Narrative Warfare: Getting Out In Front Of A Popular Movement To Derail It

This thread by Cirsova Magazine, taken from Twitter, is about both the Old School Renaisance in tabletop RPGs and the Pulp Revolution in literature. Reproduced in its entirety and edited for clarity.

It's gone from "Everyone's read these, so there's no point in talking about them." to ignoring the Pulp Revolution that Jeffro's writing on Appendix N inspired, to co-opting Appendix N to undermine it. Peeps are sucking off Bebergal's book like it's super relevant. (Archive Link)

Bebergal's book is TradPub trying to co-opt Appendix N and turn interest in the works that inspired AD&D 1st Edition into controlled opposition.

'wUt iF gNoLLs wErE eNbIEs?'

Accept no substitutes.

@JohnsonJeffro's book is a work that launched countless other pulp publications. (Editor's Note: Including my own.)

(Jeffro Johnson's Appendix N can be found here.)

"These stories are really sexist, but it's okay because Berbegal gets Weird Tales skin-suit editor Ann Vandemeer to write an afterword about how sexist it is."

Appendix N is "an unfortunate reflection of the limited social horizons of Gygax’s target audience."

Bebergal's anthology is compiled and edited by and for people who hate you and Appendix N and revel in the trash that D&D has turned into.

It will be up for every award.

This is known as "Getting in front of the movement."

The play is to seize control of a possible threat to a shot-caller's control by inserting themselves into the group, usurping leadership and defanging it by either destroying it or by assimilating it into the shot-caller's machine. The Death Cult do this sort of thing as their overall Method of Operation. It is part-and-parcel of enacting Convergence of a targetted organization.

The idea, in this case, is that the OSR and the PulpRev threaten the Death Cult power in legacy media- specifically in tabletop RPGs and genre fiction. Jeffro's book was the catlyst for both to explode into their present period of creative innovation and commercial growth, such that Death Cult control of OldPub and the biggest TRPG publishers are now increasingly obvious as things being routed around and ignored- not strongholds to assault.

How do you deal with something you do not control? You seize control of it. If you can't find a single point of failure--leadership of a centralized group, for example--then the fallback step is to find the narrative driving the enemy and begin undermining it because a demoralized enemy is far easier to destroy than one that is not.

That's what this entire attack on Appendix N is: an attempt to undermine the narrative driving two separate, but related, threats to the Death Cult's power in nodes of the culture industry.

They wouldn't take this move if they didn't see it as a threat to them, and they wouldn't attack here if they didn't think it a weak point to hit.

It's a reliable tell that the Death Cult reveals what they fear by what they attack and how they attack it. For some reason, they fear Appendix N. The immediate counter is to spread the word, both of Jeffro's book and the old SF canon Gygax relied upon to make D&D the legendary game that it is.

It is worth further consideration.