The Culture: And As If On Cue, Cargo Cultists Confirm Their Cultism

We have a one-two punch of Conventional Play Cargo Cultists exhibiting everything I talked about yesterday.

Every single product mentioned in these two videos conforms to the business model that the Cargo Cult's publishers, following the commercial incentives inspired by Mammon, made into a Standard Practice: a incomplete "core manual" that is deliberately published as Crippleware in order to make room for Endless Trash of Supplementary Product that "patches" the "holes".

In the case of Dark Heresy they go one step further and do the Palladium thing where products for another product line are defacto supplements for that product line and thus are implied to be de rigeur therein also.

What do you need out of 40K that you can't do with Classic Traveller, Gamma World, or AD&D1e? What do you need out of any other Pink Slime fantasy game that AD&D1e doesn't do just as well if not (and usually does do) better?

A lot of products on the shelves--in the store and in your homes--is Useless Filler Bullshit.

Furthermore, due to this hobby being wholly and utterly reliant on Network Effects, your odds of actually USING that products are slim to none because most people won't give anything that is not The Game That Matters the time of day.

Don't think so? The business-savvy folks do, which is why "Reskin Current Edition and add some House Rules" is the go-to answer for these corpos and strivers when it comes to answering the question of "What RPG do we use for our Brand?"

You can, and you should, strip your library down to D&D and the D&D-like game in other market niches (Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, Gamma World, etc.).

That is, if you're talking things you use and not just keep for sentimental value. (You can pry my copy of Lancer's Rockers from my cold, dead hands.)

Learn and master the real games, those few that actually exist, and you will soon find that most of what is on those shelves is Useless Filler Bullshit meant to satisfy CONSUME PRODUCT and not to fulfill a need that actually exists.