Dunder Moose is back with a second episode this week.
Yep, we have a Mech-v-Kaiju game, getting such a game out before Mark Kern gets his Emb8r MMO out of Alpha.
This is a game whose design, with plenty of factions, is ready for Braunstein as even the designer admits. That approach would solve all of the problems that typically dog adaptations of this style of media into the Tabletop Gaming medium and hobby, especially things like putting pressure on the opposition and .
And yes, if you know the Deep Lore then you'll catch all of the inspirations that go into this game. Plenty of things for you to play with. The campaign is not yet live as of this post, but it will be soon. Here's the link.
We return to the Braunless Dicestein! An Amber Diceless Braunstein!? OD&D?! Living Urf ongoing campaign!? A Free Kriegspiel?! It ALL went into the blender on puree as Polyfamous ran the craziest, most confusing and engaging Stein of Braun I've ever seen. Hear from the participants themselves. How did I almost make Folder Bloat ragequit? Why did they make me King and then rush to commit regicide? Where was Marcus Phoenix this whole time? What's with all the garbage and bathing? Was there a Muppet??? Watch the show!
Of course you can, and should, see for yourself.
This is already another fantastic post-mortem on how to Braunstein.
Seeing how players approach the game, address the scenario premise, and the absolute hilarity that occurs when players don't pay attention to what they are doing are a big reason for why this works so well- even (especially) when there's no dice and thus no Random Number Generator to replicate the uncertainity of situations not completely under control.
Turns out that players being less-than-competent can throw out enough chaos to do that for you, with completely hilarious results.
"It would be funny" turns out to be a valid reason to do a thing, and it is those things done because it is funny that players respond to best and remember most because of the incongruence it presents.
Get your notepads ready, gamers, because there's a lot to learn here. As for the game itself you have Amber Diceless (w/ supplement ShadowKnight, at Amazon and DriveThru) and its two off-shoots: Lords of Gossamer & Shadow, and Lords of Olympus.
Last week the Pundit cut a video where, among other things, he lamented that what gets him traffic is complaining about Sorcerers By The Sea.
He is not the only one. Every single RPG Guy on YouTube cuts a video, or includes in a video, exactly that complaint sooner or later. The best of them pull up Analytics to show the receipts to prove it.
It's no better in written media either. All of my best-performing posts deal with SOBS and Current/Next Edition, SpaceMace 39K, Mouse Wars, and other Pop Cult topics.
"Why can't I get people interested in getting away from (Things Everyone Complains About)?"
Because they are Normies. Casuals and Tourists are Normie variants. Normies don't go out of their way for ANYTHING.
The Normie would rather complain about something everyone uses than switch to an alternative because otherwise they are not part of the norm anymore, so as much out of Ego Defense as anything else, the Normie exhibits all of the psychological behaviors that are already confirmed with Network Effects.
Yes, this has been the case before the invention of Network-driven electronic communications.
Being that many of you are wargamers, military historians, or deal with supply chains in some capacity I can frame this in such terms: Normies don't go out of their way, even if they don't like what they have, because the Opportunity Costs of going Out Of Network are considered (rightly as often as not) unacceptably high versus the benefits of actually getting the satisfaction of having a good or service that actually does what they want.
To convince the Normie to switch from The Dominant Option, which is always the one with the best Network Effect, you have to do the following:
Get in their face.
Acknowledge their position.
Convince them that the dominant party either cannot or will not fix it to their satisfaction.
Then offer the alternative that does.
Notice that this is how Jon Del Arroz does this when he does his videos on the mainstream media industry in the West, and he does the alternative pitching once or twice in each video. When done twice, he'll do it once up front and again--as a reminder--at the end.
That's how the Pathfinder people are so able to bring Current Edition people over, and it--without even trying--is how the Bros got people looking into Braunstein- especially now that BROZER is a thing.
That is what you have to do to get Normies to look at your stuff: get in front of their faces, acknowledge, complain, then offer alternatives.
Just talk to the sales professionals, the marketers, the people who pay their bills doing this stuff on behalf of those very not-dominant parties in a market niche. They may different on details, but they will confirm that this is sound fundamentals and fundamentals wins the championship.
The dominant players in these niches know that this is a viable threat. Don't think so? Then why does the market leader in MMOs, Tabletop Adventure Games, etc. all react by going full Walled Garden and racheting Fear of Missing Out to the maximum? To make maximum use of the leverage that being the dominant Network in a niche grants to you.
Cater to Normie psychology most and you win. Simple as.
Joshua Hiles lays out the Boomer Problem in the hobby:
Every interaction I have with “original D&D guy” is just an unappealing sludge compounded of boomerism, greed, and lack of self-awareness.
It started with; “you’re not even allowed to talk about this or we’ll sue you” and has moved on to complaining about young’uns being rude because they won’t obey some decrepit dude who refuses to directly address them.
DO NOT go to the old heads if you want to run and play games. Read widely. Experiment boldly. See what works.
I thing has to be worthy of respect to be respected. A thing has to be despicable to be despised. I’ve seen plenty of the latter since entering this space and none of the former.
My elders should be respectable.
This is what the Bros have run into when recovering what the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play threw into the Memory Hole.
I cannot explain to you why Boomers are like this. I don't know. All I can say is that it is fortunate that we don't need to pick the brains of these people because they hold on to that knowledge--if they actually have it--with white-knuckle intensity and vice-like grips. I'd like to say that this is some aberration, but as others who've tried to get Boomers to pass on anything--tangible or not--they've received from their predecessors, it is not.
We have had to reconstruct everything the hard way, walking the same paths that those same predecessors did generations before, to reconstitute a deliberately broken medium back into a functional state.
No thanks to the Boomers, who refused to teach or hand down a damned thing as they had taught or passed to them, and then wondered why their little social clubs dwindled over the years and "those damned kids" kept pestering them.
Yes, I am again pointing out that Boomers and Boomerism are the cause for the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play.
Fortunately such an obstinate cohort is already on the way out and will soon be gone. I would like to say that they would be missed, but that would be lying. Instead, it now the Bros that are the cornerstone of the hobby and the medium. As the publication of BROZERshows, they are not going to be so miserly because they understand how culture works.
Author Brian Niemeier wrote, some years ago now, about corporate fandom and dubbed it "The Pop Cult".
This is the key element he identified then:
"...the PopCult doesn’t offer any answers. It’s pure escapism. The problem is it’s an escape from self-mastery and virtue into the clutches of soulless megacorporations."
Since then what we've seen is that the members of the Pop Cult are not so easily herded. Psuedo-religions are still religions, and as such the Faithful can and do reject the direction of the leadership if they (a) detect that the leaders are going where they ought not go and (b) they sense that there is a critical mass that agrees on (a).
This leads to the question: "Who decides what is Canon?" It was presumed that the Pop Cultist would slavish conform to whatever their idols told them. This turned out to be not true. What Is or Is Not in Canon, once the Creator is gone, is for the Audience to decide: not the Corporation.
Why? This is why.
So a friend did some digging and apparently Alan Merrett, the guy upheld as the source of "female Space Marines used to be canon," is a pathological liar who was disliked by his coworkers and helped Games Workshop make some of it's worst business decisions. pic.twitter.com/xptfrXJsgr
— Marshal Bohemond ⚔️⛨ Space Crusader Vtuber (@HMBohemond) October 12, 2024
Good stewards recognize this fact. That is why they are scrupulous about the property that they sheppard, especially if their compensation is directly tied to its long-term health (and thus value).
We see this being the case (most of the time; there have been mistakes) with the Howard and Burroughs Estates. It was the case for Tolkien until Christopher died and the new stewards did some truly Boomer-style things to what their ((great-?)grandfather created.
One need look only at Lucasfilm, Marvel, and D.C. to see what happens when good stewards are not in place.
"But how can the audience make those decisions?"
Force of numbers. In addition to SpaceMace 39K, Mouse Wars, BattleTech, and many others under incompetent or traitorous management are increasingly cut out of the culture by the audience.
Or do you think that corporate seething at user-driven online publishing isn't just about Mainstream News losing their Narrative monopoly? No, far more important for day-to-day living is that those same platforms allow the audiences of various properties to completely cut out corrupt and incompetent corporate management from the conversation and thus push them out of what is and is not in the canon. No amount of Official Pronouncements means jack shit without buy-in.
Proof? Sorcerers By The Sea outright bribed a cohort of YouTube channels to shill for Corporate Positions because they had considerable audiences, were rather effective and efficient at it, and could be bought with the pocket change usually reserved for tipping the pizza delivery guy.
Why? Well, you get things like this out of them and this is far more effective at determine what Is and Is Not than what they say or do.
I can go on.
The corporate stewards that seethe over this are, at best, Mammon Mobsters mad that the audience will not mindless Consume Product and then get excited for Next Product. You see this most with Stupid British Toy Company and the Devil Mouse.
But the ones that hate it most are the Death Cultists that serve Molech, and as their entire apparantus for taking the openings made by Mammon Mobsters acting as 5th Columnists to turn the corporate operations into recruitment funnels into the Death Cult. As these corporate actors (unlike those in more important segments of the economy) do not have the ability to just use State power to silence these dissidents they have to compete using personal connections with Fellow Travelers in either those platforms or related ones (like Stripe or Patreon) to do it instead, and in the meantime find or build up a compliant group of shills spouting the party line.
They have to do this, because otherise their attempts at being sly about their Death Cult pozzing will keep getting exposed and thereby rendered impotent.
Oh, and that includes their attempts to regain their previous cloak of invisibily via BRIDGE.
This is what corporates and propagandists don't get: the audience gets not only a say, but the final say.
That audience? VETO! VETO! VETO!
And those attempts to pozz non-Anglo media? Already meeting even heavier resistance than the Western pushes ever got. No blackpilling folks. This can be beaten.
Especially once you account for audience use of Print On Demand technology to keep what is considered Orthodox available. We just want our Hunchbacks, and we'll have them the way they must be one way or another.
Speaking of Uncle Kevin, he's got the XMas Grab Bags going again. Still $60+Shipping/Handling. Here's the link. If you want Palladium stuff, and you don't want to buy used, this is your best value.
What's the tell that a turnover of leadership is coming? When the current leadership starts doing retrospectives.
Despite my take on Uncle Kevin and the company, don't take this as me criticizing either party for doing this.
What has been a consistent beat on this blog? The need to preserve the history of the hobby and carry it forward. What is this doing? Exactly that.
It is good, therefore, that Kevin is taking the time to tell his story in his words from his perspective. I welcome this series, and I look forward to seeing more of it. You should too, no matter what is said here or in later episodes. Take it from someone that trained in the discipline: this has value no matter the content.
I am certain that past Palladium employees, partners, and contractors have their own tales to tell; some of them have, at various times, been made public. (Alas, finding them as of this moment is difficult due to Wayback Machine being borked by the DDOS attack on the Internet Archive.) In time, I hope, all of them come out and are collected together to piece together the most accurate accounting of what happened. (If you think that's not a thing, consider World War 2 discourse before and after the Soviet Union archives opened to the West in 1990s. Major sea changes happened and are still happening.)
Why do I say that this is a tell that a leadership turnover is coming?
First, the obvious: Uncle Kevin is a Boomer. Boomers are old, well past usual retirement age old, and increasingly taking up spaces in the warehouses for discarded people we call "Assisted Living Centers" these days and "Old People Homes" for when Boomers threw their parents into them. He can't keep it up forever, and he may not want to, but just up and selling out ain't how people like him--who, to his credit, did build up a publishing company in a niche market from nothing and keep in running for generations despite many (self-inflicted) calamities--want to go out. They want to secure their place in their world first, then transition out into retirement.
Second, Kevin wants (and, to be fair, deserves) to be respected for his deeds. That ain't happening if he doesn't talk them up first, letting others repeat them to ever-wider audiences until he reaches a satsifactory level of recognition and reknown. This isn't not something to fault him for; this is typical End Of Career stuff, Lifetime Achievement Award stuff, and in this niche you don't get the Academy to just hand you your moment and an award on prime-time TV. You have to toot your own horn, remind everyone of what you did and how it made Current Year possible, and be shameless about saying "I did that!" Stuntmen, SFX guys, concept artists, novelists, etc.- everyone at that point wants the acclaim for the work they did over their career, which means they're looking to take their leave and this is the Swan Song.
Third, by talking up himself and Palladium now Kevin makes any potential sales offers lean harder in his favor. Yes, including any from those already working for him that offer to buy him out. That's just playing the business game. Can't hate the man for that; it's just smart business, and he's survived enough to learn a thing or two about business by now.
Therefore I'm expecting this to be an implicit announcement of his intention to retire, thus this is part of his farewell tour before he ties up loose ends and hands the business off to someone else (and deposits a fat check to use as his retirement fund). I'm assuming that he doesn't just shut the company down, or retain ownership and just become hands-off on operations, both of which could happen, but most Boomers like him are looking to cash out and that's why I say this is leading up to him selling the company and heading into the sunset.
In any event, this is the beginning of the end. May it be a good one.
