I honestly did not imagine myself to be writing a piece like this on this blog. But I feel morally obligated to do so, given that I previously wrote a piece based on the firm assumption of his guilt . Yesterday,  Jeff Rients shared a link to an article based on an upcoming research paper  by Dr. Clio Weisman. I'd encourage anyone who has, or has had, some interest in the OSR community and/or held some sort of opinion on the case of Zak Smith, to read it after reading this one. tl;dr - The article is about the utterly bizarre lying, harassing and slandering behaviour that has somehow become prevalent in certain sectors of the Rennaisance-Formerly-Known-as-OSR. And Zak Smith sat at the heart of it, as its principal recipient. Dr. Weisman thus chose him as her case study.  Long story short, Dr. Weisman lays out a meticulous and researched case that shows Smith to be targeted by OSR trolls for many years with a series of slanderous harassment campaigns, and also to be th...

I'll tell you what I instinctively disliked the first time I opened the 3e Player's Handbook:  Priest spell levels going all the way up to 9th level.  Now, the reasons for this change seem fairly obvious to my mind. It streamlines spell progression for priests and wizards and makes it easier to gauge power level of a priest vs wizard spell.  But are those actually good  reasons? Is streamlining in and of itself a positive? Perhaps being able to gauge power level is useful, but tangentially so if so. How often do you need to compare a priest spell to a wizard spell and determine how powerful they are compared to each other?  As for streamlining spell progression between wizards and priests - This may seem useful as it makes progression transparently equal (getting rid of different XP tables was another move to ensure everybody progressed at the same pace. An alleged virtue I would question the virtue of), but it belies a point that is central to the argument of t...

 That is all.