@Rob: If you really are interested in honoring your KS commitments, Zach over at Frog God Games assured me he'd be happy to provide the files for The Blight to you. All you need to do is ask.
Nothing much has changed with The Blight as far as content or size from before the KS happened. There are 10 chapters on the city covering 13 areas (12 were advertised in the KS) and the adventure path is 9 episodes (12 were originally intended). It was always going to be a huge adventure setting as it was always advertised as having the city AND the adventures which LWD was aware of as that info is posted on the KS. And of course FGG has a well-earned reputation of creating bookshelf breaking books.
The Realm Works KS was in early 2013, which ended up being more than two years prior to the Blight KS launch. At the time we agreed to put Razor Coast and Blight into RW, our understanding was that both products would be of a similar size to a standard Paizo AP – roughly 400 pages. That was true for Razor Coast, but Blight is somewhere approaching 1,000 pages of material. That’s quite a difference from what we were expecting.
The above is really a secondary concern, though, and it’s rendered moot by another factor. The crux of the decision with Blight really centers on the behavior of the person who helms Frog God. Allow me to present a hypothetical…
Let’s say that you have a sibling or friend who goes to a work event where they have responsibilities to perform. That sibling is then pursued and subjected to unwanted advances by someone. That sibling politely declines the advances and leaves the area to avoid the individual who’s out of line, but the event itself cannot be left because of the work responsibilities. This process then repeats multiple times, all in front of various independent witnesses. It reaches a point where the independent witnesses are so offended by what they’re seeing that they seek permission from your sibling to call the police and press charges. Your sibling declines to press charges, not wanting to cause a scene, and the stalker is merely banned from the event. How would you feel towards the person that stalked your sibling or friend?
This is the situation that I found myself in regarding Frog God, and I’m sure those of you who’ve met me can guess what my inclinations were at the time. Suffice to say that my views of this individual are extremely negative, and I have no desire to ever interact with that individual. That view extends to the company I own and the company he runs.
A few out there may view this as “taking sides in the feminist movement”, since these events occurred to a female employee. That would be way off base, though, as this is much more fundamental. In fact, the employee wanted to sweep it under the rug and try operating as if nothing had happened. I said no, because the stalker crossed a line with me. For me, this is about simple human decency and respect for others, and even more so in a work environment (where the events took place). I’ve always striven to treat everyone I encounter with respect. While I’m certainly not perfect at it and have my share of other failings, I think those who have met and interacted with me will attest to that behavior. So I seek the same basic decency from others I choose to deal with. As Bill and Ted famously put it: “Be excellent to one another!” If someone can’t manage that at a very basic level – and the actions that took place go way past that threshold for me – then I choose not to do business with them.
So what are the implications? What this means is that all new work on anything to do with Frog God products has ceased from our end. That decision went into effect in mid-2017 (right after the events outlined above). New work would entail interacting with the company and likely the person at the helm. All we do at this point is send a quarterly report on past products, which requires zero interaction.
This begs the question of why we don’t stop selling all past Frog God products. Doing that would require work to take down support for previously sold Frog God add-ons while still making them available to those who’ve already purchased them. That work would need to be done by me, since I’m the one that set that stuff up many years ago, and that would further delay forward work on RW. So it’s not something we’re taking the time to do right now. Making it retroactive would also mean not delivering Razor Coast to KS backers, which would further complicate the KS situation when that product was already essentially done when the events occurred last year (its completion is waiting on one of the bugs to be fixed).
For KS backers, Blight is unfortunately caught up in this decision, as it came out after the events took place and the decision was made. We are therefore not beginning any work on it. What we’re doing instead is letting KS backers choose what they want in place of Blight from the assorted content that we’ll have available. I’m not aware of a more fair way of handling this.
To sum up: Someone close to me was stalked and subjected to repeated unwanted advances at a work event for my company. From a simple place of human decency, that’s not a behavior I can respect, let alone abide by. I’ve therefore chosen not to have any further dealings with the stalker or the company he runs. It’s as simple as that.
Thanks, Rob
