The Business: Grifting Beast Is Shilling Beast

Speaking of grifters.

This is naked shilling. It might as well be a paid ad.

The Real Game organically generates all the playable content you will ever need.

This is why you don't need modules; the Real Game has everything you need to generate everything required to play the game indefinitely. Stop wasting money on shit you don't need and does not help.

Yes, this means that this hobby is not commercially viable if you're of the mind to think that this is a Consume Product sort of thing; that's Striver Bullshit, and we ain't got time for that here.

It is viable if you think Buy Once, Cry Once, Use Forever is how things work. Alas, that's not how too many in this hobby think. Good thing they're a dying breed.

The Culture: Some Snakes Are Smarter Than Others

I told you the grifters had to get out in front of the Bros, and here we are.

First lie hits not a minute into it: "D&D is not one game."

Yes it is you lying motherfucker. You read the manual, you do what the manual says, you get what the rules prescribe. Lather, rinse, repeat. Everyone playing it properly plays the same game. This is up there with "Free Parking" in Monopoly being done wrong in its pervasive presence despite being obviously incorrect as in "READ THE FUCKING MANUAL YOU MORON!".

He gets it wrong be he's played the game wrong for Muh 40 Years. They are the same thing: Fantastic Adventure Wargaming. "Epic" doesn't exist anymore than "Grimdark" does; both are fake genres. The structure of play is always the same; same inputs means same outputs.

I'm going to have to explain how this actually works. Fine, here's the Quick & Easy Launch Process.

1. Get your AD&D1e core rulebooks.
2. Get one sheet of graph paper.
3. Get one sheet of hex paper.
4. Get one notepad or notebook.
5. Open the DMG. Go to Appendix A. Roll 1d10/2. See those five starting room allotments? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Roll, then write the winner down on the sheet of graph paper in the middle of the page. Stop. That's your starter dungeon.
6. Go to Appendix C. Roll 1d8 and look at the chart where you determine what terrain type an outdoor hex is; look across the top, as normal. Then roll 1d4 to determine which corner that generated hex is in.
7. Using the Settlement subchart for that chart, determine the starting settlement size and who is in charge. The dungeon will be nearby.
8. Tell folks you're running a starter dungeon delve, and which Method to use to roll up a man. Set a date and a time; use Appendix A exactly as it's written and you'll do fine as I've shown for over a year. Done. Never do any work unless and until play forces it.

No negotiations. No Session Zero bullshit. Your mans are about broke and dungeons are where they can get paid. No one--including the Referee--has a fucking clue about what's going on beyond that initial 24-30 mile hex and until someone goes beyond it that wider world doesn't exist The rules work as intended when you use them as directed to create the promised play experience. Stop fucking with it.

This is where he bullshits hardest; you don't need to do anything more than this to start with, and you should never do anything more until it is required. He lies about in the same breath as confessing to the Six Session Suckout of Cargo Cult Non-Game Play and praising The Keep On The Borderlands, which uses the above paradigm.

The Professor is one of the better grifters due to his seeming reasonableness making it hard to detect when he's playing Word Sorcery games to trick you. "I plan one session ahead" is that sorcery; you shouldn't plan at all because that's the players' job (Fantasy of Agency, remember?) and all you do is administer things. Planning means that you are assuming the role of the Adversary, when that is not your job. That's what players do, not you.

It's that one subtle shift that introduces the poison of Narrative Logic into a pure Ludological hobby. Reject all Narrative logic by sticking to Braunstein structure; this is how you beat that bullshit.

This is a far simpler thing to comprehend than many have been told to expect, so PDF Merchant grifters have to complicate it to create a space where they profit.

The Business: Once Again, Gaben Does Nothing And Wins

My Vidya brothers, I feel you, and I join you in praising Gaben.

You should take note of this and use it for your benefit.

With Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft all shooting themselves in the foot you had better believe that Steam giving you the tools to clearly see if your rig can run it is yet another customer-friendly element that everyone else somehow fails to understand or care about.

Want something that's going to work? Have your rig be at least as good as a Steam Deck, then look for Deck OK labelling. Later on Steam Machine labelling will work. Only buy what gets the Green Check.

Or buy from GOG. Those games are so old that you can run it on Grandma's email checker.

This is another place where Indies and AA are rooking AAA across the board; design for the low-end specs of your target audience. This is why World of Warcraft worked- you could run it on the basic bitch machines of the day and do fine, as I know from personal experience.

The Business: You Still Have To Deliver, Vidya Peeps

Corps in entertainment hitting the FO phase of "FAFO" never gets old.

> becomes president of Blizzard

> removes almost all quality assurance

> quality declines

> leaves Blizzard

> “wow this game sucks”

Yeah you did that, dipshit https://t.co/J0o7zYpDMG

— Khorgnir, Edict Breaker (@Khorgnir) April 27, 2026

Blizzard isn't the only one. Square Enix, via Creative Unit 3 (the FF14 crew) had this going on since Dawntrail hit its own pre-launch hype.

SE just began its own new hype cycle after years of shitting the bed with the current expansion and letting Troons and Death Cultists ruin it for everyone- led by Chief Commie Kate Cywhateverthiscuntsnameis. They got to run wild while Yoshi-P and his man Koji Fox did their best to salvage FF16, which is how the EN version in particular shat the bed so hard that everyone else got smeared by association.

It is hoped that this will be fixed with the new stuff coming, announced over last weekend at the North American FanFest.

(No, Lanse here isn't a fan; he hates Kate and the Troon Squad, but doesn't spare Yoshi-P for letting them do it.)

AAA Gaming across the board has been shitting the bed due to both Death Cult and Mammon Mob fuckery, mostly in the West but Japan isn't immune.

Meanwhile, AA Gaming and Indies on both sides of the Pacific keep delivering. I'm far more hyped for this than the just-announced Evercold.

There's more I'm looking for--Light No Fire for example--but AAA? Not really. Not until there's some serious purging of the ranks.

In a related note, I am available for hatchetman work.

The Culture: It's All The Same Thing

These are all the same story.

Different costums. Different set dressing. Exact same story, BEAT FOR BEAT.

Yet they will tell you that these are three separate genres. That can only one of two things; either those specific genres are fake, or the very concept of "genre" is nothing more than a product label the same that you put books separate from shoes separate from toothpaste.

What this is, consistently, is a Drama. That's the substance--the narrative structure--that defines what a story is; too many professionals and wanna-bees mean "product category" when they say "genre" and that's how publishers, distributors, developers--all the business types--see this topic, and they always have.

Too many creatives--such as John Truby--confuse "product label" with "narrative structure" when they say "genre"; if you doubt this, get your library card out and go read Truby's book on Genre.

We see how fake "genre" is again with Appendix N, where Adventure Fiction is split between two equally fake genres: "Fantasy" and "Science Fiction".

"Horror" is also a fake genre.

If they are not real, what are they? The lead in Kristen McTiernan's latest interview makes this plain: Audience Expectation Templates-cum-Product Categories.

And in Tabletop, we have two well-known Brands that prove how fake genre is: TORG and RIFTS. (There are others, but these are go-to.)

It's all the same thing. For us, it's all Fantastic Adventure. That's what we do; the rest is just varations of costumes and set dressing, as the substance--the strucutre--is always exactly the same.

Which is why well over 99% of all Tabletop products can't justify their existence, are surplus to requirements, and and thus have no right to exist and must be abolished.

The Business: We Already Have A Proof Of Concept For Tabletop LLM Production

Told you that holdouts lose.

It feels like just yesterday I was giggling at ChatGPT's goofy attempts to make Magic card mechanics. Now ChatGPT can design a 110-page RPG from scratch and playtest it with simulated players. How long until it can just one-shot a 1,500-page rule set like ACKS? https://t.co/359tqRlarS pic.twitter.com/dxFmOt5Yjh

— Alexander Macris (@archon) April 23, 2026

You can read what got generated here.

We can bring harnesses and apps and models together another way as well. I asked Codex to create an entirely new tabletop roleplaying game, basically its own version of Dungeons and Dragons in a fantasy world of its own invention, full of all of the tables and rules you need to play. I also asked it to simulate players experiencing the game and revise the rules based on what it found.

The article where this process gets explained is here.

I'm not going to say that the game is good. Nor am I going to say that it's worth engaging. What this is, however, is PROOF OF CONCEPT.

From Idea to Product in minutes; this is what Wizards of the Coast will use to maintain dominance over the commercial side of the hobby, both for any in-house work and especially to oversee any third party works going forward- it is trivially easy to take the licensor's manuscript, filter it through the Brand Fit filter as a rewrite, and then do some spot-checks before letting it go live on Beyond.

That linked paper comments on what needs to be considered.

In addition to being technically neat, there is a lot to like about the actual content. The setting is interesting and novel, and the rules appear to make sense, drawing on existing game patterns while adding unique elements. However, a closer inspection also reveals the jagged frontier of AI ability is not entirely gone. Every generation of AI models has struggled with actually building long-form fiction. If you are a frequent reader of AI writing you see the same problems here: a love of the uncanny; overly complex ideas that do not fully pay off; weird metaphors (“weather and architecture are the same argument at different speeds”); too many ornate sentences (“the holy things that surface when a sea forgets it was once a road,” is cool once, an entire book of that is exhausting); dialogue where every character speaks in the same clipped tone; and the name “Mara.” So, even amongst all the amazing technical progress, there are still rough edges.

Holdouts are going to lose hard and fast now that it's shown that a professional-quality product can be made by one man in the fraction of the time it formerly did. Remember that Revealed Preferences are Revealed; people only care about the result, not about how that came about- claims to the contrary are not supported by the action that matters. This will lift the floor of what is considered Acceptable Output in all hobby publications, commercial or hobbyist, because the means to do so are now in the hands of common men who need only to learn how to use their words to make the machine do as they will.

This is not just about Tabletop. This is about all forms of media production. The folks crying about it are already being rooked by those that use the tools, making "detectors" and "bans" as useless as broken condoms. There's a reason that Vox Day and Jon Del Arroz can turn shitposts into full product releases within a week, soon a weekend, and have an entire trilogy of novels in digital and print up on Amazon within a month and make serious bank doing so- they know the tools and can strike while the iron is hot to profit on a meme wave while it's relevant. (If you know how Vox writes, that's massive.)

The last refuge for the holdouts is on Prestige Release Formats: high-cost, high-expense hardcover productions with lots of addons (appendices, annotations, etc.) where a single copy is at least $100 and likely some multiple of that. Anything that can be done On Demand just had its pricing crater as a consequence of how fast and easy it is to produce the content that those formats hold and deliver to the end user.

Which means that the already-waning commercial viability of the hobby just got nuked. GOOD.

The Business: The Holdouts Always Lose

Mark Kern's going to make all the right people mad.

They want this narrative to be true.

That gamers reject AI therefore you should not use it.

But I haven't seen one game where using AI tanked sales:

- They tried to it on Clair Obscure, and gamers kept buying.

- They tried it on Crimson Desert. Gamers kept buying.

As much… pic.twitter.com/LpfilpsZZx

— Grummz (@Grummz) April 26, 2026

Not just Vidya. Tabletop too is like this. They just lie about it.

The reason is the same as it ever was: LLMs are such a massive advantage that you AUTOMATICALLY lose against someone using it because they can ship more product faster, find and fix issues sooner, and do so with less human talent.

Retards and hobbyists eschew competitive advantages, and end-users show via Revealed Preferences that they don't care about anything but the results. In media where speed of output is directly and immensely rewarded with user and customer loyalty and thus revenue--Vidya, Tabletop, Novels, Comics, etc.--you are going to see the adopters win and the holdouts lose over time, and sooner than later.

This is why Wizards of the Coast flat-out lied to the audience. They know what it takes, so they're going to do it and then lie about it until the stupidity burns off. Every other would-be competitors is going to do the same thing because that is what the commercial pressure will force them to do to stay in the game; holdouts get pushed out.

What will have to happen for a lot of people is to admit that they are really hobbyists; it is okay to be a hobbyist. Doing it for love of the game, and setting prices to just cover costs, is fine. Long-time readers know that I've said so for years, pointing to Basic Fantasy as the model proving this to be true.

If you want to be a commercial operation, you are going to use LLMs. This is no longer negotiable.

It's okay not be a commercial operation. It's okay to be a hobbyist doing this for fun. It's okay to just cover your costs so publishing isn't costing you money. This is your way out, holdouts: surrender your pretentions of commercial viability and return to hobbyist status. Otherwise WOTC crushes you, and the Clubhouse will not open for you.