I’m not alone celebrating my liberation from the corporate world today.

It’s the holiday season, and for 1,100 Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast former employees, a stressful one. This whole thing just 🦆🦆🦆king reeks! Sadly, I can kinda relate to what’s happening.

I’m not as angry that our boycotts of Hasbro/WotC might be making a dent in their bottom line, which then hopefully makes stockholders stand up and take notice. I’m angry that Hasbro “pulled the lever” on this crap during the holiday season. Yeah, end of the quarter. Blah blah blah…

Disclaimer: Statements expressed in this article are strictly my opinion. If you disagree or have a different opinion, that’s okay. I’m not an expert on everything. I’m not always right. I’m just writing from my experience as I know it. Your mileage may vary.

I was once a tiny little cog in the massive corporate machine.

Full disclosure: That’s why I currently have a mad hate-on for the executives at Hasbro/WotC. Yes, getting fired blows big time. Yes, getting fired during the holiday season? Wow. Way to ruin everyone’s holiday season, you 🦆🦆🦆holes!

I was fortunate enough to get canned in July, so our summer was okay. I was super depressed for months afterward, but that’s normal from what I hear. I have low end PTSD from that job. 🦆🦆🦆 them! I spent months looking for a new job and… nothing.

Strange how no one wants to hire an old, bald, beardy, white guy with a college degree. Maybe it’s my laundry list of physical and mental health issues. Maybe it’s my age. Maybe it’s my appearance or demeanor. I may never know. I’ve filed hundreds of applications, and I had one telephone interview that went horribly. So, here we are.

There’s good news ahead for the WotC creatives, I think.

There are definitely some people who have said they were let go that should have no problem finding a new company. Otherwise, some of these people could potentially get together and start their own company. Still, most of the bigger companies like Paizo, Goodman Games, Kobold Press, and Monte Cook know some of the former WotC employees personally, so it should be an easy in.

The people I truly feel awful for are the warehouse and production staff who were sacked for no reason other than to save Hasbro some money. The executives caused this mess. Firing back end people can’t be the best solution to the financial situation, can it? Can’t the executives take a pay cut?

My “Tinfoil Hat theories” are getting noticed on social media.

LOL! Hello. Have we met? No? I came over to TTRPG Twitter from Ufology Twitter. I have said way crazier shit that turned out to be true. When we say “shill” over there, it’s a serious accusation. Y’all don’t know.

I’ll throw a new conspiracy out there about the WotC firings. What if good old former WotC head, now CEO of Hasbro, Chris Cocks, (*Yes, that’s his real name.) had key WotC employees canned as a way to spite all the critics and fans. Looking down the list of people released from WotC, a lot of these people are highly talented, adored by fans (not Mearls,) and many had pleasant interactions during the Content Creator’s Summit and beyond.

I truly believe that Hasbro’s Reptilian Overlords and WotC’s wannabe supervillain leadership are the problem. Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: the Gathering are basically propping Hasbro up. Sadly, I could see them firing a lot of design team for D&D and making sure everyone had NDAs solidly in place. 

We know the new, not-new Core rulebooks are already done and possibly already being printed for a May 21 Release. All this Unearthed Arcana surveys are just a smoke screen. The D&D team has already locked in what they were going to do months ago. Maybe our public opinion will count during the Virtual TableTop development sometime down the road. It’s hard to say.

Remember all those changes that suddenly and mysteriously got rolled back? My guess is that things were locked in and couldn’t be changed from the 2014 edits in time to get it to the printers. That’s assuming the D&D Studios Chief Architects care, of course. The more I hear about the new core books, the less I want anything to do with official WotC D&D ever again.

Wizards of the Coast is no longer a career destination.

Back in the olden days of the 1980s, we used to want to work for TSR Inc. It was a dream to hang with Gary Gygax and write modules or sourcebooks. Personally, I wanted to get in with West End Games and do Star Wars, but alas that dream was crushed once upon a Gen Con. (Long story for another time.) Really any game company would have been cool to work for. TSR was the most prestigious, obviously.

We also knew, even in those formative years, that not very many people got to live the dream of making awesome RPGs all day long. So, an editor once told me that I couldn’t get rich writing RPGs. He was being honest, but it did kinda sting slightly. Turns out Gary Gygax himself wasn’t a millionaire in the industry he basically started. Sigh.

Fast forward to 2K23. TTRPGs are a full blown industry. D&D is still the big dog on the block. Up until recently (again) people working for Wizards of the Coast didn’t have to worry about being “laid off” aka fired right before Christmas. They only had to worry about that in the Peter Adkison days, (which he even said he now regrets having done.) It used to be WotC was a cool place to work with great perks and a decent salary. I mean, they do have a pretty cool new HQ and they still make RPGs.

Alas, WotC has had a year of absolute failures. The Open Game License Debacle of 2023 alone should have been enough to make everyone want to steer clear and people already there find another job. I can’t figure out if the teams (*gag) inside WotC are just oblivious or incredibly well insulated from the vomit their company is causing out here in the non-corporatized part of the TTRPG hobby. Then there are all of the art and editing flubs. It’s amazing how smaller companies don’t suffer the same degree of humiliation and incompetent leadership.

I would be utterly ashamed to work for Wizards of the Coast, and I grew up/have grown old wanting to be in the TTRPG industry as a paid designer. The goal used to be to get hired by a big name company like WotC. Now the goal is to become known as a freelancer for companies like Troll Lord, Goodman, or Renegade Studios. I’d even settle for being a well-known independent writer.

I want my TTRPG dream to be everyone’s goal.

Okay, let’s ditch our current reality for a few minutes. My intention for the rest of this year and in 2024 is to grow more as a creator. I intend to launch projects on DriveThruRPG and Itch.io. I intend to launch bigger projects as I go. I am going to be known on social media and in person as a TTRPG content creator. I’m launching my YouTube channel to promote my work and comment on things I see around the hobby in much the same way I write my blog daily. Wealth and prosperity are headed my way.

I hope everyone who is down on their luck currently becomes inspired or at least entertained by my words. Everyone has the power within themselves to bend their own reality. Everyone has the power within themselves to break free from the oppressive corporate world and do their own thing, bringing prosperity to themselves and their loved ones. I believe in each and every one of you reading this right now. I know I’m off on a Law of Attraction tenet currently, but please trust me when I say it’s real! Anyone has it within themselves to create a new, brighter life.

Corporations be damned.

My goal in life is to never set foot in an office work environment ever again. Unless I’m there to sign a book or give a speech, I don’t want anything to do with corporate America ever again. Honestly I haven’t decided where Paizo fits in that puzzle just yet. They’re right on the cusp of becoming the new WotC or old T$R.

I don’t truly give a rip what happens behind the scenes at Hasbro/WotC unless it affects people the way the current round of “layoffs” did. (*I don’t know why people are saying “laid off” like we don’t know they fired, but whatever.) I’m tired of the McCorporate doublespeak and fake sympathy from millionaires. I truly hope my boycott of Hasbro/WotC continues to have an impact. I’m not going to shut up about it any time soon.

“But doesn’t boycotting WotC just mean more people will get canned?” is a cry I keep hearing on social media. I spoke up the other day on this very topic. Yeah, I want WotC to feel the burn as much as possible. Laying off key WotC staff seems like it was intended to spite the fan base and rile up the community more than anything. (Of course, I can’t prove it. But it does seem convenient that the people who worked the hardest and were popular with fans are suddenly gone.)

I’m not saying people shouldn’t be dismissed from Hasbro. I think it positively sucks that it happened over the holidays, corporate bookkeeping and shareholder appeasement be damned. I feel so bad for the people who were fired over the holidays. It’s the timing that just blows.

Meanwhile, we hear the Sword of Damocles is hanging over the heads of random Hasbro employees who could find out their positions are also being cut any time going forward. Family, I think the writing is on the Jumbotron for D&D Studios/WotC staffers the same way it was for me at [REDACTED.] I think if I were still at Hasbro, I’d be cleaning up my résumé and talking to other companies in the TTRPG industry.

It might mean a greater flood of talent in the TTRPG space for a while, and that’s okay. There’s still room for all of us to prosper. We live in an infinite, benevolent Universe, and there is room for everyone to grow.

Please join in the boycott.

Please continue to send Hasbro/WotC and the shareholders a strong message. We want the leadership gone. We want someone the TTRPG industry can be proud of in charge of our oldest, well known game, Dungeons & Dragons. We want a company we can be proud to work for again.

I know there are only a couple million of us D&D nerds out there in the world and maybe their reach doesn’t extend far into the stockholders at Hasbro. Regular people off the street barely know what D&D is or how it’s played. That’s fine, but we do still matter as people.

“Hasbro isn’t a charity,” is the line I love to hate. True, they’re a big, slimy, unfeeling corporate entity where bitter little millionaires like Chris Cocks can hide their sociopathic/psychotic tendencies. They don’t have to employ people or be responsible to those in their employ. The execs only care about their own bottom line and keeping the shareholders happy.

THAT IS NO EXCUSE to treat people, especially employees, like crap! I think the wealthy have an obligation to spread their prosperity and be a good example of a good example. (I probably just riled a few people up.) Think about it, though. If I’m a millionaire, I don’t want to push people down. I want to lead by example and gain from giving. I want to raise the vibration. I want everyone on my level of prosperity and love.

My boycott will continue until things improve. If it never improves? Well, that’s a shame. Yeah, more people will get canned. D&D the game will survive regardless. We’re still here.

I’ll etch it into something around here if I have to.

The one takeaway from all of this that I think everyone is overlooking is that if the team fails, it is at least partially because the coach (or management team in this case) has failed to lead them. Is management taking pay cuts at Hasbro? Not as far as we’ve heard. So, basically the company is hemorrhaging money, and these clowns are keeping their bonuses and probably getting pay raises all around.

If Hasbro can’t sell toys, boardgames, cards, and TTRPGs- don’t take it out on the warehouse staff or even the creative teams. The fault in this case lies in the crap business decisions made by the leadership at Hasbro/WotC. Do I need to mention E One? Does anyone think the guy driving the forklift in the warehouse had anything to do with a nearly $3.5 Billion dollar loss? What about Power Rangers? Was that the accounting secretary’s fault?

Hasbro completely cut the wrong people, especially at WotC. I’m not going to go line by line, but damn, Hasbro. Really? What does this say for the company six months from now? Does Wasbro think they’re going to have any loyalty left, especially if people continue to get fired?

Thanks for being here today.

I know it was another long rant. I’m very passionate when it comes to large corporations screwing people at the proverbial drive thru. While I was writing this, two other stories involving YouTubers completely exploded onto the TTRPG scene that I’ll cover tomorrow. Is there something in the air making people crazy?

Take care. Enjoy your holidays as much as possible. Let’s ring in 2024 with joy and prosperity.