New allegations against Jamison Stone from an employee at Lostlorn Games, the TTRPG company founded by Vampire: The Masquerade creator Mark Rein-Hagen. In a statement shared with The Fandomentals, the employee (who wishes to remain anonymous) alleges that while Jamison and his wife Satine Phoenix were employed by Lostlorn to promote a Kickstarter, Stone allegedly berated the writer at GenCon and ultimately walked out on commitments to the company after forcing a delay in fulfillments. The employee’s full statement is below:
This will be [a] catharsis to type this out, as it’s something that I’ve just been sitting on since GenCon 2021. I never even gave all the details to my team, burying it instead.
As we were heading into launching the Kickstarter for our first product from Lostlorn Games, the Curse of BloodStone Isle, our COO recommended advertising through Satine and Jamison. He had worked with them before and liked them, and when I looked into their social media presence, I was impressed. Satine was HUGE. Jamison less so, but he was clearly pretty shrewd. Our Director was not as star-struck as I was, but I really saw in them value. I pushed to get Jamison to be our first stretch-goal writer, and pushed us to agree to letting him do the amount of words that he wanted (which was more than what we initially wanted, but I told our COO that I would pay the difference), and when the company didn’t feel that they had the money to hire them for advertising, I did it myself and paid $1000.00 out of my pocket for their advertisement. It seemed like the best thing to do to assure that we would make our goal.
In the beginning, Jamison was amazing. He was friendly and offered lots of free advice on how to succeed. I was surprised and told him that this kind of advice seemed above and beyond, and he admitted that he usually charged for that advice, but that he wanted us to succeed. I was further star-struck. A family guy, friendly, smart, helpful. I was excited to meet him at GenCon.
So at GenCon I was surprised when he pulled me aside from my teammates (director of marketing and project lead) to light me up and cuss me up one way and down the other. “You guys are fucking amateurs and we’re inches away from just walking away from this project. What a shit-show you guys are. Look at her! She is a big deal, and you guys are nothing. This is beneath us.” I was speechless. I’ve never been talked to like this. Jamison plays Vampire: the Masquerade, and I’m the lead writer for the guy that wrote it. I don’t know the industry all that well, but that’s literally why I hired Jamison to advertise for us. Why talk to me like all of us, even Mark Rein-Hagen, are somehow beneath you? I get invited to city council meetings to deal with the homeless problems in my city. I’m a pretty dignified, upstanding and well-known member of my community and abroad. What on earth had I done so wrong that had warranted such an attack?
So I apologized. Profusely. And told him he was right. Because… I’ve never in all my years had anyone say anything like that to me. Surely I was the one that was in the wrong. Here was this guy that had been so nice and cool and friendly with me, and suddenly he was raging at me, and it must have been my fault. I was the writer and not marketing or operations, but apparently, I was letting everyone down not staying on top of those subjects as well.
And to try to make it up to Jamison, who had let me know how much I had let him down, I purchased an hour of consultation with him for another $150. But then things fell apart from there. He was upset that he was in our stretch goal book and not our two main books, but I had told him that the main books were already at the printers, and that the stretch goal writers would be in a bonus book. He was upset about our artist drawing his character, but he had told us that our artist should draw his character. And then he said that he could make more money if he wrote his own stuff and keep it and sell it himself, that writing for us was beneath him, made him sick, and that he had never had in all his years in the gaming community as bad an experience as he had dealing with us. He would honor his agreement to be a stretch goal writer and write something small for us, like an artifact, he said, but nothing more.
Y’know, this was a bit of the wake up call for me. Sick to his stomach? That seemed over the top. I said “We would love to get anything you would provide for us at this point. Here’s our deadline.” But I knew at that point that I would never hear from him again. He was not going to fulfill his promise to us and our Kickstarter backers. That was obvious. We delayed the publishing of the stretch goal book two weeks for him, then published it without ever hearing from him again. There was never a message of “I need more time” or even “I can’t/don’t want to do this any longer.” He just walked away without a word. Good riddance. No one should berate other people like that. Imagine looking down on everyone else like that? Looking at people only as “you’re only of value when you advance me” is just plain unhealthy.
But it’s a relief to hear that it wasn’t just me that he treated this way. Not because misery loves company. It simply reaffirms that it wasn’t me. It’s him.
Thing is… I miss the cool guy that was so helpful when we were chatting in events leading up to GenCon. He seemed so pleasant. And I do think that the money I paid for their advertising was money well-spent. I think it got our name out there, and I’m super proud of the Curse of BloodStone Isle. So I don’t actually have regrets at this point. Jamison was an absolute jerk and completely unprofessional at so many levels, but he wasn’t at first. Initially, he was a fellow gamer and a fellow dad, and a fellow White Wolf fan, and that guy was great. I suspect that success has gone to his head and he has forgotten his roots. I hope that he can find his way back to where he was. He has a lot of potential for good in the industry, but he cannot treat people as disposable stepping stones and do anything but tear down our beloved hobby.
At least one other employee has backed the allegation up. We were also sent screenshots of conversations between the company and Stone as part of the employee’s story:
Images via Lostlorn Games