The Culture: Sacrificing The Industry To Save The Hobby

A hobby culture is, by its nature, a tinkering culture. A fantastic adventure gaming hobby does not confine creativity to drawing maps, painting figures, or assembling terrain pieces. It includes drawing upon whatever fantastic adventure media the hobbyists like and putting it to use at the campaign table. There is no need to ask permission to do this, and therefore there is no point in seeking the credential of "official" status.

You are reading this on the Internet. Degraded as it may be, you still have access to one of the largest repositories of history, mythology, literature, and popular culture known to Mankind. Use it.

I do not need an official Mazinger Z product to throw Dr. Hell into a campaign, or to tie the legions of cyborg giants to Nephilum mythology, or to decide that Clerics can use Protection From Evil to stop a Kadera from possessing the Magic-User's brand-new Iron Golem.

I do not need a licensed product to determine the gameplay statistics of Captain Marvel--the original Fawcett creation, not the one ruined by that bitch from the Hellmouth--or to tie it to the creation of the technomagical transformation devices behind the Super Soldier Special Forces Squad because they are both tied to the power of a god-like being.

I do not need to give Magic-Users By The Water (or whomever succeeds them) money just to get a star chart with pre-calculated travel times if I want to play a campaign in Uncle George's Space Fantasy setting; there's plenty of free wikis that tell me everything I need to do it myself, assuming that I even need to make those calculations at all.

So much of that stuff is free, is online, is not that hard to find- or is completely open to interpretation so you might as well make it up yourself and have more fun with this hobby while you have fun with your other hobbies. Need to figure out how to write up a Savage 110 Scout in .308 Winchester? Go to Savage's site and look at the specs yourself, write down what matters and insert game stats as required. Done.

Or you can see if someone else did it already. Sure, Google/Bing/StupidNameHere doesn't search like they used to about a decade ago, but you can still find stuff if you know how to work the queries and you can put up what you did yourself to share- and use social media to share it.

What you do not need to do, and what this hobby should actively shy away from doing, is engage in stupid Consume Product behavior. The rules you're using are enough to get going; from there you are free to--and are expected to--add new stuff as you go, and to share with other hobbyists. That's what having campaign blogs, session reports, Discord servers with public-facing channels, etc. is all about.

We don't need anything but our own ability to tinker, to invent, and to share- we sure as Hell don't need a fucking "industry" and we never have.