Part of me wonders if I should be wary of posting this one given the topic at hand but since it's all true and verifiable, I'm willing to risk it. That said, I'll be changing a few details, just in case.

So, years back some friends and I started a forum for ourselves and several more of our friends. We did this after getting inspired by a local WoD game that was poorly run, and we wanted our stories to go further. Not wanting to step on anyone's toes, we changed the setting, continuity, and even used a different version of World of Darkness.

Some friends invited their friends and the online campaign got surprisingly big for what it was; what was essentially going to be a forum for maybe 10 people ended up with about 50 active participants. It should be noted that we were all at least semi-local to each other, some people were from a ‘One World by Night’ chapter, and while I did only know a lot of these people through this game, we did end up having meetup events where just about all of us eventually met. It was really fun, if I do say so myself, but tons of work. I ran the whole thing with two other people and while they contributed some significant story beats, I did the same and I also did a lot of the atmospheric writing and NPC-playing as well as organizing all of these 'real life' events. That said, I was by far the most passionate of the crew so I didn't mind too much. Lots of players even asked I take over the venue of the old game as management had changed, and the game runners…were the old management. So, we did it for them a couple times a month - these were mostly just fun little LARP/roleplay heavy events. Though it did cause a lot of stress, people from other LARP events joined and I got a lot of sexual harassment and a lot of tantrums and lots of old guys who had a problem with a female GM tried to intimidate me into giving them whatever they wanted, but since this was a venue there was security, thankfully.

I'm not sure if the guys felt their contributions were too much work once the game went more ‘real life’, the campaign was getting bigger than they thought, or genuinely thought this was an incredible offer but they brought on a guy to ‘help’ without consulting me. One day I log in to see a new admin and apparently he's loosely affiliated with the original game runners - which admittedly is pretty cool. While I was a little miffed no one told, let alone asked, me in theory I appreciated the support. In practice, this guy was a problem from the start. He invited a pretty significant handful of his own friends who for some reason weren’t in the other game and had similar connections – mostly, they’d been playing tabletop together for years. The main guy, my new co-admin, had run most of these games and tried to incorporate lots of inside jokes, his and his friends’ character’s old prestige and items and experience, etc. into the plot.

We spent a good while catching him up but he repeatedly took issue with details of our setting and story; they were different than the game that had been running at the venue previously. This surprised me, and I figured my co-admins hadn’t explained things properly to him but he denied this; and every time I explained our logic (it was a new setting and different rulebook) he would say he’d understand but then take issue with similar things not long after. I was the only woman in the ‘crew’, about 30 years younger than him (as were my other admins), and the only one he did this with. I was also the only one he’d pick fights and arguments with during planning, even (if not ESPECIALLY) when we were in agreement. One time when planning an adventure for players, there was an incredible treasure at the end of it for them – incredible in the sense of its historical significance to his preferred clan (little did I know this was a treasure that belonged to one of his old characters in an old game of his, which was why he was so fiercely protective of it). I did posit that while it WAS a prestigious items, our players could be a bit less than sentimental and may at the very least ask how much they could sell it for so that we should probably account for that possibility. This offended him greatly and he took this out on me with aggressive and hostile interrogations as to why anyone would do such a thing, that I was messed up for even imagining it, and all the while admitting it was probably what our players were going to do.

On top of that, he took a liking to this girl and started granting her titles, experience points, and items other players had to work towards. He was even sharing future plot points, meta information about other characters, and other spoilers with her. I took issue with this and at least my fellow GMs agreed and told him to handle it but he whined about being ganged up on, accused me of being jealous of the girl in question, and claimed he was just rewarding her level of engagement. We’d already had to stop him from rewarding his personal friends in such ways in the past but this is what sort of broke the camel’s back for me. I told my co-admins that since they enlisted him, they needed to ‘fire’ him and they told me they’d take care of it.

When I checked back later he was gone, and I thought they spoke with him; but it turns out they just kind of kicked him out without warning. That IS admittedly shitty, but soon he contacted ME to tell me that unless I reinstated him, he was going to sue me for ‘stealing his ideas’ (and made a smug little comment that he’d already prepared his lawyer and that ‘maybe I’ve heard of him’ – one of his personal friends and players in the campaign). Funnily enough, this same lawyer friend actually ended up advising ME on what to do because he agreed his friend was being unreasonable but was still pacifying him to his face. However, it truly seemed like this guy wanted to take me to court and started an entire harassment campaign full of lies, attempts to exploit my anxiety and depression, and tried to steal my player base and start his own game. He would send me abusive messages over various social media every day but be nice to me in group chats to try to look like the civil one. Some people did participate in his new game but funnily enough no one actually fully left ours though he did get other unrelated players and some others who were solely loyal to the original GM’s game. His friends did continue to participate though I have no doubt some of them funneled information to him, but they did the same for me so whatever.

Unfortunately, everyone was very ‘kid gloves’ with him. They all said I should reinstate him to ‘make things easy’ even when they admitted he was being unreasonable and acknowledging the harassment. He even got his wife to contact me and try to reason with me ‘woman to woman’ and I told her everything he’d said and done to me and the problems he’d caused in our game (including disproportionate attention to a female player) and this greatly upset her because apparently he’d done such things in the past. After that, a relative of his contacted me but it was pretty evident she had no idea what was going on, only that she was under the impression that I had taken something from her family member that he wanted back.

Eventually, I was just too stressed and felt too betrayed by my co-admins who did nothing to continue. I stepped away and both games apparently crumbled pretty much immediately. Back then, this guy was unemployed which might explain why he had so much time to give me grief, but I heard that for a while he was working for this group that ran paid D&D campaigns for children. That worries me (I wonder if he made them sign waivers to not steal his ideas, LOL) but that company folded pretty quickly – which I know because he was posting in every tabletop/RP space he knew of that the service would be ending soon and to buy his services while they were still available.

I have no idea what he’s doing now, but his friends have actually been weirdly kind to me in the following years so maybe it wasn’t all bad. I will never RP in a public, especially real life, setting again, though!