few of the more choice insults have made their way into my Bluesky and Discord bios. But given I've been told I shouldn't harass and slander people on the internet, I figured I should maybe make things a bit more clear.

Unrelated publicity photo of paragraph four of my first post.

    

    So for the benefit of those who didn't make it that far last time, I'm once again going to reiterate: I do not think the folks at Roll For Combat or Professor DM are any form of bigoted. I do not know the content of their hearts. However, decisions regarding the marketing of this campaign have attracted an audience that is at least indifferent to bigotry, and at worst actively encouraging it. 

    The guy who keeps spamming my blog is the perfect example of this. In the first of his series of replies, he mocked the idea that people's heroes in the industry would be women figures like Ginny Di and spoke about how the game was just trying to harken back to the culture of the 80s, adding in parentheses "...not that there was anything wrong with those times anyway." He deleted that from subsequent reposts because it kinda gave the whole game away. If you can't find anything wrong with the culture of the 1980s...idk man. I can't help you, and frankly I'm not sure you even want to be helped.

    In a comment I accidentally deleted (sorry again about that), a woman spoke about how she was uncomfortable with the initial phrasing on the Deathbride's miniature. Mark Seifter, one of the Roll For Combat staff, chatted with her about it, and Stephen Glicker went ahead and adjusted it to the version that is currently up. I joined the Roll For Combat discord briefly to ask a question about the campaign, and going through the message history I actually found that exchange.

I couldn't fit this anywhere else, but one of the RFC team also said the Plague Doctor ended up being an androgynous/femme figure because otherwise it would be a 5/3 split of men/women among the iconics. So I guess there is one woman in non-skimpy clothing, depending on how you squint.

    The RFC folks were polite and willing to share stuff, and assured the woman that there would be more equal-opportunity skimpy art coming in the future. My own thought that maybe they shouldn't have led with exclusively skimpy lady art aside, it's a good way to handle it.

    And then a few days later when discussion of the game got banned from EN World for being too toxic a subject, you had people discussing how they had fought the "gatekeepers" and the "perpetually-offended/emotionally incontinent" and of course the classic that a lot of people are backing it, so it must be good. 

    That's not to say there aren't sincere fans of Deathbringer who are normal about it. But if The Most Annoying Gamers are the folks jumping in the mentions of your critics (and at least one implying that I, Lizzie Magnolia, might be a sex pest with something to hide), I think that should give one reason to pause.

    Oh yeah this game is banned from discussion on EN World now. Have I mentioned that?  

Antici-

    So y'all know EN World? 

    Big forum, its what the Ennies are named after?

    You're not allowed to talk about Deathbringer there anymore. 

Stolen from friend of the blog Amber McFarlane. Go check her out!

    

    I don't have much to contribute to this story. Yes there are allegations that the Deathbringer team intentionally brigaded EN World to shift the vote for Most Anticipated TTRPG in their favor, but frankly I don't care. Online popularity contests are largely going to be decided by who has the largest/most unhinged fanbase anyway.

    Rascal covered this better than I could (in part because a chunk of it is happening on Twitter, where I'm not), but the basics is that the forum regulars and Deathbringer fans had words, and the forum's owner, Russ Morissey, has since been harassed on Twitter by aforementioned Deathbringer fans. I bring up my point again about how you are at least a little responsible for the audience you attract and keep, but honestly this just fucking sucks and I'm sorry for Russ.

Check out This YouTube Video

    One of my great lamentations of the original two Deathbringer posts is that I'm not an art critic. I can point out that things look silly or wrong but I have a hard time explaining why.  So thankfully some actual art critics did, and I found their video really enjoyable and informative! Go watch it.

Gathering Blue (Orcs)

    To quote John Mulaney "The things crazy people say mean nothing to them, but everything to me." In the initial Deathbringer promo video, the Professor said that his orcs were not "Blue-skinned elves..." This short-circuited my brain a bit because what the fuck was he talking about??? A few ideas were floated by my friends and colleagues: the orc-equivalent from Break!!, the trolls from Warcraft, maybe the Drow? No one could figure it out.

    However, about a week into the campaign, a Q&A was done on the Roll For Combat channel, and the Professor answered my question, which, genuinely, was really nice of him. So let's hear what he has to say on the matter:

"It's just the idea that Orcs as they've evolved in D&D, they just...they just look like elves, all those species to me just seem to blend, there's nothing really distinctive about them."

(edited for clarity)

    When she heard this, my long-suffering girlfriend howled with laughter. "There was no meaning! He just says stuff!" God I love her so much. 

    So yeah, I guess I actually was overthinking this one. "Orcs are blue-skinned elves" doesn't mean anything.

    Unless you're Prismatic Wasteland. 

Drop Ship Louie

    Some of you may remember that the Deathbringer Backerkit offered a set of premium dice. They were thirty bucks a set, were advertised as invoking the weathered look of when you were a teenager the 1980s, I opined a bit on how they were selling a false nostalgia, I thought it was a nice and personal ending. 

    And then Onslaught Six of Tidal Wave Games found some almost identical dice. 

$17.99 for a set of six.

Normally they're $30 apiece, but if you buy them all it comes out to $20 each!
A steal at twice the price!

    I have tried to stay away from levying accusations of impropriety against anyone involved with the Backerkit. But holy shit. This is so brazen it wraps around to being delightful. I kinda wanna do my own nostalgia-bait crowdfunder now. 83% markup for shipping, handling, and a paragraph talking about how fucking manly your dice are. Fuck I love dropshipping. Our economy is so normal. 

The Curious Case of the Disappearing Redhead

    In viewing the marketing for Deathbringer, you tend to see the same few characters a lot. The Class Iconics are obviously there, either standing around aura farming or in some kind of battle scene. However, there is one additional character I brought up during my first post: Not-Red-Sonja.

Here she is in the Beyond Shadowdark section, as it appeared for the first few days of the campaign.

    

    This woman, despite not being an iconic class, is prominent. She appears three times in the campaign launch video and its thumbnail, she was the campaign's header image, she was in the Beyond Shadowdark section, and she was even part of the prelaunch page, the very first bit of marketing most people saw. Not even Deathbringer himself got this much publicity.

There she is on the right.

    As I was writing Part 2, I refreshed the Backerkit page and suddenly she was gone. The header image had been replaced by an image of the Dolly-Parton-esque Doomscribe, while the Beyond Shadowdark section was replaced with Mr. Deathbringer and a blonde babe.

What the Beyond Shadowdark section looks like now. I really wish I'd had this image back when I was first talking about the marketing's sexism.

     Who is this woman? Where did she go? Did Red Sonja LLC send a threatening phone call? Did Deathbringer get mad he was being upstaged? Did they see my post and go "Oh shit, they got us."??? I don't know.

(Editor's note 8/14/26: Friend of the blog Mindstorm Press pointed out that the Professor posted on altered image of Not-Red-Sonja on Facebook a couple weeks ago, now featuring Vikings-esque blonde hair. Given these alterations, I find the "Red Sonja LLC got mad" theory a lot more believable now.)

Conclusion: The Thoughtful Marketing of Deathbringer

    There was a comment in the OSR subreddit that I initially dismissed because I'm an egotistical little shit, but I've been mulling it over. 

"..."thoughtless" isn't the word. He thought about this to the tune of seven figures. Cynical and tasteless work better"

    The reason I have tried so hard to see all of these marketing decisions as the result of ignorance is because it otherwise paints a deeply unflattering picture of everyone involved. I know it might surprise a lot of the folks who have gotten this far, but I don't like thinking negative things about people. 

    I want to celebrate a guy making adventures, attracting a following, and having a huge smashing success with the crowdfunding hit of the summer. But I also know that Professor DM has a habit of playing the algorithm; from YouTube Face Syndrome, to clickbait titles, to privating old videos that underperform. It's his channel, obviously, he can do what he wants with it, but it speaks to a guy who is capable of reading the market and, more importantly, the room. 

    

    The other read is that Dan knows it's tasteless and alienating and attracts bad people when you, say, invoke The Handmaid's Tale to critique the outfits of women in modern fantasy, or imply that you're being braver than cowardly mainstream companies for putting a woman in a revealing outfit, and he doesn't particularly mind because their cash spends just as well. Hell, given the K-shaped reality of the modern crowdfunding campaign, nostalgia cash probably spends better than most.

    Between the launch of the Deathbringer crowdfunding campaign and now, Wizards of the Coast has announced two separate "Grimdark" settings coming in the near future. One is a return to Dark Sun, perhaps the most political and achingly relevant setting of our times (climate catastrophe, despotism, the need to do good in a world that seems too far gone), and turned it into something generic. The trailer isn't...anything, really, beyond a promise of blood and violence, to the point marketing said that legal said it had to be wrapped in shrinkwrap.

    The second setting, Death Saves, is based on Joe Manganiello's clothing line of the same name and codesigned with abuse enabler Mike Mearls, promises to be D&D's first "Black Label" setting, again implying an edge and grimness like DC's Black Label, which famously showed Batman's batdong, or White Wolf's Black Dog imprint, featured among other things Wraith: The Oblivion sourcebook concerning the Holocaust. D&D's new Black Label had a liveplay at GenCon, featuring the Professor as a Dwarf named Ironballs.

From the Death Saves catalogue, something invoking any given Mork Borg Du Jour more than when Gygax was working at TSR.

    More relevant to this discussion is Manganiello's announcement post, where he declared "I’m drawing from D&D’s past to chart its future…" claiming his clothing line was based on the aesthetics of the late 70s and 80s-for reference, he was born in 1976, so he's evoking what is to him an even earlier childhood. Setting aside the questions of exactly what metal vibes constitute D&D's past, all of these just remind me of The Comics Store by Beany Tuesday, a mass infantilization of popular culture under the guise of it being more mature, as the mainline of the hobby retreats further into the safe and the known, selling Memberberries at premium prices while still letting people larp that they're punk and countercultural.

    If the Professor were a more cynical sort...that would make Deathbringer a product of prescience, of finding and building an audience who eats this kinda stuff up and not noticing when, say, they're massively overpaying for dice. Of selling aesthetic because the product has no real ludic or narrative identity to speak of. It is, in a sense, the Professor DM way: dress something reasonable if not passe in controversial language; The Ultimate Dungeon Terrain will change D&D Combat? It's just range bands, which have been in games since at least 1977. D&D is dead, and Deathbringer kills it? Actually D&D is the best game ever, and Deathbringer is fully compatible. Like Hamburger Helper. A product that has raised over $1.2 million dollars and counting on bargain-basement tier Warhammer Fantasy fanfiction and the promise of women to leer at? Nah, man. It's just over the top. Like Frazetta. You wouldn't get it because you're a prude who can't accept when things aren't made for you.

    I don't want that to be true, because if it is...then it's just a real fucking shame.

    I'd like to take a moment to once again thank all of you for following me on this weird, wonderful journey, and also shout out this installment's beta readers, Theo of Starships & Scoundrels Press and Total Quest. I couldn't have done this without them, and you should go check their blogs out.