Satine Phoenix: Porn, Bondage, Comics, and the 2022 Break

Satine Phoenix is an American comic-book illustrator, cosplayer, model, and former pornographic film actress. With writer R.K. Syrus she co-created the graphic novel New Praetorians, and she founded CelebrityChariD20, formerly CelebrityCharityDnD. For readers who know BDSM and fetish culture, she is a public case of adult performance, bondage aesthetics, and a geek-media career running as one life. Industry allegations and the professional fallout later made that picture harder. The adult work starts after she is an adult. She has said she began playing Dungeons & Dragons in 1988, at age eight. That date is when a child started a tabletop game. It is not a sexual history.

Stripping, porn, and fourth place at the Bondage Awards

She stripped in San Francisco, then entered pornographic film in 2006. She was open about her interest in sadomasochism and bondage. In 2010 she placed fourth for Best Comic Artist at the Bondage Awards. In a 2006 AlterNet piece, journalist Annalee Newitz described her as someone with the education and the resources to choose among many careers, who chose this one because she liked it. The framing treats adult work as a deliberate vocation, not as pure economic desperation. The SM visibility and the comics pointed ahead to the mixed identity she later carried across porn, illustration, and tabletop games.

She took work in gaming and fetish fashion, cosplayed Dungeons & Dragons characters, and modeled in latex and leather. Early credits include Pen, Paper & Laser Guns, and the gaming web series I Hit It With My Axe, which she co-developed and which The Escapist distributed. In 2008 she appeared on WE tv’s Secret Lives of Women and as a guest on Fox’s The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet. Swedish punk painter Karl Backman and American photographer Chad Michael Ward both pictured her. In 2013 she appeared in Javier Grillo-Marxuach’s short film Minotaur. In 2010, at Meltdown Comics in Hollywood, she pulled art and gaming back together: DrawMelt, life drawing with cosplay models, and DnDMelt, a Dungeons & Dragons community. She organized and hosted Celebrity Charity Dungeons & Dragons for Reach Out and Read, performed with San Francisco’s Zen Bullies, did body painting and bondage burlesque, and hosted a weekly show on KSEXradio. Kink-adjacent performance and nerd-media infrastructure were running side by side.

TableTop, Wizards, and Maze Arcana

She appeared in and hosted multiple Geek & Sundry and HyperRPG episodes. She was on seasons three and four of Wil Wheaton’s web series TableTop, as a guest on his show, not as its host. In 2017 she hosted season two of the YouTube series Game Master Tips, for Dungeon Masters and other tabletop gamemasters. That season widened the format into interviews with influential TTRPG figures and closed in December 2017 with an interview of season-one host Matthew Mercer. From 2018 to 2019 she was community manager for the Dungeons & Dragons arm of Wizards of the Coast, one of the more visible corporate community jobs in official D&D streaming.

With Ruty Rutenberg she co-founded the streaming network Maze Arcana, which produced official actual-play D&D series: Maze Arcana: Fury’s Reach (2017), Maze Arcana: Fury’s Fate (2017–18), Sirens of the Realms (2017–19), and Maze Arcana: Inkwell Society (2018–19). Phoenix was Dungeon Master or player on those shows. In 2018 the Diana Jones Award went to the actual-play movement and named Maze Arcana an exceptional example. Phoenix, Rutenberg, and Ivan Van Norman accepted at Gen Con. The network then went dark in 2018. In 2022 ComicBook.com reported that Rutenberg and Phoenix were suing each other over Maze Arcana funds and fiduciary duty. In 2019 Phoenix founded the livestream production company Gilding Light. In 2021 Apotheosis Studios, founded by Jamison Stone, ran a successfully funded Kickstarter for her campaign setting book Sirens: Battle of the Bards.

The apology, the wedding, and what stays on the record

In June 2022, more than a dozen former collaborators alleged bullying and mistreatment by Phoenix and her husband Stone. Phoenix issued an apology. She said she was sorry for being the cause of her accusers’ pain, and for enabling Stone’s “terrible behavior.” Several organizations formally cut ties, including Level Up Dice, D&D In a Castle, Jasper’s Game Day, and the McElroy Brothers. The same year she married Jamison Stone at Gary Con. Luke Gygax officiated at a convention event. Her publication list includes Burning Quill: A Collection of Illustrations and Other Art Work of Satine Phoenix (CreateSpace, 2010).

For a BDSM-site reader, the story is not the short version in which an adult star becomes a geek celebrity. Bondage modeling, SM-open porn work, latex fashion, and actual-play fame can share one career. Community allegations later redrew that map. The fourth-place Bondage Awards result, the KSEX and burlesque years, and the later Wizards community role sit on the public record next to the 2022 rupture. The kink credits are real history. The later conflict is real history too.