The Culture: The Core Of D&D Is The Conquest Of The Frontier

Jeffro's continuing his mission to completely unfuck the hobby in general, and AD&D1e in particular.

It is a property of the DMG that it always seems to contain some offbeat rules element which alters your conception of the game when you finally take a moment to seriously contemplate it. Now, most people don’t want to alter their conception of the game. And I guess that’s fine. But some people want to actually try playing AD&D before they die. This post is for that sort of person.

This is a continuation of his previous post going into Appendices B and C.

What this post gets into is how the very machine of play itself disproves Just So Story assumptions about the game and its setting.

They think it's stuff like this:

When it's really this:

"But really? The Gallic Wars? The Conquest of Gaul?"

Yes, really. Go read Jeffro's post. There's a lot of armed men, leveled men, running around those inhabited--pacified--areas maintaining that pacification and the order that such power project brings. Far more than one minor baron has at hand, which is why a strictly Medieval (and thus Feudal) conception is not accurate; it's going to blend with Ancient and Early Modern (i.e. Classical revivalist) forms, as befits the situation.

You may also take a look at the conquest and colonization of Mexico, Central America, and South America for more parallels that are closer fits than the American and Canadian experiences and for that "back and forth" element look no further than Russia's struggle with Mongolia during the latter's days as The Golden Horde. From the other end, the Chinese have also had serious issues with the same (when not going at each other).

This is not a party game played as a boardgame with an infinite board. This is a wargame with global, even cosmic, scope and scale for all the marbles. Mans come and go, but the regimes and institutions they build and wield live beyond them. If not for the Boomers and those like them lobotomizing the hobby to make it a commercially viable product, we'd now be talking about generation-long ambitions coming to fruition as massive campaigns reach major turning points.

What Jeffro is doing is the same as making a video showing a cutaway view of how a machine works and explaining it to the viewer. You may like or dislike what you see, but that doesn't change how the machine works. Either you conform to the machine or you change what machine you use; you do not fuck with something you don't like and (often) don't understand because it doesn't do what you want out of the box- you switch to a thing that does.

Some retard will cry about Muh Colonialism. Fuck that faggot. Fantasy Seattle is Over There in the corner crying about the election with the rest of the Theater Kids that Just Can't Even. The real gamers are hard at work learning, mastering, and conquering over at the Clubhouse.