A Kickstarter just finished for James Spahn's White Box Cyclopedia. I skipped it after reading just the cliff's notes from the kickstarter's Campaign page:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/barrelridergames/white-box-cyclopedia/description
There are multiple reasons why I already know this campaign is going to absolutely produce a turd that will at best sit on people's shelves gathering dust forever.
Firstly, White Box FMAG is exactly as complex as it needs to be. Having an additional 26 character classes is fucking retarded as the game is meant to be simple, loose, and easy. That's the first bullet point. The second one threw up a huge Chinese flag faster than a Disney executive trying to save his company from bankruptcy. It's not that there's a dozen races instead of the usual four. It's that the game is calling races "Heritages".
For those in the cheap seats, there's a tiny vocal sect of non-consuming, non-roleplaying racist blue-haired asshats on X that think the word "race" is racist. In the last 8 years or so we've seen several fantasy games bow down to these fucking twits and validate their moronic, racist worldviews because either creators agree with them and are therefore also racist fucking twits, or are big fat pussies who paradoxically have tiny mincey faggot balls. They don't realize how small this group is, how empty their wallets are, and how little anyone cares about their opinion. I do not agree with this horrendous nonsensically censorious worldview, and cannot abide the sin of supporting those that do. So this game was set to insta-ignore up until...
I noticed some sack of shit shill youtuber interviewing this mid-talent author today, and I didn't feel like watching it also didn't remember why I didn't bother kicking it. As soon as I went to the starter page I remembered. Luckily this author has zero to do with White Box FMAG, so FMAG remains the one untainted version of Sword & Wizardry. Up until today I had it on my chopping block. Today I noticed you can get a POD hardcover of the badass B&W cover from DTRPG here:
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/226313/white-box-fantastic-medieval-adventure-game-b-w?src=hottest_filtered
The third bullet point is some bullshit copied directly from 6th editon. As if this version of my at one point favorite OSR system needed more nails in its coffin.
So why did I make this post? To remind myself that James Spahn is effectively dead to the OSR, his products are garbage henceforth, and to never take him seriously again.
It's not a huge loss, the only thing he ever produced that was worth a damn was The Hero's Journey 1E, and he couldn't be arsed to fix the minor problems with it, instead opting to produce an over thought, over wrought, under playtested sequel that was in every way inferior to the first game. Case in point; he renamed Races to Lineages. It wasn't a red flag at the time; he completely nonsensically renamed everything to put his own creative/mediocre stamp on it. Showing he was ultimately an asshat and didn't give a fuck if the game was easy or difficult to pick up for the average OSR casual.
So at the time he wasn't placating racists, he was just a dipshit breathing deep his own farts.
