Rascal bids adieu to D&D's faces

Episode 12 of the Rascal Radio Hour podcast sees Chase and Rowan invite a surprise guest back for another appearance — their shared American mania. The pair put off talking about tariffs for as long as possible, mostly by discussing how Wizards of the Coast will handle their public presence now that Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins have stepped out of their long-held lead roles.

But they can only avoid the specter looming over tabletop for so long — it's even crept inside the Question Dungeon for a surprise encounter! Welcome to the Tariff Era, or is it maybe the start of the Tariff Wars? We need a catchy moniker because hoo boy is this mess not going away soon.

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Here's an excerpt:

Chase: Here's my big thing. I don't know what comes next for Wizard of the Coast. They're not doing a one-to-one replacing of Crawford and Perkins. There's not gonna be the next two spokespeople for D&D. But they are taking a lot of their duties and passing them on to other lead designers. They name a few names here in the article. They said that they were gonna try to push off stuff on, say, Wes Schneider and James Wyatt, who are bigname designers within the company but they don't get a lot of recognition and playtime on the videos. They sometimes come in to talk about specific design elements or changes to the new editions if you were watching those videos on YouTube.

But specifically, and this is the interesting thing, Lanzillo mentions Justice Arman by name. This is an Iranian-American designer — I believe he's managing designer or managing editor within the Wizards of the Coast team — who has worked on a lot of stuff, has a lot of credits on titles from the last two or three years out of D&D.

Which is good! I'm glad that they're putting more than just a few more white guys up there, but also this is Wizard of the Coast. They have a habit of tokenizing their PoC creators.

Rowan: Wizards of the Coast? No. No!

Chase: Let me tell you about a little book called Journey Through the Radiant Citadel and how many of those people got to come back to make more stuff on a regular basis. I'm going to stay cynical about this. I would hope that some newer voices, some fresher talent, takes hold of the ship. But also maybe we don't need to know. Crawford and Perkins were a convenient pair of people to put in front of the camera. I don't know that you need that. I don't know that you should put people in front of the camera, especially with how often Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro fucking step in it.

What happens if you put a Black woman up there as your new lead designer, and then she has to be on camera every time the company that she works for fucking beefs it, publicly? That's a nightmare job. It's gonna be bad enough for her anyways, and then she has to sit up there, holding her hands in front of her, and apologize for the thing Chris Cox said to VentureBeat? Fuck off.

Rowan: Have you ever seen Mythic Quest?

Chase: Only the first season. I haven't watched the second season yet.

Rowan: There's a PR woman, the woman who works in PR who does like, all the emails and stuff. There's this one episode where they find out that a bunch of Nazis are on MythicQuest. And her whole thing is, we need to just get rid of the Nazis, guys. The entire episode is spent around how are they going to make it so that the Nazis feel welcomed in a way that makes them out themselves as Nazis.

Chase: They're trying to honeypot the Nazis by making their game more friendly.

Rowan: So that way everyone else can know that they're Nazis. Yeah. And that's really the energy that it sometimes feels like Wizard of the Coast walks into, especially by putting people who care so much about this game and wanna be like, hey guys, we just wanna do good things. And then the guy stroking a cat up in the penthouse is like, no, they need to give us their money.