The Culture: Mearls Reveals That He Doesn't Get It

Not hyperbole. He doesn't get it. He is a Cargo Cultist.

This entire series of videos is disqualifying of him as any sort of game design expert.

He is doing exactly what Blizzard says World of Warcraft players do: correctly identify issues, and completely fuck up the reasons for why (and thus solutions for them).

Mearls isn't entirely out of the loop. He knows that the OSR exists, and thus that the #BROSR exists because he'll hear back about Braunstein being rediscovered and applied- successfully, over time, repeatedly and reliably.

This means that he is aware that there are people who actually play the game properly, and can explain what that game is with citations and how it works, but this slides off the brain that's as smooth as his bald head because he cannot connect the two to comprehend how solving what he complains about means actually playing the game as it is- not as he thinks it is.

He admits that Combat is where the focus lies. That's because Combat, in every shit-tier D&D edition, is the only actual game in the book. Everything else is Mother May I? levels of Calvinball run by people that hate you who use words as weapons to prey upon you; that is not a game- that is a humiliation ritual.

Yes, that is correctly identifying the issue.

He then fails to identify the source of the problem and thus cannot provide any viable solution to solve the issue. His comprehension of what this hobby and medium is, and how it works, is absolute retardery unworthy of being tolerated out of the mouth of a child. The root of the problem IS THAT YOU THREW OUT THE REST OF THE GAME! Put that back, run it exactly as the user manual tells you to do, and (as the #BROSR found out first hand) all those problems GO THE FUCK AWAY!

Put the rest of the game back. Simple as. The Bros proved it. D&D is a Braunstein.

The Culture: Grifting Beast Can't Admit It

The Grifting Beast cut this video this week.

The answer is, as anyone with a clue knows, NETWORK EFFECTS!

But this video does have value: he explains why the Cargo Cult persists.

This is indepdendent confirmation of what I have previously posted.

“Direct conflict” as opposed to “cross-purposes” conflict actually (usually) produces less drama because of its directness. If we’re playing chess, we both know going into it that someone will lose (or claw out a draw) and someone will win. We accepted that as part of the game. But games with slightly more subtle conflict don’t have that psychological acceptance built in to the decision to play the game. A kid might know that there’s only going to be one winner in Monopoly, but what he won’t have realized is that means that he’s going to be (potentially) screwed over by 3 other players at the same time. This is both a much more sportsmanship-taxing ask, and also not an explicit ask. That’s the core of the problem.

- Tenari

Read on Substack

I will again bold this for emphasis:

"Normal People are poor sports.

But Normal People want to have a relaxing evening with a mildly enjoyable diversion. So whenever they play a game with “fun” conflict it creates real drama and they either stop playing that game, or house-rule it to avoid conflict (which breaks the game)".

The Normies ARE THE PROBLEM! They need to go, one way or the other; if that bastion of gaming integrity known as Blizzard Entertainment (you know, the folks behind World of Warcraft) can shrug off the Normies and thrive after sloughing off that dead weight, Wizards of the Coast can too.

Grify Boi can't admit it because that directly fucks with his income.

The Oldfags can't admit it for the same reason. Same for the PDF Merchants and other Cargo Cult enablers and exploiters.

Normies need to be shunted off to the products that are purpose-built for their satsifaction--piss-easy boardgames, piss-easy videogames, etc.--and cater to their Revealed Preferences, something that is antithetical to the medium and hobby of Tabletop Fantastic Adventure Games.

This is why the Clubhouse, as well as D&D, is inevitable. The latter draws in all the worst, and the former exists to sift out the wheat from the chaff so those who belong here can engage and enjoy to their full potential in peace.

The rest can use products that cater to them, and not waste our time with their retardery.

The Culture: How Small Can A Space Adventure Setting Be?

There is one thing I adore Mobile Suit Gundam for, and that's for having a big Space Opera that is entirely confined to the Lunar Sphere.

Yes, by the time of Zeta there was talk of Jupiter and Mars and so on, but until you got to F91 and Victory the action was entirely within the Earth-Moon LaGrange system- and, primarily, between Earth and the Moon.

See that? There's your SWEEPING SPACE OPERA ADVENTURE SETTING. Massive fleets. Planetary invasions. Nobles and politicians and corporations all fucking each other and the common people over. That's not BattleTech- that's Gundam. This is most explicit when you read/watch Origin and Unicorn.

And yes, aside from Mekton Zeta and Jovian Chronicles, there is one other game that can handle this just fine.

You scoff. It can be done as-is, but someone bothered to work out the math to allow for stompy bois.

Try it for yourself using the free version.

The Business: You Have To Toot Your Own Horn

No one's going to promote your stuff for you.

Reminder: Yes, the culture at large may not promote art or books that you think should be promoted. In fact, ugliness and written garbage may be promoted. Individually, you cannot fix the culture. But you can support an artist or read a good book.

— Not John Daker (@NotJohnDaker) November 8, 2026

This is the thing that small press, indie authors, and game studios alike get wrong and have gotten wrong for decades. Dov James' recent video expresses it well.

This is why appealing to Larry Correia isn't the own some think it is. This is also why shitting on Matt Walsh isn't a winning move either.

For the ones already in a position to amplify, their calculus is simple: "Is this worth my time?"

For a lot of you, you are not worth their time to boost your reach. Their audience, whatever it is, will attempt to link you to whomever is boosting you and that link goes both ways. You have to be sufficiently appealing to their audience to make it worth their while; if you are not writing what Larry's readers like, it's not worth it for Larry to spend his time boosting you. Same with Walsh, Jack Posobiac, Oprah Winfrey, or anyone else.

Why do you think I've mentioned Novel Marketing and Author Update? That's an outlet all about the reality of your situation. You, and you alone, are responsible for the marketing of whatever book you write or game you design. OldPub won't do it for you. Small presses won't. Big names, unless you're in the sweet spot of adjacent-but-not-competition, won't. You're on your own.

You want another good use-case for Super Intelligence? Doing all the work you need to do but hate doing. You, very likely, hate marketing. Let the bots handle it; go to Novel Marketing, listen to those videos and about using bots for those ends, and implement what you learn- slowly, piece by pieve, that you know what you're doing as you do it. You will be better off managing bot agents than doing it yourself the hard way.

You like the writing process? Great. You hate marketing? Tell the bots to handle it. You get the idea, and you had better believe your competition has and is implementing them so they can solve this problem. Get on board or get left behind.

The Culture: You Can Just Not Use Minis, Wankers

I see a lot of whining about 40K and Games Workshop.

Have you considered playing a proper game and not a mini painting hobby with a loss leader attached?

You want GW to stop being shitters? Stop using miniatures.

I am not talking about recasting. I am not talking about using old minis or buying used. I am not talking about 3D printing. I am talking about ANYTHING OTHER THAN MINIS because if Car Wars doesn't need them than neither does any form of Warhammer.

Standees will do fine.

Another week, another delve into the Inferno Lattice. #Trollopulous https://t.co/j0oB6rhmZp

— Macho Mandalf, King of Machodor (@LL_929) November 6, 2026

So long as you care too much about Muh Minis, GW will continue to bend you over and violate your wallets. Make standees, base them, play- or admit that you're not a wargamer, but a modeller that specializes in a particular IP. Have some self-respect.

The Business: Steal This Format

On the subject of channels talking videogame history, specialized in the depiction of firearms, no one does it better than Ahoy.

As the title of this post says, the thing I want you to pay attention to is the format.

Ahoy's format is a strong visual aesthetic, especially with title cards (intro and outro), a just-long-enough run time per video and a deep male voice to lend a seeming of authority and expertise to the presentation. This is easily appropriated and replicated as Republic Armory (a Star Wars channel) shows. This is a faceless format; no one knows what Ahoy looks like and yet look at that man's success.

Take a look at Ahoy's channel. His videos vary in duration, some going an hour or more, but when I say "just long enough" I mean it. That's him focusing on the facts, while the video shown and the audio used do a lot of the work that otherwise gets used by dialog to transition from point to point in his essays. This is why Ahoy, despite making videos on a niche subject within a niche subject, is one of the best video essayist on any platform. He comprehends what this medium is and how it works to best effect.

Why am I telling you this>

Because, if you are an author or publisher, you have been handed one of the best formats around for marketing your works.

You don't need to show your face. Your prospective audience wants the thing, not your face. They also don't need to hear your voice. Find a suitable voice, or voices, and let those do the talking. All you need to do is to provide the material, probably the script, and you can gin up visuals easily now. Look at what Jon Del Arroz has done recently and you'll see where I'm going.

You don't need to see anyone's face. You need a voiceover, a script, and matching visuals. All of this is well within agentic capacity to handle now, and the cost is low enough that any serious independent operating should add this as a business expense at the first opportunity. Don't think so? Then consider that people doing faceless videos about existing Brand IP already do plenty in terms of traffic and thus ad revenue- revenue you can use to defray expenses, if not become a significant income stream in itself.

That last one being a Traveller channel is the proof of concept, and they don't even do voiceover or offer substantive information.

Like it or not, marketing is necessary business activity for any indie author or game designer. Ahoy's format makes it painless to do video marketing for your books or games, as it puts the attention where you want it--on what you're selling--and away from you. The tools are now available for you to do this yourself cheaply, and then upload videos to the sites that matters--YouTube, Tiktok, Instragram (the latter two being vertical short-form clips, which you can derive from the long-form YT videos)--and redirect them to your site.

Oh, and there's been a good video dropped about that too. Aimed at authors, applicable to gamedevs, here's Novel Marketing's latest critiques of authors pages.

Oh, and while you're there, watch this one and learn why Palladium is justified in never deviating far from its core aesthetic.

The Business: Sword World Is Still Raising Money

If you have money to burn, the official Sword World campaign is still out there with hat in hand.

I say "money to burn" because good luck getting print products from this without having the luxury of either not having bills to pay or having excess cash well beyond what you would keep on hand for expenses and emergencies alike.

Choose as you wish; this is funded, so it's now into Stretch Goals. If this is not to your liking, then hunt for the unofficial translation in PDF. It's still out there, for now.