- Joined
- Sep 3, 2014
Hailing from Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, Darrick Dishaw is a creator of a variety of ‘OSR’ tabletop rpgs and adventures. If you asked him to describe himself, he’d likely claim that he’s an old school gamer and a “fucking boss of a GM”. He’d also claim that he’s for the old school of pen and paper style of play, mumble something about how it’s better than the current stuff, and he’d decry what he calls the “woke” infiltration of the hobby.
In all actuality though, he’s just a stoned out of his gourd edgelord grifter who can’t write books, who tried and failed to start his own Lovecraft Cult after getting kicked out of his Satanist group, and who acts just like the SJWs he screams against. In short, he’s a massive embarrassment with over 15 years of freakouts, pisspoor products, and attempts to control people, consoom product, and coom on people and products.
And yes, he legitimately named himself after the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon villain. And no, this is not the most embarrassing thing he has done or will do. For example, as of 2018, he's transitioned out of being human; he's some type of alien creature now apparently.
The Cult of Cthulhu
Darrick once upon a time attempted to create and operate his own cult back in the day. Given his tendency to be edgy and because he has a tentacle and slime fetish, it also was mixed in with a lot of Lovecraft’s work too. Also yes, Darrick was dead fucking serious about all of it, treating it as his religion and trying desperately to explain how it would work to an audience of none. He would spend a great deal of time establishing a glossary, designing rituals and he did this for years on end.
Hilariously, he was so uncharismatic that no one really wanted to join his cult, so he was mostly just babbling to himself about how Cthulhu is totally real guys and how you can worship him and especially all the other outer gods.
Unfortunately, he seemed to have some mild form of self-preservation, and he essentially left the blog he used to babble about how he was the bringer of Cthulhu for dead. Despite this, he refuses to admit he has failed, because Darrick cannot imagine the possibility that he may have fucked up, which you will see quite often when faced with criticism he can't block. If you want to get a good idea on what his old blog was like, here’s a pretty little archive of his ramblings:
And here’s a few videos where he talks about the cult.
And this is a member of his cult Darrick decided to film:
Darrick on Family
Darrick has a habit of bragging about his prior conquests. If you believe him, then he’s allegedly slept with dozens of women before he met his wife. He also had a habit of not wearing a condom, which he confirms when he explains how he got entrapped by his wife. Yes, Darrick got shot-gunned wedding’ed and entrapped because he couldn’t be arsed to wear rubbers.
See, about 10 years ago, back in 2010, he was dating his current wife Danielle for only a few months, pumping and crying and covering her in slime repeatedly. Well anyways, Danielle, realizing the sheer manliness of this specimen decides to stop taking birth control. Without telling him. She admittedly does this because Darrick also confessed that he wanted to have a family some day, so both of them are at fault here.
Darrick, refusing to stop using his tendril inside the hole of mysteries, eventually gets her pregnant. He then tries ditching her two months into the pregnancy entirely because he “doesn’t feel it” but stays with her on the condition that he is allowed to have open relationships with other women. Well, Danielle rejected that offer and a few months later they married. And this is what Darrick himself posted on this, meaning this is the best version of events for him:
This shotgun wedding spawned four more kids before Darrick realized it might be smart to use some form of birth control, in this case getting the snip.
To give Darrick credit, he mostly avoided using his children as props or brought them up in his regular rants on his blog. He has revealed his daughters’ names and they are terrible (Briella, Emerald, Ilyria Jade, and the most sane one Trinity), but besides a few videos of him playing with babies he does not mention them.
He’s also proven that he’s more than capable of sending them to Catholic school, as that's where they've all gone. Rather strange thing for an alleged Satanist/Cthulhu Cultist to do to be honest. It might be because of the woke factor scaring him off of public school, or it might be due to his desire to avoid plebians.
Anyways here’s a snippet of him playing a monster with his infant daughter and then reading her excerpts of a horror novella:
And here’s Darrick showing off his slime fetish by using his pregnant wife’s belly. THREE TIMES. Why yes he also used her on a cover of one of his books for sex appeal why do you ask?
Darrick and GMing
Now let’s get into the nitty gritty. Darrick has tied his life and his online activities to pen and paper RPGs. He has written several books and has done nearly 20 campaigns on Kickstarter for them as well. He has also written a book called “How to GM Like a Fucking Boss”, which based on reviews is a waste of money and bloated with padding (archived). This is about right given that Darrick fairly often tries to devolve DM power to the players so that he can really avoid having to wrangle them at all.
Another genius example of Darrick’s GMing chops is how he seemingly doesn't fade to black in sex scenes (archived), which given every single book he has written focuses very heavily on prostitution, clown sex, slime sex, and rape, means you can expect a lot of magical realms and cringe with each game he runs.
No seriously, when he was asked to explain where he does, he skips it, and then eventually just says this shit:
Darrick Dishaw said:
Did I forget to mention he also defended the actions of Adam Koebel, the DM who livestreamed him raping a player’s character for no reason? No? Well he fucking did and here it is:
Also yes, even over a year later and after even more details about how Koebel also abused his exes, Darrick is still defending him. Very kino of Darrick there.
Darrick’s Games
Besides his failed Cult of Cthulhu and just general edgeposting, Darrick’s first noted activities online have entirely to do with him releasing and reacting to responses to the games he makes. He’s made several over these 16 years and they’re all terrible due to a mix of common failures in its creator and in their own unique ways. Let’s go through each one briefly:
Empire of Satanis
This was Darrick’s first game, and the concept is very simple: you play as Fiends, which Darrick helpfully explains are part human, part devil, and part alien. They’re all evil and live in some hell dimension he calls Yidathroth, and pretty much serve Satanis the archfiend who rules it. The characters’ main goal is to mainly just cause pain and suffering to effectively build their powerbase in hell and become gods in their own rights… I think.
And that’s a big issue with the book; setting wise, it’s fairly sparse in details about what places exist on Yidathroth and how they work. There is one city that is at best partially explained, and most of it was the brothel area. It also spams a lot of races and names and assumes you’ll instantly know how it works, it changes point of perspective repeatedly for no reason as well.
I kid you not, for some races it’s written similar to how a basic game would describe them; basically giving details on their looks and culture, and listing off brief specialties they have. But then Darrick will also just write them as if he was a character describing them in legend for no reason. It’s also dotted with misspellings and errors that should have been caught given it’s clearly a word document that he converted to a .pdf. Lastly fluff wise, it includes the authors fetishes front and center, namely slimes, tentacles, and clowns. Yes, there are clown brothels. No they are serious.
And that’s just the fluff. Mechanically it’s extremely loose and shaky. It is a bastardized West End d6 system where you have dice pools, but you only take the highest result. Given that average difficulty is a 7, that’s kind of horseshit. Now, in a more competent game like Cyberpunk 2020, you’d add attributes to the result instead given the situation, but nope. The attributes just determine your dice pool, and you can only get above a 6 when you max it out, as the dice are explosive. Also, just to add salt to the wound, he puts no effort into explaining the economy and has barely any form of equipment or items to stockpile. So mechanically this also sucks too.
Here's some funny snippets of this book for your eyes to witness.
Alpha Blue
Alpha Blue is probably the work Darrick defends the most whenever it gets brought up (archived), and he loves to flex about how it triggers SJWs and how his games are truly mature, designed to explore sex, and designed for the OSR gamer. Ultimately though, this book can’t be considered a player’s handbook. I mean sure, for about the first 40% of it I can assemble a character, stat them out, make them a “Zedi” because Darrick is creative and a Star Wars fanboy, and even arguably equip them.
But the problem is that’s only the first 40 – 50 pages of the book. The rest of it is more like a setting book, particularly if you wrote a book on Sigil in Planescape. This makes a lot of sense when you keep in mind that in Darrick’s own words:
Darrick Dishaw said:
Which to me is kind of strange given the whole fucking point of OSR is to revive the more in-depth and crunchier style of play that existed back in the first two editions of DnD, but perfectly explains why he almost expected you to get another one of his booklets just to play this one. Thankfully he does make up a combat and action system in book so you can play, but the rounds are too long (they last 20 seconds), it gives you and the enemies multiple times to either fail a task, fail to hit, or forcibly roll on the fumble tables. There is actually a very good chance to fail or partially a task given that only on a 5 or 6 you will succeed with a d6 roll, which hey guess what, PbtA also is guilty of doing.
He also rationalizes his slipshod mechanics as “DMs prefer hard and fast rules”, when in reality he only really plays with his paypigs who will not disagree with him. It really is strange that he pretends that he really likes old school gaming when I imagine making a wizard in 2e would give him a stroke. Anyways, Alpha Blue itself devolves very quickly into just describing the station itself and how it’s full of sex, and Darrick is adamant it stays in as a way to “trigger the SJWs”. In reality it’s because he’s a filthy coomer, but hey let’s show off some of that:
Here's the sexual fetish table. Yes. He made this.
How the location you're in was designed mainly for space sex
Him burbling about space hookers
Fucking Orgasmatron, Roofies, and Lube.
Here’s some horrible preggo art. I guess that’s also a fetish he has.
Here’s the “I’m walking in on people fucking” table.
Here’s the dildo weapon and the rape machine.
And that’s the thing, a good chunk of the book is just Darrick spilling his spaghetti and pretending that it’s owning the SJWs in any way. He in all actuality is just angry that he can’t be a degenerate who can put his slime, tendril, and pregnancy/rape fetishes into games without people 360 no-scoping out of the room (archived).
He still to this day thinks this book is good; (archived) at least he finally disavowed Satanis like 12 years after he wrote it.
You know, that last section was really cringe and probably made quite a people lose their boners. Let’s have some art of characters he stole from other franchises and put in this book as a chaser to cleanse the mind.
Cha’alt
This one is the big one; this is arguably his magnum opus, as he put a ton of effort into it, getting proper art commissioned for it, background art and a style and texture to the book itself. It’s very clear, especially since he even had a limited run of these getting printed, that this is the book he really wanted to push as a real book. This was the book he wanted to use to show he was a true creator, OSR player, and to own the SJWs.
Too bad it still sucks balls as a book and actually does a few things dumber.
So why does it suck? I can literally just summarize it in one sentence really: he didn’t fucking specify in the book what system you used for it until the last few pages. This is kind of amazing, since this implies Darrick actually forgot and got worse at designing a book. For those wondering, a competent book in this genre usually has character creation tools and mechanics after the initial setting crawl, almost certainly within the first 10 to 40 pages depending on who’s writing it. Even Alpha Blue had that shit at the beginning like any competent book would have.
As for the book itself, it suffers the exact same problems that Alpha Blue had in being mostly specific locations he thought up. It’s better in that he actually seriously plotted out adventure scenarios for each of the three big dungeons/cities he describes for 2/3s of the book, and the enemies he makes for the module are statted enough you CAN use them, a first for any of his books. But it’s worse in that he really skimps on the areas themselves. Again, Alpha Blue at least described the station in great details in between sex perversion.
It ultimately isn’t a setting book if you really think about it; it’s 1/3 of a setting book and then three short adventure modules combined. If you came in expecting a full book ala say the original Player’s Handbook, Vampire the Masquerade, or Battletech, you ain’t getting that.
Crimson Dragon Slayer
The last one of his projects I’m seriously going to go into is the one he just expects you to have for each of his shitty games, since Darrick often expects you to know what to use or to use his blog for more details rather than flesh things out. This thing is Crimson Dragon Slayer, which he actually shills in Alpha Blue and gives to you in Cha’alt. Well that is to say he gives you a shitty version that just expects you to use the Player’s Handbook from DnD to use, since he doesn’t specify wizard spells:
It's basically a 15 page booklet where it leans heavily and relies on you using the d20 system’s mechanics without seriously spelling it out, meaning you don't even get a full system initially. Darrick assumes you as the player or as the GM will stat out his barely thought out monsters or encounters with pesky things like AC and so on, with him only explaining how the fighter can basically kill everything in one hit no matter the level if the dice play fair, the rogue can do all the damage, the cleric just heals, and wizards can fuck off.
It seems Darrick really hates wizards because they have a very shit spell selection for their abilities, they cast from HP to do it (or sacrifice animals because edgy), and their very few damage spells rely on a fumble table. Here’s a list Darrick eventually deigns to give you when he remembered to flesh this one out:
Yes, this clown expects you to either instantly know the spells in the handbook, or use the few he listed in the advanced version, thus making it not even a full setting. Oh, did I forget to mention that the version of the book I showed here wasn’t in Cha’alt? No? Well now you know, you had to use a DnD book to play it. Such quality gaming.
Tl;dr: Darrick can’t be bothered to make detailed mechanics for his “OSR” games, and he cannot spend any serious amount of time writing out a setting without inserting his fetishes or just turning the book into an adventure module or setting book. He is not able to make a proper player's hand book, the basic unit of a setting.
His other writing and artwork:
Darrick also has other artistic ventures. For example he does a decent amount of painting:
He's also done quite a bit of poetry:
He also has a variety of books that he publishes through Lulu and sells on Amazon, including a bible for his cult. As for said Bible? Well, Darrick seems to have copied and pasted extensively from Wikipedia and then decided to try and sell it as his own work. An enterprising blog then called him out on it, using direct comparisons to show the dozens upon dozens of lines he copied and stole from a website and pretended were his own
And what was Darrick's response to the accusation you might ask? Well, he didn't take it well:
Inability to Take Criticism
If Darrick was merely an incompetent dev, you’d be right in that he probably wouldn’t have a thread. Also, he doesn’t really seem to chimp out all that much nowadays based on how he seemed to slip under the radar. Well you’re both right and wrong on that account. You see, Darrick used to chimp out all the time to any form of criticism of himself or his work, especially at RPG.net, who often would rip apart his shittily put together and minimally thought out games. In fact, it was this little post here that made me first seriously look into this guy:
You see, Darrick can and will readily and quickly defend his work to the hilt, fairly regularly looking up his name to see if anyone is talking about them and then either beelining to the site to cry about it, or whine on his blog instead. He will also defend any skeevy or rapey thing other coomers make for RPGs, because in Darrick's pot addled mind he thinks sex = OSR. Case in point:
It probably didn’t help he got banned several times from RPG.net and even DriveThruRPG for a brief period. As for how he got banned from DriveThruRPG? Well...
But he stopped doing that all that often mainly because he spent his time since going on Kickstarter building an iron hugbox. Darrick is a notorious at blocking out criticism and dissent, refusing to leave his little circlejerk of fellow coomers trying to stick it to da EssJayDubyas. The only people he lets playtest his game are his paypigs or fans; he will not allow anyone else to touch them.
He also is quite able to hold onto a grudge it seems, since he actually named his parody site in honor of YourDungeonIsSuck. Now, to be fair, it is entirely possible that he did it due to it being a fairly well known snark blog about TTRPGs, but they did write an article or two about him, and Darrick very quickly searches for his name or his books. Expect him to make quite a few blogposts or even a parody site given this in mind.
But don’t worry; he’s still able to be roused into grumpy rages at times. For one thing, he still gets pissy and defensive if you shellac
He also gets really nettled if you criticize or mock his poor choice of art assets or his design choices, even if it makes the final product look worse or harder to read. Darrick recently finished a Kickstarter campaign for an expanding critical hit table, and this is what it originally looked like, with what it looks like now:
Don't you like red text on that blood splattered background and how the black borders make it very hard to read the dice on this little poster? Well there were some backers who gave Darrick money who had some issues with it too, and this was how Darrick responded to it:
Fun fact, that comment is now no longer on Darrick's Kickstarter. He also can and will get pissy if you shit on Cha’alt, as that really is his baby out of all of them given how many campaigns he’s made for it and expansions. Which reminds me:
Kickstarter Frauds and Cheating in General
Darrick has at least on two occasions abused Kickstarter’s services. The first example being when one of his projects seemed set for failure to meet funding goals, an event that is now unthinkable now that Darrick has lowered the asking value to the low thousands to guarantee he gets his paypig’s money. When faced with that particular book not getting funded, Darrick likely seeded the pot given that he bragged a lot about secret backers on it when it “made” basic price goal.
But that's not surprising, Darrick even back in the day has attempted grifts before. He did after all at one point try to pretend he was a life coach:
The more noted example is he recently used old Chaalt assets to make an increasing critical hit table that a fan actually came up with. He asked for 100 dollars for it and instead got over 1,000 dollars for a single page (archived). Conveniently this was right around the time that Darrick wanted his multi-yearly fix of Disney, which leads me to:
Darrick the Consoomer
Darrick makes a big deal about how woke thinking is destroying tabletop gaming. He rails repeatedly on it in his baked youtube videos, most recently complaining about the terrible prom night idea that Wizards came up with for 5e. But the thing is, he will pound that drum, wave that bloody shirt, and crow and grope for the anti-sjw’s money, but then he will use most of it on consooming from Disney.
Darrick has gone to Disneyworld TWICE this year, once in July (archived), and the most recent time being an anniversary trip with his wife Danielle not even 10 days ago, costing thousands of dollars in the process. He also bragged about and happily showed off all the hip beers he drunk from Galaxy’s Edge:
Which by the way cost well over 80 dollars. And that's actually a pretty big thing; Darrick really seems to like going to Galaxy's Edge, which for those wondering is just a glorified strip mall with only two attractions to be honest. Oh, and let’s not ignore all the Star War shirts he wears in the video. The culture warrior needs his product to consoom after all.
Darrick also has a fairly impressive film collection he filmed himself going through on at least one occasion, and it took him a good thirty minutes to go through them all. Given that this was in 2010 or so, that means it's only gotten bigger as Darrick tries to fill the hole in his heart on the 80s:
Darrick the Hypocrite
Darrick isn't just guilty of giving his fan's money to corporations like Disney who hate the very people like him though. Oh no, he’s also quite guilty of trying to cancel people he disagrees with or who he thinks wronged him in the OSR community, with this being a fairly recent example.
It’s pretty odd for a person who hates SJWs to use their same tactics, and then try to gain a sense of victimhood about how the SJWs were out to get him when some rando mentioned him in a video with barely 2k views. It's almost like he tries to build it to get sympathy money out of his paypigs or something.
(The original video that triggered Darrick)
(Darrick's response)
He still does this by the way, as recently as February of 2022 he attempted to frame choosing to refuse to go to a convention due to state required mask mandates as if he was kicked out. When faced with this, he decided to then take it out on other members of the OSR community as his new excuse. This also came on the heels of him complaining about his blog links getting taken down from convention sites where he has promised to be... even though his blog shows genuine NSFW content from the covers alone. But remember, Darrick is the victim here and it was not self inflicted at all.
Also for a guy who really wants to shit on the left and present himself as the anti-woke culture warrior, it seems pretty interesting he only seriously started using "fuck the left" quotes AFTER Trump won in 2016. See, here's the thing: Darrick demanded back in the day that you should vote for Obama, going so far as to make a youtube rant about how Mitt Romney bad in his classical unplanned style:
He claims to be a republican in it, but then he says multiple times how he prefers the democrats over them. He also admits to being a big supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement at the time of recording, bitching about the one percent and standard OWS talking points. He also was pro residency even for illegal immigrants AND on top of everything else he wanted to vote for Hillary in 2016:
If I didn’t know any better, I’d think he’s a grifter trying to go after people sick of wokeshit’s money or something.
Vengercon
One last bit of funniness. Darrick, again proving he’s just a grifter, made a big fancy announcement on his blog about Vengercon (archive), a convention that will totally come out next year. He did this in response to Nu-TSR being stupid and pozloading my negholepoo on Twitter, which got them banned from GenCon. He says that there will be no X-cards, checklists or safety tools, yet he goes on in the next paragraph to say that this con does content warnings. He also gives no convention rules at all, which are fairly important given the liability that you the organizer can set yourself up for. Not to mention for a small con limited to 100 people first starting out, he is demanding 100 dollars to attend. Hopefully time will tell if it ends up a trainwreck!
As of February 2022, he's managed to sell 14 of the 40 tickets he needs to break even on the convention. He's also only recently begun to think about basic logistics, such as how many GMs he might need for an event that is about 5 months away to the day we're writing it. It's looking more and more like this will either be a trainwreck of the highest order, or possibly an attempt by Darrick to martyr himself and to take the money. Only time will tell.
Summary
In conclusion Darrick Dishaw is like a braindead cockatoo that slammed its head against the floor a few too many times. He knee jerks and babbles about how bad woke things are, and he spends all of this time upselling and pretending he understands anything at all about what old school gaming is like. Like that cockatoo, they are just words he expresses with no meaning, used mainly when in response to stimulants he likes or dislikes.
He has been laughed off of most major RPG sites before they got pozzed for being an edgelord who can’t take criticism, and he uses the exact same methods of the cliques he claims to be against. He is the epitomy of he who fights monsters, though in his case it’s more like “hold them down and bathe them in my slime”.
(Massive credit goes to @Something Vague ; without their research, there's no way I'd have this much detail on this guy)
Websites and Accounts
Cult forums (mostly dead, still up): https://cocthulhu.proboards.com/ (archive)
Abandoned Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheIchor/videos (archive thanks to @Oliveoil )
Current Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/VengerSatanis/videos
DriveThruRPG List: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/5876/Kort039thalis-Publishing
Twitter: https://twitter.com/VengerSatanis?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^serp|twgr^author (archive)
Vengercon site: https://tabletop.events/conventions/venger-con-2022 (archive)
Darrick’s Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/282964469933503/ (archive)
Darrick’s blog: http://vengersatanis.blogspot.com/ (archive)
Darrick’s satire blog: https://yourdungeonisracist.blogspot.com/ (archive)
Darrick's MeWe: https://mewe.com/i/vengersatanis (archive)
Darrick's Dox:
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