Narrative Warfare: Full Copyleft! How The Hobbyist Seizes Control Of The Hobby (Introduction)

What We Face

Politically motivated religious zealots, grunt-level adherants of the Death Cult, have spent most of the last few decades worming their way into various businesses that deal in entertainment media.

The Death Cult's smarter cohorts, using the language of Communism to disguise what they're doing, see all media as a vector for their control over the Narrative and thus the culture of a people.

They do this using instititutional power, justified by their religious dogma. They believe, with justification, that if they attain a monopoly on what is thought (via control over what is said) then they can control reality itself. (Don't ask them to jump off a building and fly unassisted, or let you run them over with a tank.)

They do not care about profits, or market forces, or anything that ordinarily would be a corrective and mitigative power upon their actions. They use their Patronage Network as a parallel shadow government, rewarding friends and punishing enemies, and through this network they exercise the institutional power that they usurp from the enemy nations they target.

The specifics of this are explained in three books: SJWs Always Lie,SJWs Always Double-Down, and Corporate Cancer. The latter is the most important for dealing with it if you are on the inside of a targeted institution or organization.

As this is a fanatical Death Cult, a group of religious zealots, appealing to self-interest or using market-based solutions DOES NOT WORK. As the case with Disney and its subsidiaries show, even when a Converged organization is in a death spiral leading to inevitable destruction with no survivors they will not relent.

They do not believe in the rules you think are normal and treat as if they were Natural Law. They work solely off Friend/Enemy Distinction; everything else is just a tool to use to get their way.

If you want to win, you must abandon all of the rules and tools that they used against you.

The Fictions You Must Shed To Win

Tabletop gaming, as a business and as a social scene, relies entirely upon the Network Effect to achieve its results.

However, there is a difference between the social scene where the hobbyists are and the business side where the problems are coming from.

The Death Cult is using a set of tools originally intended for a moral people, which we known collectively as "Intellectual Property", to execute its cultural hijacking ops upon the hobby scene and attempt to bring it into compliance like a fake, gay, and retarded LARP version of the Necromongers as done by people whose elders thought that Count Dante was a legit Dim Mak master.

They rely on you, fellow hobbyist, abiding by the same rules that they ignore, break, defect from, etc. every single chance that they get if it means punishing you.

If you insist on abiding by rules that your enemies do not, YOU WILL LOSE AND YOU DESERVE TO LOSE EVERY SINGLE TIME!

Seriously, gamer, learn what the real rules of this game are.

The objective is to seize control of the hobby, hold it, and safeguard it for posterity thereafter. To that end the business end must be destroyed. To achieve this end, Muh Intellectual Property--the rules that they weaponize against us, but violate without care--are to be recognized as no longer fit for purpose and thus surplus to requirements.

This is the justification:

The Publisher exists in a Compact with the Hobbyists.

The Publisher is allowed to conduct business operations on behalf of the Hobby and the Hobbyists, for which he shall be granted an honorable living performing the honorable labor of stewardship and caretaking of the core assets of the Hobby.

The Hobbyist is the Principal. The Publisher is the Agent. Agents that turn on their Principals are no longer owned any loyalty or support, but instead are to be destroyed with all due haste.

This is a textbook Principal-Agent Problem. Converged Publishers are Traitorous Agents. Therefore taking all of the assets under their stewardship, up to and including the Brands, and distributing them freely (both as in Speech and as in Beer) among the Hobbyists in perpetuity, is entirely justified and warranted.

The Objective

This is not the route of the Formal Fork Strategy. That cedes ground to the enemy. That's the route for losers and Cuckservatives.

We are going with the Informal Fork, and we're going Full Fabian Strategy. The Converged cannot be saved; the merciful route is to accelerate their demise. To cut off their revenues, their attention flows, and their claims to legitmacy and redistribute it back to the Hobby Scene is the objective. Thanks to the technology now extant, not only is this possible (as there's already mass-scaling versions done as Foreign Intelligence operations of Unrestricted Warfare by rival Imperial powers), but it is available now to ordinary people and it can be a fun side hobby to itself.

Go ahead, compete with Free stuff done by people as skilled (or moreso, given that Planned Obsolesce won't be a thing; no need to nickel-and-dime here) as Muh Professionals, easily and readily available without the garbage that the Converged (and those nearly so, but otherwise in thrall to Mammon) do on the regular.

But Why?

Again, Network Effects. This is about who controls the Network. That Network is tied to a Brand. The Hobbyist objective is to dissociate the Brand from a specific Product by the Publisher, and restore its association with the Hobby Activity in general.

This can be done. The BattleTech example is a Proof Of Concept that, despite Razorfist's doubts, can be repeated elsewhere; Catalyst already whines that there is so much extant material (including rules manuals) that it's impossible for the Cultists in Catalyst to achieve control of the Brand.

You can see where I intend to go just by reviewing this example, and no I have not forgotten about the tie-in media. That too can be contended with and beaten.

One need only remember that "D&D" is synonymose with "RPG" in most peoples' minds to recognize this fact and thus the possibility.

Yes, I am aiming to turn this into the equivalent of going into a diner in the American South, saying "I want a Coke" and then being asked to specify which one because "Coke" is synonymous with "soft drink".

That's the objective and it is an achievable one.

Tomorrow we start talking about how to win.