Where is he now?

Veeky Forums

I'm sorry for this mildly-baity post.

I was talking to my buddy about RPGs, and we got on the topic of really, really bad RPGs.
Naturally, I brought up Byron Hall's shitstain of a system and setting.

I talked about it with him for a while, but then...idk what happened. I guess I got curious. I was wondering, does anybody know where this fucking guy is? It's like be disappeared off the face of the Earth.

I usually would celebrate the fact that he faded into obscurity, but someone doesn't created a 900+ book of vile retardation and then disappear never to be seen again.

Anyone know?

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=7JTsWbdG8lY
mega.nz/#!4psXkBQB!hHpnwAuaQqH38cUeOadOGOj-OWuYkRgk75xmfiwt_Ec
projects.inklesspen.com/fatal-and-friends/halloween-jack/carcosa/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

He's retreated to the edge of the galaxy to gather his forces...

Seriously though, it's weird, I was just thinking about this earlier today.

Yeesh, Veeky Forums Hivemind, much?

I saw a news story a year ago about some dude named Byron Hall who was in jail for drugging and raping a 17 year old. Could it be, maybe? They had a pic of him, but I don't know if it's him or not.

Found it.

what's the short version of who this guy is and what he did?

He wrote F.A.T.A.L., generally considered the worst RPG of all time.

F.A.T.A.L.

...Why am I not surprised that it was this?

I want to believe.

Could that trashy soul patch be hiding a cleft chin? Could the different facial proportions come from the camera angles? Looks like he has dark eyes in the OP pic though.

Yeah, but he just up and...like, disappeared. Him and all his 'buddies'.

I know, right?

This guy is "Byron Craig Hall jr.". I read somewhere that the death penalty. He was convicted last year.

>that the death penalty is on the table

The flesh around the mouth and the lips in the two pictures is similar... but it could still be confirmation bias.
>time to roll for anal circumference, Byron.

More importantly, does anyone have pictures of his wife? Apparently she's really hot and if the creator of FATAL has a hot wife then I might have to kill myself.

Rolled 95 (1d100)

>rollan!

it's super wide!

Bumping while I search for evidence.

bumping, guys we must find him.

Damn, the prosecutors must have heard about F.A.T.A.L.

The lips, the jaw, the ears, they give it away. This isn't our man, boys.

nose, ears and facial structure are completely different

I'd rather believe that IS him though

Probably taking his time to write FATAL 2nd edition.

Doesn't FATAL use a d10 thousand?

FATAL uses d10,000,000

I missed out on the original drama, doesn't part of FATAL's infamy involve Byron Hall using dozens of sockpuppets to spam RPG.net and other such sites with insane hype about his game?

The fallout when the game finally released must have been incredible.

Gah, don't remind me

I'm not sure if they were sockpuppets, or just all of his friends of questionable genetic quality

Only for rape-pregnancy rolls, I think.

I don't remember that, but I do remember his defense of the system. His response when someone called FATAL a date-rape RPG was "false; there are no rules for dating."

Yeah. It was pretty cringey- he actually fedora'd a few times and mistook a Catholic Saint of the blind for Mary, which the reviewers called him on, showcasing how much his head was up his ass.

Last time I heard he was working on a new edition of F.A.T.A.L that would be exempt of all the bullshit.

I say if he does, it'll be even worse, because at least F.A.T.A.L can make you laugh a bit or somethin'.

I think he should Kickstart a F.A.T.A.L video game, personally.

I think it was a trolling attempt turned too real, and he and his friends disappeared somewhere like Rio Deginero or Buenos Aires.

I thought he already did? There's, like, 2 editions of the game.

Albeit, the first edition was more like a half-formed fetus. Didn't even have much art other than pics of Byron and company with odd lens filters trying to do edgy things.

OP here

Maybe this could be a clue?

Assuming he isn't lying about all of this shit.

>what's the short version of who this guy is and what he did?

Some of the fatal developers did an internview and told the story, the interview was on youtube.

As as I remember
>main fatal developer (of the pic) and his friends only knew and played ad&d
>they liked to play as evil guys
>they also houserules the hell of ad&d to fit on their playing style
>d&d 3.0 is going to be released
>instead of learning and then houseruling the hell out of d&d 3.0, they decide to make their own game.
>the idea is to make a realistic game, (myth, history and science) and also something that fit on their playstyle
>they start to do it
>after some days the main developer, come with a huge amount of text
>developers disagree on some stuff, the developer form interview complained that angel race was too strong and not realistic
>after some amount of time main developer decided to live on another city (you can see the city change by looking at some different book wips)
>the developer form interview tries to find him to get the rights back to continue developing the game
>he discover the guy moved to another city and work doing car restoration now.
>the developer from interview still tried to get the rights back, so he can continue developing the game.
>he also sometimes tries to find people online to play fatal, he was sucessfull sometimes

>I thought he already did? There's, like, 2 editions of the game.
Nope, there isnt, the game was just a wip and there are many wips out there.

>main fatal developer (of the pic) and his friends only knew and played ad&d

>only knew and played ad&d

this make fatal even more cringeworthy

>the interview was on youtube.

Oh snap, think you can find it again?

youtube.com/watch?v=7JTsWbdG8lY

Fuckin' eh bud. Lets have a gander

Wow, the audio is shite. Still gonna slog through

>Quantitative Reserach Methods

Byron Hall got lazier as they continued gaming. He'd put a lot of work into AD&D campaigns (writing up NPCs and drawing maps and stuff), but in FATAL he'd not bother. NPCs would all have identical average stats and the like.
Mr Hausler thinks this was partly because the criticism of FATAL was getting to him, and partly because he was getting career focused and had less free time to spend on RPGs.
When Byron wrote FATAL, he was with his second wife, who wasn't a gamer (unlike his first wife who played in the AD&D campaign).
Byron and his second wife moved to Kansas when he was offered a job there, and then Connecticut, and the rest of the group never heard from him again.
Mr Hausler tried to reach Byron in order to buy the rights to FATAL from him, but was unable to contact him. Byron wouldn't return anyone's calls.
According to Byron's wife (who Mr Hausler did manage to talk to), he'd given up RPGs and was spending all his spare time renovating '60s and '70s muscle cars.
Mr Hausler thinks that the large number of rape references in the game were Byron seeking controversy.
However, he does say that (in-character) rape did play a part in their home games even back when they were playing AD&D.
Mr Hausler recants an anecdote about the character played by Byron's first wife being gang raped in an AD&D game by minotaurs and ending up pregnant.
The main reason for so many rules about sex and rape being in FATAL was that there were so many ways for characters to get the mental disorder that made them addicted to rape - so there needed to be rules for those characters.
Mr Hausler says that it wasn't his idea to have that particular mental disorder be so common, but he wasn't against the idea either.

Mr Hausler suggested to Byron that they make two versions of the game - the adult one with all the rapey stuff and another version with the same rules but without that stuff. Byron "didn't want to budge" on that, though.
The rapey aspects of the game were all Byron's work, not the work of the other contributors. Mr Hausler would do that sort of stuff in a game, but not as a creative endeavour.
FATAL was never actually finished. It was still a "living document" when Byron disappeared.
Mr Hausler was against putting the PDF on the web, because he thought it would reduce sales of the book if people could download it for free.
In general, Byron was very hard-headed and difficult to convince of anything.
Mr Hausler was bothered by a lot of the FATAL criticism, because he felt it was "anything but scholarly".
When Mr Hausler tried to get local people to play the game, they looked it up on the Internet and decided they didn't want to try it. He was only able to find two people who would actually play the game with him.
When he ran the game, none of the rape stuff ever came up.
The mental disorders were mostly used when Byron ran the game, and he liked seeing the rape addiction one come up a lot during character creation.
The big list of random magical effects (that includes lots of rapey effects) were created by Ryan and John for the AD&D game, before FATAL was written, and then copied over.
Most of the other lists (of herbs, or gems, or whatever) were done by Byron.
Ryan wrote a character generation program in C++ and Byron wrote one in Excel, and they let you create a character in under 10 mins, so they never had a problem with the lengthy character generation process.

The art wasn't done in-house. Byron found some artists via the Internet and paid them for it. Mr Hausler wasn't happy with the quality of much of the art.
However, Mr Hausler did love some of the art, especially in the first edition.
The races were mostly Mr Hausler's idea, and he based them on real mythology.

It's always interesting to see what went through people's heads when they make things like this.

So...Byron realized he was a cuck faggot and now tries to restore cars in an attempt to feel macho?

The game was intended as a game for mature adults only.
Mr Hausler responds positively when asked if the game was meant to be mature in terms of complex philosophical themes as opposed to just mature in terms of graphic sex and violence, and replies that the game was meant to be "highbrow", although he laughs and says that the first version didn't reflect that at all.
Mr Hausler invented the tag-line "The dice don't lie".
When asked about how a game with magic and monsters can claim to be "historically accurate", Mr Hausler says that the mundane stuff - weapons, fighting techniques and so forth - is all accurate to actual history and the fantasy races and stuff is accurate to actual historical beliefs and myths - except the Anakim (the half-demons with random and sometimes graphically sexual mutations) which were invented for the game.
Mr Hausler never liked the Anakim, not for reasons of taste, but for reasons of play-balance. He thinks they should have been monsters, not a PC race.
Byron came up with the original "Fantasy Adventure To Adult Lechery" title, and Mr Hausler liked it because he liked the word "Lechery" due to it being an obscure word that no-one ever uses. Byron decided to change because of the negative feedback he got about the first name.
They have a vote, between keeping the name the same, changing it to "From Another Time Another Land", or changing it to "For All Those Against Light".
The designers were into extreme death metal music, extreme video games, and extreme wrestling, and the game was intended to tie those things together.
They thought the game would revolutionise gaming.

The idea of having the spell called "Fatal" (which basically kills everyone and ends the campaign if cast) was to take the piss out of players who would do "stupid destructive things" in game. Mr Hausler's example of that sort of "stupid" thing was a player in an AD&D game whose character was surrounded by monsters and going to die - so he grabbed a magic wand and snapped it hoping that it would cause a magical explosion that would take the monsters out with him. He calls that sort of thing "power gaming".
The game only credits Byron as creator, not all of them, because he was the one who copyrighted it. The others were just named as "contributors" along with the people whose art Byron bought. They are listed as "abettors" in the second edition, though. 99% of the game was done by the four of them, with half that being Byron and half the others. Mr Hausler says he was more of a co-author, but doesn't seem bothered that he never got that credit.
With regards to the RPG.NET review ("by Jason Sartin and that other guy"), Mr Hausler was aware of it but didn't contribute to the rebuttal. He almost did, but then thought that John and Byron had covered all the points that needed to be covered and he didn't want to join in to "beat a dead horse".
He thought that John's rebuttals were good, but occasionally he felt that Byron sounded like he was taking the criticism personally - although Byron never actually said that it bothered him.
Mr Hausler was somewhat upset by the bad reviews because they always latched on to the rape and other "not very PC" aspects of the game and took them out of context, assuming the game was like SenZar or Racial Holy War. He thinks reviewers should have talked to the authors, then they'd have seen those things differently.
He's only heard of Racial Holy War and SenZar because of RPG.NET. As a result, he got a copy of Racial Holy War - but after reading it he thought it wasn't the game for him.

So...that's the whole saga, I'm guessing?

What got me about the rebuttaled to the review was the last line he gave.
It's as if he was so insecure about people saying his game was awful.
That and the dice system was fucking awful that could have been simplified, which is not always a bad thing.

Other than that, the fact that Racial Holy War exists makes me have this horrible thought that a /pol/ish fa/tg/uy would try to remake it and make it playable, just a morbid thought.

What did you think about all of his frig ups in the rebuttal?

So, in short, they are a whole bunch of That Guys and deserve all they shit they got.
>Trying to sacrifice oneself in a hopeless situation is power gaming

Also,
>When he ran the game, none of the rape stuff ever came up.
Is a 100% lie, because you literally cannot go an our into this game without some dumbass random table bringing it up.

980 pages of goodness right here

mega.nz/#!4psXkBQB!hHpnwAuaQqH38cUeOadOGOj-OWuYkRgk75xmfiwt_Ec

>His response when someone called FATAL a date-rape RPG was "false; there are no rules for dating."
Was he wearing a fedora when he said this?

Probably. He...was pretty snarky and stupid.

What the acronym means has changed, but the content of the book has not.

It doesn't say he majored in communications.

I have to read it again, since it was like 6-7 years ago since i read it, it was just the whole 'FATAL is the greatest game ever made.' just stood out as being either really insecure about criticism or not really getting why his game was getting criticized.
truth be told, some of the things I remember from some of the magical items where somewhat racist, though going on Veeky Forums, mild racism stopped bothering me awhile back.
the dice rolls will always bothers me, seeing how you could simplify the rolls.
but it's not the worst game, RaHoWar is awful because it's unplayable.

Some of the really, really blatantly racist stuff was removed. Like the armor of Jewy Jewbaca or whatever it was that turned you into a big nosed, hand wringing jewish stereotype.

>though going on Veeky Forums, mild racism stopped bothering me awhile back.


Yeah. I remember 'retard strength', at first, didn't bug me. Then seeing Halls justification for it, I was just like "...man fucking what?"

I mean, if it's true that FATAL's more controversial stuff is just for causing controversy, then yeah, they do deserve the criticisms it got for that.
What i also will say is that Fatal seems to be made a someone who comes from edgy teens, most o the other awful games comes from really shitty people, such as the picture in my original post or this picture, which was made by some dumb motherfucker who worships Satan/Cthulhu

I was actually going to ask if Carcosa was any good.

Also goddamn that art is garbage

Carcosa is a weird fantasy game with some weird ass sorcery spells that involve rap, murder and shit like that.
Guy how made Lamentations of the Flame Princess seem to like it.
the game of pic related is different, i think the title is Empire Of Satanis, which should be obvious as what it should be.

>rap
I want to see someone play a rapping wizard in one of my groups.

>weird ass sorcery spells that involve rap

...
Do...do you have an example laying around? I'm curious.

I was reading through some pdfs just this morning and decided to give FATAL a skim again like I do every couple of months. The only thing I could think of was creating FATAL 1.5 or FATAL Revised Edition; reducing the page count, rebalancing the game overall, and giving it a more organized structure. The only thing standing in my way was a way to contact Byron and work something out: obviously I'd be working for free.

Small world isn't it?

Goddamn. Hivemind twice in one thread.

Wait.

Who...are you?

RPGs are not exactly the most productive business strategy out there. Most people who make RPGs will probably release new material very occasionally, and that's being generous thanks to how PDFs work.

This guy released what the internet thinks is the shittiest RPG in existence. Of course he's not running around making new RPGs. Of course he's not been hired by another RPG company. Most likely, he went to work on his day job once FATAL was released, and just decided to stick with that since it pays the bills.

What were you really expecting him to do?

>Didn't read the thread

No, you're thinking of SenZar and USENET.

i meant ;rape' but if you want a few examples here is a link to the original review where i found it.
projects.inklesspen.com/fatal-and-friends/halloween-jack/carcosa/
unfortunately it is also from SA, so if your cool with that, then go ahead.

Man, my hopes were up for rapping rites and fresh beats

i will say the guy who does the review also has some few choice words to both the creator and James Edward Raggi IV, so take that as you will.

Carcosa's setting is great, there are a lot of good ideas. And the art is excellent.

It's just that a lot of the content in the book is rather plain. Just reams of hex descriptions along the lines of 'Hex 3755: 3 mutant stegosauruses'
And I guess there's the rituals, but unless you go apoplectic at the very idea of a fictional rape, they are overhyped. For example:
>The sacrifice is a virgin White girl eleven years old with long hair. The Sorcerer, after partaking of the root, must engage in sexual congress with the sacrifice eleven times, afterwards strangling her with her own hair.

That's basically it. Incidentally, 'white' here refers to the race of white men, who are alabaster white, not european. There's a dozen or so races of different colours, including a couple that aren't on earth's spectrum.

Where is he now? New Vegas.

There is a Byron Hall in Connecticut who previously lived in-and-around Chicago.

So it could be him.

The rebuttal he wrote was crazy. In some paragraphs, he and his friend would start making some sense, and then finish with stuff like 'admiring Slipknot for their physique', but don't quote me on that.