Macris is joined by Dominic Martyne to discuss his crowdfunded book Dungeons & Dragons: An American Institution.
Yes, this is the same guy that was on Dunder Moose the other week. If you missed it, his Kickstarter page is here.
You can expect that the core point is the same: Jon Peterson and his Fellow Travelers cannot be trusted to tell our story, so we have to do it oursevles.
This is Narrative Warfare. Peterson and others of his camp are deliberately rewriting history to suit their ends when they deny that this is a wargaming hobby and thus the game has to be run as a wargame in a wargaming social environment.
This interview is a good follow-up to the Dunder Moose appearance. Watch both, and back the book.
Vee notices that Games Workshop's been on a very antagonist path for some time.
Northern Exile, Arch, and several others (Janovich most recently) have also made these obsvervations.
NE showed the recepts: Games Workshop wants a Great Replacement of its audience. They are deliberately trying to drive away the very audience they attracted in the 1980s because they believe that Warhammer in general, and 40K in particular, is ready for Hello Kitty territory and thus want to transition from a product-driven business to a Brand-driven one. They want to be a Lifestyle Brand.
That means becoming a Normie-friendly Safe Edgy Brand, which is not what 40K is at this time (believe it or not). That's pure Mammon Mobster activity; the pozzing from the Death Cult, as usual, rides on the Mob's coattails because they never succeed on their own- they always require a patron willing to bankroll them indefinitely to get anywhere and succeed in anything.
The Death Cult pozzing may be the things that tip people off to what's going on, but do not forget who is driving this bus and why: the Mob, and because Line Must Go Up!
What you should be afraid of is not a Kathy Kennedy, or a Taikti Whatshisname, or some other Death Cult hackjob catamite or bitter bitch. Instead, you should be afraid of this:
You think Big Corpo is any smarter than Retarded Toy Companies? LOLno. They're just better connected with governments. It's all a racket.
That's what you need to worry about long-term. Not the Death Cult, though that's a problem (it's short-term without Mob backing), the Mob. They can rip apart Games Workshop, or Hasbro, just as easily as they did Burger King or Toys R Us because Corporate Raiding doesn't care about the target- only what they can get from scrapping and salvaging it. This is Copper Wire Theft for White Collar people.
And if this current courting of Amazon doesn't work, don't be surprised to see GW's management and investors sell out to a Private Equity firm; the smarter ones will take their bag and run, likely to a tax haven (because who wants to do business or be rich in the UK anymore) and there's quite a few close to home (e.g. the Channel Isles) while others are British Overseas Territories (e.g. Cayman Islands) or Commonwealth states (e.g. Bahamas).
You will see far worse than an attempt to do a Great Replacement on an audience if that happens.
Fortunately 40K is about as proof against Corpo fuckery as BattleTech is, so let the 3d printers and PDFs and POD books flow freely on the high seas. GW can die in a fire for all I care; 40K can, and will, live on without GW just fine.
There is no competition for D&D. There never has. There never will. Even when TSR was deep in the shitter, it was still top dog by a country mile. It has only gotten exponetially worse since then.
The vast majority of D&D players don't even know that alternatives exist. They don't go to stores; they buy on Amazon, Walmart, or Target. They don't go to cons. They don't watch videos. They play the game and that is it. This is not their identity; they do the thing once a week or so, then grill some brats and do something else.
There is already so much material for them to consume that they can spend several years clearing out the backlog of Endless Product Slop before they even sense that the well may be drawn down somewhat, and that's just Current Edition. If they play any past editions, they're set for life and nothing you can say or do will change that.
This is the benefit of being The Only Game That Matters. D&D is in the Normiesphere; Normies play this game, however half-assedly and incompetently, and not Your Favorite Darling because D&D Is Normie-Approved and everything else Is Not- yes, including those Star Wars games. It's hard enough to get past editions played by Normies; you can't even get them to play near-alikes like Pathfinder and you are never going to get them to play some bullshit like Daggerheart.
The delusion of gaming channels like this, and others, is strong enough to hold up a trans-oceanic suspension bridge.
In reality, it's Current Edition or the Clubhouse now. Conventional Play cultists like Pat--and she's like this with 40K too--are being left behind now, exactly as predicted.
This is why only D&D can kill D&D. All other games and products IN ALL MEDIA are compared to D&D!
This is the Network Effect and the Lindy Effect in action.
This is why Your Indie Darling doesn't mean jack shit; no one talks about some long-forgotten licensed tie-in product in reference to that- only to The Only Game That Matters.
This is why even licensed tie-ins cannot dethrone the one true king. No matter what Wizards of the Coast does, or does not, D&D is and shall ever be the One True King of the Tabletop Hobby. Nothing else even comes close, and now nothing ever will. We have reached the point where the Network Effect, compared to all alternatives, is so dominant that it is now the God-Emperor of the Hobby: forever in power, forever on top, no matter who or what does or does not because no one else can even be bothered to try- both players and publishers alike, each in their own contexts.
Breach the Normiesphere. That's what you have to do, and no alternatives did and sweet fuck-all even try. You have to go into historically-specific corner-cases to find anything at all that to gainsay that (e.g. why Sword World is popular in Japan). Using these to gainsay that fact betrays that you aren't tall enough for this ride. That is all, as Stephan Molyneux said:
Remember all that talk about Wizards of the Coast pivoting out of being a pure gaming company, but instead making their brands into Lifestyle Brands? That applies to Games Workshop too.
This is up for preorder here. I hope you hate money as much as you love the God-Emperor.
This is not the first licensed 40K toy; there's been several Space Marine toys over the last decade, and there's been others, but an Imperial Knight toy with a pricetag on par with its Forge World counterpart but it comes fully assembled, painted, with a figure (also assembled and painted) is quite the tell that GW wants the same thing. Northern Exile's been all about how GW wants to do a Great Replacement of its audience with Normie Consumer Pop Cultists, and one of the pivots is via toys.
Games Workshop turning hostile to its established audience isn't that different from what Wizards did in courting the Theater Kids; they're doing this under the open premise of courting a younger, wealthier (LOLno x2) more general audience of unthinking spendthrifts. That's why the game's revisions over the last five years have culled the model lines, has culled the army types, and has attempted to change the lore (and failed).
When this happens, it's time to seize the game from the corpos, and GW is one of the corpos most vulnerable to having that control taken from them by the audience.
And, in many respects, it already has- not as well as how BattleTech is in the hands of the audience, but going that way.
Last weekend the J. LeTourneau ran a Braunstein. Dunder Moose had some of them on for a panel to do the After Action Report.
Macris got it: this is one-night-only style of Braunstein is as much a social game as it is a game of rules and procedures.
Folks who've played BROZER or did the Throne War scenario for Amber Diceless are primed to do well in this style of Braunstein. Doing this as a campaign launch event, or as a means to swiftly resolve a moment of Convergence in an ongoing campaign, then integrating the results back into regular play is a critical element to making the magic happen in this hobby.
This panel discussion shows you how fun this can be, and how fast a Status Quo within a campaign can be upended when Preparation meets Opportunity. Don't miss out; play in a Braunstein as soon as you can.
Dunder Moose had on Dominic Martyne to talk about the history of the hobby and its misappropriation.
@thecriticaldom makes his This Is Dunder Moose debut to set the record straight on the History of Dungeons and Dragons. No disavowals, no disclaimers. No Unhuman pandering. No antagonism for the founders. I KNOW you are gonna wanna hear THIS!
It is good that the Conventional Play Cargo Cultists are being actively gainsayed. Now we're seeing the record being corrected.
The first good sign: acknowledgement that Fantastic Adventure Gaming is a wargmaing medium.
The second good sign: there is an active effort to get that correction out there in dead tree forming coming soon. (Link here.)
The third good sign: acknowledgement that Jon Peterson is not the only party acting in less than good faith here; old-timers, greybeards, and more also have incentives to bend the record and massage the narrative to favor their ends over others.
The biggest problem is that too many parties are acting like Magic-Users that know they have spells that no one else does, so they gatekeep the hell out of their hoarded lore and receipts in order to preserve their ability to gain from that knowledge. This is untenable in the long term because, like it or not, only institutions can afford to do this for any longer than a single lifetime and this hobby isn't that- yet.
That's coming to an end, and it needs to. We have to be the ones that tell our history to those we bring up behind us- not bad actors, not outsiders. If you have the scratch to back this, do so when his campaign goes live.
