The Culture: We're Getting Real Close To The Clubhouse Breaking Containment

The Professor tries to give good news.

Dump the storefront and focus on providing the secure Third Space. That's where the money is now.

He's so close to a proper Clubhouse. All he really need is to do the CostCo thing: charge membership fees (to price out low rents, culling 80% of his problems right there), and as a perk members can ship orders of gaming stuff to the Clubhouse for pickup. He doesn't need to stock a damned thing, and only needs to have some space set aside to hold packages, but I don't think he's ready for that leap just yet. He will once he runs the numbers.

This is where the money will be going forward. Less Endless Product Slop. More Secure Playspace Locations. Member-supported Third Spaces with curated and vetted membership rosters are where things have to go, so it is going to be the case that those willing to make it a premium will be able to charge a premium price for it.

The Culture: Death Cultists Have No Theory Of Mind

The Basic Expert reminds people that The Past Is A Foreign Country.

When The Pundit decrys Wizards of the Coast for turning The Only Game That Matters into Current Year Seattle In RenFaire Costumes, this lack of comprehesion of how the past worked is what he was talking about--and is talking about still--because it betrays that Death Cultists have no Theory Of Mind for anyone outside their cult- their own religion.

They cannot comprehend anything but themselves.

It's no surprise that TBE's getting stick about this in the Comments, proving this point for him. We call folks like this NPCs for a reason.

The Culture: Illustration Is This Easy Now

One other thing that you need to realize is that we now have a powerful tool for folks who have problems visualizing what they read.

This is the description of Deijah Thoris from A Princess of Mars:

The prisoner was a slender, girlish figure, not unlike the Earth women in form, but far more beautiful. Her face was oval and exquisitely beautiful, her features finely chiseled and exquisite. Her great lustrous eyes were of a deep, rich, liquid brown, shaded by long, curling lashes, and her coal-black hair, waving in a loose yet becoming coiffure, was confined by a jeweled diadem. Her skin was a light reddish copper, which glowed with the crimson flush of her cheeks and the ruby of her lips. She was entirely naked except for the highly wrought ornaments of gold and precious stones which she wore, and her figure was perfectly symmetrical.

Copy and past that into a Grok chat. You will get a photorealistic head-and-shoulder shot (because Grok auto-censors nudity in chat-generated images; Imagine will do topless, but not full body nude).

Let's say that you want to take the opportunity that Princess is now Public Domain to put out a Light Novel version with all-new illustrations.

First, how it can look (SFW version):

This is the prompt I used in Imagine (not the chat; you need to use the Grok site or mobile app for this):

1990s anime OVA style (Record of Lodoss War + early Berserk Golden Age + Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth). A slender, girlish figure, not unlike the Earth women in form, but far more beautiful. Her face was oval and exquisitely beautiful, her features finely chiseled and exquisite. Her great lustrous eyes were of a deep, rich, liquid brown, shaded by long, curling lashes, and her coal-black hair, waving in a loose yet becoming coiffure, was confined by a jeweled diadem. Her skin was a light reddish copper, which glowed with the crimson flush of her cheeks and the ruby of her lips. She was entirely naked except for the highly wrought ornaments of gold and precious stones which she wore, and her figure was perfectly symmetrical. Ethereal fantasy atmosphere, dramatic rim lighting, clean sharp line art, cel-shaded with soft airbrush. masterpiece 8k. --ar 9:16 --stylize 350 --v 6

Imagine generates a lot of variations; this one is the one I post in public-facing forums because it is Safe For Work. You can do the same with any description in a book.

Want a better idea of how Conan looks like in a story? Feed it into Grok. What Amon Hen looked like? Same. Is this foolproof? No; like any LLM, it can only work with what data it is trained upon, so very old, very rare, and very new work may escape its ability to generate a depiction.

Which means that as you learn how to use language to describe what you want the reader to see, you can create powerful illustrations; as you learn the language of art direction, that power multiplies. Talk in chat with the LLM you use--Grok does this very well--to learn how to do the more technical elements that I've shown above; this is the first widget that you can talk to and it will teach you how to use it in real time. You can do everything I'm doing; I've gone from flailing about like a rube to where I am now in a few weeks I turn out this sort of thing casually now, sometimes posting them to Twitter as shitposts.

That's why my Substack articles now have illustrations included almost all the time. This is why I am confident that BRODUM will look amazing; I've become familiar with the tool, and I develop towards mastery with each day. You can make counters for wargames, card art for CCGs, wraparound images for paperback/hardcover books or boxed sets, and more.

This is going to totally wreck what remains of the commercial viability of Tabletop gaming; when rolling your own is this easy, why pay someone else to do it?

The Business: The Future Is One-Man Bands

Tabletop Publishers are going to shit themselves.

In Cowork, you give Claude access to a folder on your computer. Claude can then read, edit, or create files in that folder.

Try it to create a spreadsheet from a pile of screenshots, or produce a first draft from scattered notes. pic.twitter.com/GEaMgDksUp

— Claude (@claudeai) January 12, 2026

Couple this with the tutorials that my pal Oliver Campbell does on Twitter for image generation in Grok.

Comics people that cry about a page a day will be outworked by someone that knows how to use AI to crank out entire issues PER DAY. https://t.co/1nPz5vvFTQ

— Bradford C. Walker (@MrBCWalker) January 13, 2026

I just threw this together quick to show (a) how fast this can be done, and (b) you can break the frame and add art style direction without any difficulty. This is scuffed (needs revision) but you see how easy it is to do this with Grok now. Illustrations are now doable entirely on your own if you can properly describe what you want to see.

This is why I am confident that I can deliver BRODUM as a solo project and still show-up a lot of established publishers all while spending nothing but time.

I'll look into Cowork; if that can further boost my output by reducing elimninating the time spent on bitchwork then I'll adopt it.

We are moving away from the value-add skillset being the gruntwork; we are moving towards the value-add being the Command Level skills, of project management and oversight- of being the Master managing and overseeing a team of appentices and assistants. The days of needing lots of human labor to design, publish, and promote Tabletop product (or any similar product; you better believe card games, board games, novels, comics, film/TV, and videogames will be similarly affected) is going to fade away over the next several years as this potential is recognized and realized- with the seismic shift in the economy and society that will come with that shift.

The Culture: On The Necessity For Fantastic Adventure Media

The other night Dunder Moose had a stream.

Of course there was something to promote.

Throw this on and watch some good ol' boys talk Fantastic Adventure.

The Business: Wizards Is Making The Move To Lock The Network Down

Pat got some serious inside info.

What Pat did not do is provide critical context.

Daggerheart selling out?

No, not that it didn't sell out. What is missing is this question's answer: "Out of a print run of how many?"

1000? That's NOTHING.

100 million? That's SOMETHING!

It's the former.

And then there's the REAL money: Exclusivity on Beyond.

As Pat said, Wizards of the Coast is locking the Network into the Walled Garden; Beyond has the critical mass of adoption already, and the Normie audience does not go out of their way for anything- if it is at all inconvient, they're out. This is why Daggerheart is not a threat; the masses are in the Walled Garden because Beyond is free, easy, and far more convenient than any other alternative. Remember: Diamond is dead, so Retail is now withering on the vine because guess who distributed most of the not-D&D stuff to Retail stores. Soon it'll be Amazon, Beyond, and DriveThru- and most people will only use the biggest option (Amazon and Beyond).

You can't win against the owner of such a supremely dominant Network Effect from the outside. You have to fight from within it.

Lots of people who still think otherwise are going to find this out the hard way. I warned you; you didn't listen, so now you're here. The collapse is going to go from ignorable to obvious over the next year or so, and crowdfunding will not be able to fill the gaps.

The Business: Reactions To Being Told The Tech Writing Sucks Are Disappointing

The Beast follows up his Goodman Games video.

Beast here talks about a lot of reactions that are boggling to anyone that gets the point of competent technical writing.

The sole justification of buying any supplementary Tabletop product is to be able to use it at the table, which means you need to be able to find the information you're looking for at a glance. They are not coffee table status-striver products to be displayed, maybe read; they are to be USED.

Yet too many comments betrays that this is what they actually do and thus the comments are Revealed Preferences in action. No, morons, supplements do not need evocative language. That's what you need for writing fiction, not a supplementary product for a tabletop adventure game. You also do not need persuasive language either; you are reading a user manual, not an argument for or against a position. You need cold, clean, concise commentary on how to use the widget at that moment- no more, no less.

TLDR:

from Imgflip Meme Generator

Disappointing. Learn to use the right tool for the job; games are a Technical Writing medium, novels are Narrative Writing, and articles are Persuasive Writing. You lot routinely mistake Form for Function and then wonder why you fuck up so often.