The Culture: "Greyhawk", Not "Dungeons & Dragons"

One Product, Many Games

One other former practice primed for revival is the return of identifying a given hobby table by its location- not the product name.

"I run Trollopolous", not "I run Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition, in other words.

As most people weren't around at the time, and far too many of you aren't paying attention to the #BROSR (which has revived this practice), let me summarize: each table has its own particular culture that influences what is done and how it is played DESPITE BEING RUN EXACTLY BY THE RULES.

You will get the exact same effect if there were a bunch of Boot Hill tables, all named after their location, with players and characters moving between them (as they are in the #BROSR games). "Bob runs Pig's Eye, Dick runs Eagle Point, and Harry runs Golden Valley" you might hear at the clubhouse.

The same applies to Gamma World, Classic Traveller, ACKS, and a few other products that are actual full and feature-complete games (instead of half-assed bullshit like 90% of the cottage industry's catalogs).

There's a reason for this being primed to return: most products are going to wither away and die, taking their user networks with them, and only those that are full and complete games will remain. Therefore there will be little in the way of confusion within a decade or so after Magic-Users By The Water pulls the rug out, rounds up the Tourists and the Cultists, and fucks off for vidya.

The Clubhouse Hates The Module

A tabletop adventure hobby scene that refocuses around clubs and clubhouses will mean that club campaigns will also return, the precursor environment for location-based game identification over product-based.

The reliance on complete products, each with user-content-generation features as AD&D1e and other games prefered by the Bros do, means that the Cargo Cult insistence upon modules will also get the chop as they are surplus to requirements, unfit for purpose, and only came about because of performative play in public (i.e. conventions).

As conventions are now irrelevant, so is everything tied to them, which means that modules are on the block now also.

A clubhouse campaign, with multiple games running at separate tables, replaces all need for (and liminal space for) modules because those user-content-generation tools get used and thus fill the void that modules otherwise would.

Tying all the games together into a single campaign is what prevents each from mutating into a non-game or incompatible variant game; everyone plays the same game, so everyone needs their own copies of the rules, and as any player can start up their own game under the same campaign rules conformity between them becomes not only necessary but desirable.

The Bros are already proving this in action, and have been for a few years now. Trollopolous, Red Frontier, BROvenloft, etc. are all under one ruleset; Dubzaron is the outlier, being under ACKS and not AD&D1e.

The future is the past, and this time the promise of that past will not go unfulfilled.