Narrative Warfare: Full Copyleft! How The Hobbyist Seizes Control Of The Hobby (Step 3C: Flashpoints)

We're going to take a look at a few flashpoints across the Hobby scene and how the lessons apply. First the lessons.

A Consistent Enemy Pattern

The Enemy has a pattern. The Death Cult takes over Publishers because they see the Hobbyists as a social isolated population segment that are already in a psuedo-cult social environment via some degree of Cult of Officialdom. Stupid British Toy Company succeeded most in doing this, but Sorcerors By The Sea were not far behind due to having done this with Magic: The Gathering and transfering that corporate practice to Dungeons & Dragons when they took over from TSR (which also had a not-so-successful attempt at doing this).

This is why the tie-in media, and thus the lore, is a draw for the Enemy; they see storytelling as Propaganda, and Propaganda is justified solely for seizing and maintaing state power via Narrative Warfare, ergo any narrative that they do not control is an existential threat to them. The medium does not matter. The reason for the narrative's existence does not matter. What justifies the lore's existence does not matter. All that matters is that the Enemy controls ALL narratives in ALL media to guarantee that There Is No Alternative to their Narrative.

To accomplish this, the Publisher must exercise centralized control over the entire property in all media wherein it exists. However, the Hobbyists exist in a hobby where central control is always fragile at best and easily shattered back into its default decentralized state. Without that cult psychology, centralization is impossible to attain or sustain, and as this is now becoming obvious that centralization in tabletop is becoming an obvious delusion.

Sorcerors By The Sea admit this; that's why they are abandoning tabletop for videogames, where that centralization and Cult of Officialdom is trivial to attain and sustain.

Stupid British Toy Company, Catalyist, and several other Publishers are either unwilling or (far more likely) unable to follow that lead because they lack the capital, the connections, or both. This is where the Hobbyists smell blood in the water.

A Consistent Hobbyist Response

Decentralize, Decentralize, Decentralize!

Without any attempt to organize or coordinate a response, a proto-Stand Alone Complex manifests where manuals and other goods get pirated and passed around while necessary play aids are shamelessly copied and made available via storefronts like Etsy and Ebay, links to used phyiscal products get passed around in private messages and similar back channels, and hobbyists are learning to not trust Official Communications channels of any sort thanks to episodes like what happened to /r/battletech at Reddit.

The memetic warfare is evolving fast, akin to military airpower in World War I, and so far there's ineffective counters by Publishers to this; they have to deploy bots to gaslight observers into think that Publishers are the superior power and it doesn't work.

> Be regime propaganda guy
> We need to use video games to promote our values and combat extremism
> Pour billions of dollars into regime aligned game messaging
> Don't bother to make it appealing, just have bots tweet about it
> Nobody plays it
> Nobody's influenced by it pic.twitter.com/yAy5xBeMhB

— Mr Beige Shiba (@MrBeigeShiba) April 25, 2024

The deficit is tie-in media production. Here is where Hobbyists need to step up; we have plenty of proof of concepts for Hobbyist-made audiobook adaptations and original Hobbyist lore productions. Some folks are stepping up to the plate, but now the next step needs to be taken: not only original productions of extant lore, but wholly original ADDITIONS.

This tie-in deficit includes novels, comics, videogames, etc.- all of these, done by and for Hobbyists, need to increase in numbers and subjects yesterday.

That's the next step once the core hobby activity gets seized from the Publisher and secured into Hobbyist hands, as that's where the fight over legitimate claims to the Brand will be waged thereafter.

The Flashpoints

In no order, and with limited commentary:

• Dungeons & Dragons: The #BROSR is the vanguard here, overtaking the OSR by recovering the original decentralized Hobbyist model of organization that relegated Publishers to a necessary evil- one that is no longer necessary. As more people get turned off by the Publisher and Conventional Play, and as Conventional Play collapses without Sorcerers there to prop it up, the #BROSR with its revival of the Old Ways will be in position to teach those willing and able to listen how to play D&D without the need (or want) for a Publisher to dick them around like they're Sea Org mindslaves.
• Shadowrun: Catalyst is just as boned here and they are with BattleTech, starting with the fact that older editions remain easy to find and just as (or more) popular than what pozzed pablum they push. If it wasn't for Harebrained's videogames, hardly anyone outside the Hobby would know it exists. Again, easy victory to gain here.
• Cyberpunk: R. Talsorian can be pushed, but not far because Maximum Mike is a walking idol for the Death Cult (despite his own disdain for same, past and present) and R. Talsorian is a part-time operation these days (and has been since Mike took a job working on the XBox decades ago). Furthermore, while Red has its players, the 1990s edition (2020) remains far more popular and is a defacto Forever Edition. Again, this is already most of the way to a Hobbyist victory.
• Legend of the Five Rings: A 1990s darling of the Leonards who were the 5th Columnists that let the Death Cult into the scene, this property has been on the backburner for over a decade now despite best efforts by various Publishers. Mentioned because if there was an extant IP that could be skinsuited into a Death Cult front to use against the Japanese, this would be it due to it already being ameable to Death Cult dogma in several respects, but that requires resolving Cognitive Dissonance between punishing an Enemy (the Japanese gaming industry) and its own dogma (as this could easily be seen as racist, colonialist, or Cultural Appropriation by their own rules)- not that a serious op attempt would let that be an obstacle for long.
• Star Wars: Already defeated in the tabletop Hobbyist scene, as previous posts show (and the failure of previous Publisher attempts demonstrate). The fight here is in its home media and those adjacent to it, not in gaming (where, in addition to the d6 tabletop game, there are thriving mods for extant games)

TLDR: It's a lot more hopeful than it seems, gamer.

Tomorrow we'll go into Action Items to plug holes in the Hobbyist strats.