My Life In Fandom: "The Penultimate Men" On The Gab Today

The Gab had the authors of The Penultimate Men today on the show. (Also at Amazon, by the way.)

The authors--Neal Durando, Schuyler Hernstrom, Jeffro Johnson, Jon Mollison--come on the show today to talk about their book and what it's about. The Description doesn't do it justice: "The age from which they spring has nearly drawn to a close. Yet some noble work remains to be done before the end. They come on, knowing that anything left undone, any chance let slide cannot be paid forward. Their game bags are heavy with a wealth meant to nourish the reader through the leanest of times. Four tales of a once-and-future apocalypse. Two meditations to challenge you to play harder in an already hard world. Introduced by Misha Burnett. Some say they are other than human; they are the penultimate men."

Most fantasy today is degenerate, being that it is a derivation of people playing Dungeons & Dragons wrong, and they'd been getting it wrong for about as long as I've lived due to not being in touch with either the literary or the ludological foundations of the game and arrogantly omitting or replacing what they did not comprehend. It's no surprise therefore to find that real D&D is very much a skirmish-scale wargame that leans heavily on liminality to reduce the workload to something appropriate for a hobby, or that every popular expression of fantasy world-wide is itself a memetic child of playing the game wrong.

"Going back" is increasingly the rational response to our current insanity. This includes in things seemingly trivial like tabletop RPGs, which have exerted such an outsized global influence on popular culture for the whole of my lifetime, because by returning back the way you came you can find the value in the things so foolishly discarded and thus fix the errors made. Over time this too cascades out as more people see that and make the connections, but by then you're looking at 50-100 years and that has its own problems.

But that is what needs to happen. It needs to happen in literature, in gaming, etc. because we've screwed up and only by backing up can we unfuck ourselves. Once repaired and restored, we can--hopefully--resume our previous positive path. I'll talk about this some when I appear on Geek Gab to talk about "Hound of Nimrod" next week, and I hope you'll tune in then, by which I hope the campaign will have hit its goal.

By the way, there are two new Perks: Character Illustrations and Design The Back Cover. You'll find them on the Perk section at the campaign page. Remember that there are no Stretch Goals until we hit the goal.