Is it time to post Doug Beekman's cover of Darkmage by Barbara Hambly, Doubleday, 1988? Yes it is.
This may actually be the best $7 I've ever spent, thank you Thriftbooks and @nora for the inspiration

I've been using descriptions to make oxford comma jokes, but I feel it's time to change that up.
Is it time to post Doug Beekman's cover of Darkmage by Barbara Hambly, Doubleday, 1988? Yes it is.
This may actually be the best $7 I've ever spent, thank you Thriftbooks and @nora for the inspiration
When you have a very rich inner life, but nobody knows about it.
Recently I've seen some posts on twitter where people are talking about my game, Girl by Moonlight, and describe it as "Girl by Moonlight, by Evil Hat" or something to that effect. I had a very strong reaction to this, and after some reflection as to why I reacted so viscerally, I think I can articulate it rightly, and maybe dig into the topic in some useful ways.
First up, for context, Evil Hat Productions is the publisher for Girl by Moonlight (and to be clear, I am happy with my relationship with EHP, and they've been great to work with). It's a small publisher, with a small core staff, that brings in contractors to round out its workforce. I designed, wrote, playtested, and developed GBM independently, and was approached by Evil Hat with an offer to publish the game. Attributing the game to EHP cuts me entirely out of my own work, and at best I can only guess at why people might frame the game in this way. We don't talk about War and Peace by Penguin Random House, or Oppenheimer (2023) by Atlas Entertainment, and it would be absurd to do so.
One possible reason is that people are borrowing frameworks from the larger corporate-controlled IP space of games like D&D (Wizards of the Coast), Pathfinder (Paizo), or Vampire (White Wolf). Though D&D is the largest by far, they are all IP held by companies, with writers/designers brought in to develop products under their ownership and control. They represent a particular mode of production which, while a mainstay of the big players in the broader TTRPG industry, is not the mode in which GBM was made.
GBM, despite being published by a small press, was made very much in the indie TTRPG tradition, in which I as a designer set out to make a game end to end, with no IP or other interest attached to the project. I still own my work (published under a creative commons sharealike license) and the closest EHP comes to a claim on it is a right of first refusal on publishing subsequent connected works.
It really bothers me to see my work being misattributed in this way, but I don't see any way that I can chime in and correct people without looking petty and obtuse. Attribution feels especially important in an historical moment in which we have large language models scraping all the writing they can find for datasets, largescale corporate consolidation and ownership of cultural works, and the disappearance of digitally published media as cost savings for its corporate owners. It feels important to insist upon acknowledging the actual people making the culture, and thus sticking up for myself in this somewhat obnoxious way.
I'll wrap this up by asking people to please take the time and effort to attribute any work of art or culture correctly. It means a lot to the people who make those works to have their efforts and ideas acknowledged. It's also important in terms of the political economics of cultural production to highlight and value those that make the things, over those brands/companies that might own the things.