The Business: You Have To Toot Your Own Horn

No one's going to promote your stuff for you.

Reminder: Yes, the culture at large may not promote art or books that you think should be promoted. In fact, ugliness and written garbage may be promoted. Individually, you cannot fix the culture. But you can support an artist or read a good book.

— Not John Daker (@NotJohnDaker) November 8, 2026

This is the thing that small press, indie authors, and game studios alike get wrong and have gotten wrong for decades. Dov James' recent video expresses it well.

This is why appealing to Larry Correia isn't the own some think it is. This is also why shitting on Matt Walsh isn't a winning move either.

For the ones already in a position to amplify, their calculus is simple: "Is this worth my time?"

For a lot of you, you are not worth their time to boost your reach. Their audience, whatever it is, will attempt to link you to whomever is boosting you and that link goes both ways. You have to be sufficiently appealing to their audience to make it worth their while; if you are not writing what Larry's readers like, it's not worth it for Larry to spend his time boosting you. Same with Walsh, Jack Posobiac, Oprah Winfrey, or anyone else.

Why do you think I've mentioned Novel Marketing and Author Update? That's an outlet all about the reality of your situation. You, and you alone, are responsible for the marketing of whatever book you write or game you design. OldPub won't do it for you. Small presses won't. Big names, unless you're in the sweet spot of adjacent-but-not-competition, won't. You're on your own.

You want another good use-case for Super Intelligence? Doing all the work you need to do but hate doing. You, very likely, hate marketing. Let the bots handle it; go to Novel Marketing, listen to those videos and about using bots for those ends, and implement what you learn- slowly, piece by pieve, that you know what you're doing as you do it. You will be better off managing bot agents than doing it yourself the hard way.

You like the writing process? Great. You hate marketing? Tell the bots to handle it. You get the idea, and you had better believe your competition has and is implementing them so they can solve this problem. Get on board or get left behind.

The Culture: You Can Just Not Use Minis, Wankers

I see a lot of whining about 40K and Games Workshop.

Have you considered playing a proper game and not a mini painting hobby with a loss leader attached?

You want GW to stop being shitters? Stop using miniatures.

I am not talking about recasting. I am not talking about using old minis or buying used. I am not talking about 3D printing. I am talking about ANYTHING OTHER THAN MINIS because if Car Wars doesn't need them than neither does any form of Warhammer.

Standees will do fine.

Another week, another delve into the Inferno Lattice. #Trollopulous https://t.co/j0oB6rhmZp

— Macho Mandalf, King of Machodor (@LL_929) November 6, 2026

So long as you care too much about Muh Minis, GW will continue to bend you over and violate your wallets. Make standees, base them, play- or admit that you're not a wargamer, but a modeller that specializes in a particular IP. Have some self-respect.

The Business: Steal This Format

On the subject of channels talking videogame history, specialized in the depiction of firearms, no one does it better than Ahoy.

As the title of this post says, the thing I want you to pay attention to is the format.

Ahoy's format is a strong visual aesthetic, especially with title cards (intro and outro), a just-long-enough run time per video and a deep male voice to lend a seeming of authority and expertise to the presentation. This is easily appropriated and replicated as Republic Armory (a Star Wars channel) shows. This is a faceless format; no one knows what Ahoy looks like and yet look at that man's success.

Take a look at Ahoy's channel. His videos vary in duration, some going an hour or more, but when I say "just long enough" I mean it. That's him focusing on the facts, while the video shown and the audio used do a lot of the work that otherwise gets used by dialog to transition from point to point in his essays. This is why Ahoy, despite making videos on a niche subject within a niche subject, is one of the best video essayist on any platform. He comprehends what this medium is and how it works to best effect.

Why am I telling you this>

Because, if you are an author or publisher, you have been handed one of the best formats around for marketing your works.

You don't need to show your face. Your prospective audience wants the thing, not your face. They also don't need to hear your voice. Find a suitable voice, or voices, and let those do the talking. All you need to do is to provide the material, probably the script, and you can gin up visuals easily now. Look at what Jon Del Arroz has done recently and you'll see where I'm going.

You don't need to see anyone's face. You need a voiceover, a script, and matching visuals. All of this is well within agentic capacity to handle now, and the cost is low enough that any serious independent operating should add this as a business expense at the first opportunity. Don't think so? Then consider that people doing faceless videos about existing Brand IP already do plenty in terms of traffic and thus ad revenue- revenue you can use to defray expenses, if not become a significant income stream in itself.

That last one being a Traveller channel is the proof of concept, and they don't even do voiceover or offer substantive information.

Like it or not, marketing is necessary business activity for any indie author or game designer. Ahoy's format makes it painless to do video marketing for your books or games, as it puts the attention where you want it--on what you're selling--and away from you. The tools are now available for you to do this yourself cheaply, and then upload videos to the sites that matters--YouTube, Tiktok, Instragram (the latter two being vertical short-form clips, which you can derive from the long-form YT videos)--and redirect them to your site.

Oh, and there's been a good video dropped about that too. Aimed at authors, applicable to gamedevs, here's Novel Marketing's latest critiques of authors pages.

Oh, and while you're there, watch this one and learn why Palladium is justified in never deviating far from its core aesthetic.

The Business: Sword World Is Still Raising Money

If you have money to burn, the official Sword World campaign is still out there with hat in hand.

I say "money to burn" because good luck getting print products from this without having the luxury of either not having bills to pay or having excess cash well beyond what you would keep on hand for expenses and emergencies alike.

Choose as you wish; this is funded, so it's now into Stretch Goals. If this is not to your liking, then hunt for the unofficial translation in PDF. It's still out there, for now.

The Business: The Play Is The Pivot From Product To Platform

The shills did their thing.

Timed to coincide with the launch of Forever this past Wednesday, as any half-competent corporate alliance would do.

Will this work? You better believe it, so long as you're concerned with corporate priorities such as revenue and user retention metrics. Will this get crossover action? Some, as it did when this was done 20ish years ago. What I want to mention is that I am already seeing issues that should have been avoided because it happened last time.

The question needs to be answered: "What do I do with this?"

The answer is going to be "Throw it in the pot." We'll see the same with Star Wars. Current Edition is not a distinct environment. It is a platform. Azeroth is just another option for Places To Go and another source for Things To Be and Stuff To Get. No different from the Realms, Greyhawk, Krynn, Athas, and anything else aligned with that edition.

The entire point of pivoting from Product to Platform is to achieve the same aim that Dancey stated openly with the d20 System, but with the technical infrastructure enforcing the aims in a manner that social pressure alone cannot achieve. D&D as a Platform does not need to answer why you would adventure on Azeroth anymore that it does on Coruscant because it is not there to ask that question. It is there to make it acceptable in the minds of Normies to do any such thing at all.

Recall that "D&D" is, in the minds of Normies, a generic term for the hobby. It is in the same place as "Xerox" and "Kleenex", and like those latter two brands Wizards of the Coast simultaneously wants to wield the power of that degree of identification while maintaining the legal priveledge of a distinct trademark. Pursuing a Platform pivot, what I have also called "The Fortnite Strategy", does exactly that.

The technical side, being that this is incorporated into Beyond, means that it is enforcable on WOTC's part. Moreso as the Super Intelligence elements go from pipedream to practical, allowing for bot Referees and Players to fill out tables, and the mobile app development severs the need to work off a PC or laptop; play anywhere, at any time, for as long as you like without needing to Schedule Your Fun or play Mother May I with some Dexter.

By going over to a platform business model, erected on a technical infrastructure permitting (even encouraging) solo play, C-Suite intends to replicate Epic's successes. There is good reason to be confident of success if they can get the bot Referee working, and nothing the new leadership in C-Suite indicates that this is not on the table- not when the bot-loving Hasbro CEO is backing the new WOTC CEO.

These shills are not merely pushing a new Current Edition product. They are pushing a business model pivot, wittingly or not. Expect more of this over the next few years, and expect all official communications to begin pushing the shameless remixing of things from every single Current Edition publication (at least WOTC or those it officially allies with, like this WOW product). The business logic for segregation of content within a platform has long been shown to be a loser, from a commercial perspective and especially a corporate one, so that will be the case here. Mark my words; they will start saying so slyly sooner than later, and you can start watching for it after the Star Wars product arrives.

The Business: Super Intelligence Continues To Improve So Use It Or Get Ditched

This is still janky, but it keeps getting better. When Chris started his videos were short; now look at that length- as long as network TV (without commercials) or longer while maintaining coherence over time. Still imperfect, but this is edging out of Proof of Concept and towards Viable Replacement.

Right now, what is viable to replace are dialog-heavy narratives with a handful of characters. That's classical Greek drama and a hell of a lot of Shakespeare (and his fellows on the Continent), in addition to drama elsewhere.

What it is not yet good at is action movie stuff, not really.

There's more like it out there.

You are this close to doing your own BattleTech videos (or whatever you're into) now using this tech- and others are already trying with other IPs, including their own. Learn the tools, learn the workflows, and you too can do amazing things.

The Culture: I Did Not Stutter

You think I joke about nuking the commercial side. Nope.

I have no confidence in even the longest-running Tabletop “designers” (in quotes due to self-confessed incompetence) and publishers anymore. They are one big Cargo Cult; they can’t even parse their own market research (if they do that competently, and they confess that they don’t), can’t figure out Revealed Preferences, and many even after being TOLD TO THEIR FACES can not comprehend Network Effects. The commercial side of the hobby is unfit for purpose, and increasingly is surplus to requirements. I no longer wish to just let it die. I want to ensure it is destroyed. Such rampant retardry disgusts me, and that’s before all of the Theater Kid faggotry and estrogenic Longhousing.

- Bradford C. Walker

Read on Substack

Blame Mearls.

He severed the last thread I had holding me back from wanting to see this actively done instead of passively accepting it as inevitable.

This Cargo Cult needs to be PURGED.