The Culture: Our History Is Ours To Tell, Not Some Soup Aisle Sucker

Dunder Moose had on Dominic Martyne to talk about the history of the hobby and its misappropriation.

@thecriticaldom makes his This Is Dunder Moose debut to set the record straight on the History of Dungeons and Dragons. No disavowals, no disclaimers. No Unhuman pandering. No antagonism for the founders. I KNOW you are gonna wanna hear THIS!

I'm having @thecriticaldom on my show next week! Don't miss it. https://t.co/XJvp8SgOEv

— Dunder Moose (@DunderMoose) June 19, 2025

It is good that the Conventional Play Cargo Cultists are being actively gainsayed. Now we're seeing the record being corrected.

The first good sign: acknowledgement that Fantastic Adventure Gaming is a wargmaing medium.

The second good sign: there is an active effort to get that correction out there in dead tree forming coming soon. (Link here.)

The third good sign: acknowledgement that Jon Peterson is not the only party acting in less than good faith here; old-timers, greybeards, and more also have incentives to bend the record and massage the narrative to favor their ends over others.

The biggest problem is that too many parties are acting like Magic-Users that know they have spells that no one else does, so they gatekeep the hell out of their hoarded lore and receipts in order to preserve their ability to gain from that knowledge. This is untenable in the long term because, like it or not, only institutions can afford to do this for any longer than a single lifetime and this hobby isn't that- yet.

That's coming to an end, and it needs to. We have to be the ones that tell our history to those we bring up behind us- not bad actors, not outsiders. If you have the scratch to back this, do so when his campaign goes live.