The Business: Jon Del Arroz Showed WHY The Cargo Cult Is Cooked

Jon Del Arroz, writing at AI Central, wrote this on Monday this past week.

VIDEO: Testing Abacus AI Agentic AI To Make Your Own Apps by Vox Day

Read on Substack

Therein he posted a video of himself demonstrating his use of Agentic AI. He showed the vibe-coded agent that lets him do solo play of Official D&D.

Sit with that.

This is exactly what Wizards of the Coast is pivoting towards. All of the signs, for over a year now, point this way. As WOTC is Big Corpo, this takes time to execute and not just because they have Danger-Haired Dipshits on staff. The rest of the company's operations need to be brought inline, and then the Narrative massaged to make acceptance of these changes a fait accompli.

Jon showed--not told, SHOWED--how WOTC is going to kill the Cargo Cult.

The reason? Frictionless convenience. That agent is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. It never says "No". It can add additional AI-controlled party members, run sessions wherever on the map and (once mobile-deployed) wherever you get reception, run for as long as you want, all the time.

Cargo Cult Dexters have no leverage anymore. "Not at my table" gets you kicked to the curb; the bot is always there, doesn't cheat, doesn't fuck with the rules Because Reasons, and doesn't play favorites. As Cargo Cultists deal with attrition on the regular, recruiting replacements is required; agents like this kill that deader than disco because you will NOT convince the Casuals, Tourists, and Normies that WOTC targets to put up with friction of any kind once they are aware that agents like this exist.

The Cargo Cult model dies whimpering due to this.

Only the Clubhouse, rooted on Braunstein, can compete because it doesn't try to fight WOTC on its own terms.

The Business: Yes, You CAN Protect Your Creations Post-Mortem, But It's Pricy

Funster made an attempt.

If you want a summary: Creators have a responsibility to protect the integrity of their work

The problem is that Copyright Law is corpo-driven, specifically driven by the Devil Mouse, and so there is only one way to achieve this objective: to use the tools of the corpo world to build the structure necessary to compel post-mortem execution of this duty of care.

Funster, being typical of men in the hobby, has no idea what that means. Most working in the corpo world don't either, not even in WOTC or Hasbro's C-Suite. Their lawyers do.

The bare minimum is an Offshore Asset Protection Trust based in the Cook Islands, Nevis, or Belize. That Trust then holds a CI or Nevis LLC; this is the operational element at the core of the structure, to which all other elements append as subsidiaries. The premium version is a Private Interest Foundation in Panama or the European Equivalent in Lietchstein, which then has a LLC within it in CI or Nevis. The purpose here is to have rock-solid protection against 1st World civil suits. These are jurisdictions and legal structures that, when properly erected, tell judges to pound sand. Principles are expensive and make enemeies, enemies that use lawfare; this structure stops that cold.

You then want a US (or UK for British or European-based operations) LLC to be the Local Office that actually does the work under contract from the Trust as Work For Hire. The Trust exercises Brand Control over the property under rules that you--as creator--establish in your lifetime, rules that survive your death and become the private law of the Trust thereafter. The canon is closed and the rules carved in stone.

The Trust then owns and enforces Trademarks, registers and renews Copyrights as they can (and enforces them), and if Patents apply those too are filed and enforced. Cook Islanda, Panama, and Liechtenstein all have mature and long-standing reputations for integrity as Trustees- CI's in particular are Licensened and Bonded, so they have real money on the line to incentivize them against doing fuckery.

In short, we can do this. It's just not cheap, easy, or convenient to do so; this structure is $30-50K to set up and about 10% annually to maintain, so it's not worth it to bother unless you've got something that is commercially successful, has been for many years, and could for many more after you're gone. George Lucas should have done this. George Martin should do this. Most in Tabletop? Not even worth trying the Temu version that's entirely domestic (Wyoming LLC held by South Dakota Trust, easily bustable by a US judge if he can hold you or your trustee in Contempt).

That is assuming that you own it. In the case of anything done for TSR or WOTC, you don't; that's Work For Hire, so they own it and as it is their property they can enshitify it if they want to and all you can do about it that means anything is to not buy it and not give any traffic to it.

Is it worth it? I'm going to wear the black hat here: if you can't afford the structure, it's not. Macris can justify doing this. Siembieda can. The Pundit? LOLno, and that goes for most in Tabletop, and quite frankly we're better off because it is so.

The Business: Your Days Of Being A Cog In The Machine Are Over

You are wrong about AI and writing.

The technology now exists for the ambitious and the skilled to make one-man publishers of themselves. Videos (and channels) like this show you how by demonstrating the tools and their use.

This is a growing field. If you're still thinking about what Chat GPT could do six months ago, you are already out of date and wrong about everything. It is now possible for one man to draft, revise, edit, polish, and finish manuscripts at a speed which OldPub cannot match. That same man can do this multiple times per week, each one with a unique authorial voice, and yet each one will 100% hit the Revealed Preferences of the readers of that specific Product Category. He can do this while devising the covers himself, formatting the books himself, making the audiobooks himself, and even automating all of the PR work to his email list (usually via Substack) and uploading to the storefronts he uses in addition to his own author site(s).

He can, if he wants to, get to a point where he can drop a novel a week per pen-name because readers read in series and read in binges. If he wanted to space out releases he can do that too, usually by format (ebook, audio, paperback, hardcover and usually in that order).

This shift requires a different set of skills. Being a copymonkey is not enough anymore; you have to have business management skills, especially the full Public Relations suite (which includes Advertising and Marketing), which means your job is now Project Management- you're the Producer, the Publisher, and not just the grunt shitting out copy.

Jason vibe-coded Story Hacker. He's no programmer, and yet he delivered a valuable specialist tool that he offers to his members. Expect more of this going forward, especially if the pressure to cut the balls off the big models continues and thus forces the development of specialist LLMs that lack such neutering.

And if you think this doesn't apply to non-fiction work, you are already very wrong; Advertising is already wholly taken over by LLM-powered campaigns, which means Marketing already is, and as such it is already happening that other forms of non-fiction are now being done by LLM-powered production workflows overseen by human management.

Now all that needs to be done is to bring the costs down so that those with the time, but not the money, can fully exploit this potential.

Jon Del Arroz made it plain: you have to be public-facing to succeed now, which means you can't be a copymonkey- you have to be The Man In Command.

The Culture: Stealth Archer Rocket Tag Got Rejected By Players, Retard

DD did a Dumb.

Vitality/Wounds got rejected for a fucking reason, retard: it was more bothersome than the problem it claimed to solve.

Consider the normal way it works: Roll Damage, Track Hit Points. Crits don't matter unless and until they impose additional effects; recovery is equally standardized.

Now: Did I crit? No? Roll damage, Track VP. Yes? Track WP. Took WP? Complications on recovery.

What happens next? Anyone serious about being effective optimized for crits. This happened in previous WOTC Star Wars editions. It happened with Spycraft (and its deratives such as FantasyCraft), and it happens every single time this is implemented because PEOPLE FOLLOW INCENTIVES YOU FUCKING MORON!

What did you do with this? You introduced a means to bypass the ordinary damage capacity mechanic, which rewards those who are better able to achieve that bypass effect with superior combat performance, which incentivizes players to optimize for achieving most-consistent-bypass-performance and thus compels opposition to do the same lest all sense of challenge disappear.

Congratulations! You just made the game into Stealth Archer Rocket Tag. Everyone has to become a Stealth Monkey just to stay alive. Combat comes down to Who Can Detect Whom First; the losers get Alpha Struck with Overkill levels of Firepower and get the Swifty One-Shot Macro treatment. When players saw this in action 20ish years ago, they rejected it en masse which is why it disappeared from d20 Star Wars and Spycraft ended up losing hard to competing offerings.

No, it didn't make the game more fun. No, it didn't speed up gameplay. No, it wasn't fun to be on the wrong side of. No, it got boring to be on the shooting side of in short order too. It also lead to Narrative Faggotry when things went against the players, further degrading the integrity of the game and the hobby.

You should have been bitch-slapped for even thinking about this failed idea, DD. It failed for damned good reasons, such that even the obstensible source (HERO) is notorious for being janky and wonky in the execution of it- thus part of why HERO remains obscure to this day vs. The Only Game That Ever Fucking Mattered.

Oldfags, man. Not even once.

The Culture: Theft Of Credit Is Narrative Warfare

Jeffro noticed a thing:

Let’s talk about the game in which all of these games took place in. The one in real life. I was, ultimately in a kind of prisoner’s dilemma with a couple hundred people throughout this process. Lots of people opted for betrayal along the way. How did this manifest? A) Cutting videos to relay key revelations from my efforts without saying my name. B) Making a lifestyle about complaining about me and calling me a fool. Or calling everyone that has something nice to say about me a dummy. C) Publishing a book that plagiarizes my work. D) Going to people privately and telling them not to speak with me or associate with me. E) Attempting to get somebody to make a Kickstarter Boondoggle based on my efforts while crediting my ideas to an enemy of mine. F) Being ugly to me while I was attempting to run a game session with the purpose of trying something new that wasn’t fully understood yet. You can probably cut some of these people some slack. If you were charitable. I mean… at every stage, it was not obvious how significant and even historic this effort was going to be ultimately. And I can tell you that the vast majority of the people in the vicinity of this work could not even admit that there were problems with what we were experimenting with, much less accept that there might be solutions to any of them. Some of these people that opted for betrayal make a lot of noise. But the one thing they could never make was a lasting contribution to game design that can stand the test of time.

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

While I don't know all of the parties, I can suss out some of them. Respectively:

• Earthnote, Tenkar, Grifting Beast, and the rest of the YT Oldfag Crew and the newfags riding their coattails.
• Griff
• The fake Appendix N book and its authors: Ann VanderMeer (ex-Tor, so a Commie) and Peter Bebergal (another NYC Commie fag). Tor's kept a hand in on Tabletop for decades due to personnel having current or past experience therein, and thus maintained contacts with Fellow Travelers at Wizards of the Coast and its orbiters like Paizo, so when Vox Day (Tor's enemy) decided to publish Jeffro's book they had to respond with their own to attempt control of the Narrative.
• Also Griff
• Would not be surprised if this was also Griff
• Not a clue here

Freezing out Jeffro, and by extension the #BROSR, is Narrative Warfare. This attempt to retroactively take credit for all of Jeffro's work, all of the Bros' work, means that the Cargo Cult can steer the hobby back into the Cult Compound- the same thing that got done to George Lucas, by the way, as the Fanatics never forgave him for shattering their hold on the Narrative.

We're seeing the same reaction in Tabletop. Jeffro and the Bros broke the Narrative, such that enough hobbyists can see it and apply it, and that's too much for the Cargo Cult since Wizards of the Coast is giving them the shaft from the other direction at the same time by rendering their entire business model defunct.

Fuck these OldFags. Sideways. With a shovel covered in shit and burs.

The Business: Normies Prove They Want The Bots

The big reason anti-AI people hate it is because they suck and the robot does what people want better, faster, and cheaper.

The authors I know who actually make a living doing it (and don't beg for their sustainance or have a patron covering their bills; I mean "does this as their 9-5" and lives off the proceeds entirely) embraced AI.

They don't just prompt a LLM. They use multiple LLMs, they tooled up an entire automation chain using those LLMs, they added agents to those automation chains to do other things (cover generation, manuscript formatting, uploading to storefronts, etc.), and through this industrialization of the process they not only can establish and sustain a unique voice but can accelerate their pace of publishing from X/Year to X/Month- an entire 12 book series per year easily, and possible to do so per quarter, per pen name.

Revealed Preferences Are Revealed, folks. They want a very specific experience from every specific product label in media; they reward with time and money those that deliver exactly what they want on the nose 100% of the time. Robots can do this far better than all but the best human writers. The lower 80% are the losers here; the upper 20% are the ones that still have a career w/o patronage of any kind.

Every author is a factory now. Factories take time to tool up, but once that's done they can mass-produce identical widgets wicked-fast and deliver them to market faster. You ain't going to John Henry your way out of this, and you ain't going to strangle it with regulation either- not when the globe is available and China doesn't give a shit about your faggot rules. Adapt or die.

The Culture: Still Trying To Stop The Inevitable

Today in Oldfags Trying To Steal From The Bros.

He completely ignores player-directed development.

Braunstein does this better, and because the receipts are being shown repeatedly the influence spreads without pause. Oldfags have to get out in front or get rolled over, and so we have channels like this trying to steer things back on to the reservation.

Fuck this guy. Fuck all the Oldfags.

Braunstein or death.