The Culture: The Rumbling From Below Comes For The Ossified Sadsack Revanchists

While the commercial end of the Tabletop Adventure Game hobby continues to wobble as precursor to collapse, the cultural end continues to rumble from below as the Memory Hole's indigestion issues escalate and forces yet more of what was shoved down its gullet back up and out.

There hasn’t been any mention of that in the historical docs I’ve seen or read about Blackmoor.

And dungeon crawling parties predate the LoTR. pic.twitter.com/ayOkm6L0zh

— Daddy Warpig (@DaddyWarpig) September 10, 2024

The result is that more and more Just So Stories are getting the Mythbuster treatment, and the truth (and thus facts) are spreading around in successive waves.

The consequence is that the Narrative regarding what this hobby and medium is and how it works is being undermined and destroyed by truth-seeking shitposters.

Which means that everything and everyone that relies on any part of that false mythology for their power, their prestige, or their revenue is under existential threat.

This leads, in turn, to hostility to the Bros by the Soup Aisle Sadsacks. Why? Because they rely on Conventional Play, which relies on that false mythology.

Rebrand all you want. Personnel is Policy, and you lot are defined by folks who can't stop reinventing low-level B/X to save their lives.

The other problem is that you want to make a living shilling product. You are going to fail and you cannot afford to fail because the power behind your perceptions are abandoning the medium. You're trying to feed yourselves on a shrinking pie when there's already established parties therein, and that means you are going to run into some viscious conflict that you're not ready to deal with and it will not be financially viable win or lose.

Your best shot is to go the route of Neopatronage, but at that point you're not in business; you're just living off the good will and discrectionary spending of others insteading of selling them something they need, no different from the folks who barely make a living doing art commissions.

You would be better off taking all of that effort and capital to do what Mike Cernovich did and form a private Club, preferably with a physical location, complete with structure and dues and bylaws. If some minor political actor (and that is what Cerno is) gets the importance of the Clubhouse, you Soup Aisle rejects and retards should be able to grok it- the control you think you have (but don't) can exist there, but you'd never be allowed into any club you didn't found and what you found would never prosper and you admit it by your behavior.

Crom has the Soup Aisle's number:

Within this feminine paradigm the only hierarchy allowable is a mythological veneration of the ‘mothers’ of the hobby — ie Gygax, Arneson, Wesely, et al. All are equal so long as they validate the ‘sisterhood of fellow gamers’.

— Crom (@DoomstoneCrom) September 10, 2024

(The rest of this fantastic thread is here.)

Because of this, it will be a disaster in waiting. Changing the brand doesn't change the people or the procedures. Same inputs, same outputs every single time. We can tell.

This is why the Bros are the force from below, while SOBS's Big Move is the force from above, and combined they will destroy Conventional Play on Tabletop. Something this fragile can't take it- and the Bros are coming to burn down the Longhouse.