Been wondering what Sven van der Plank has been up to? Lots of Mechwarrior 5 based lore videos.
That's a Playlist. You have well over a day's worth of videos, the last of which by itself is over 9 hours.
Notice that this--like with Tex and the BPL--is from the videogame side of the property, and not the Tabletop side; Catalyst can't be bothered to do jack shit to promote the game they licensed, relying instead on the fans to do that for them.
The problem (for Catalyst) is that no one needs to give Catalyst money to play.
Meanwhile, these faggots beg on Kickstarter.
Razor was right when he cut that video and he is still right now. Cut Catalyist out, and that includes 3D Printing of any minis you want (not that you need them; standees or counters will do--and have done--just fine.
If used products aren't good enough, Captain Harlock will hook you up with the PDFs and Lulu's happy to print off new copies based on those PDFs (with a few conditions).
The same means are useable for every other Tabletop publisher that steps out of line- yes, G-Dubs, that includes you. You don't have to give money to people that hate you, so pirate away- that is one way to compete within the Network Effect.
The question that the Professor asks is not the right one.
The question that should be asked is "Why use external supplementary product at all?"
The problem with every edition of The Only Game That Matters after AD&D1e, with so many Never-Weres and Also-Rans, and with so many delusional beggars on Kickstarter (etc.) is that they do not provide the end user with the tools necessary produce all playable content organically and emergently through a series of procedures and tables.
AD&D1e has that. Classic Traveller has that. There are a few others. Most, however, are lobotomized non-games that funnel buyers into Endless Product Slop in order to get a functional game followed playable content.
That's why, despite all the talk, products like this and videos about them are superfluous. We don't need videos reviewing things you don't need. We need videos showing people how to use the tools that the game provides to do that instead but that doesn't shill products.
This rancid commercial sector of leeches can't die fast enough.
Stephen should take the hint and shut down, but he's a Cargo Cultist retard so LOLNO Ego Defense too strong.
The one segment worth noting is where--again--Derik gets it; he is correct that Wizards of the Coast could easily bring in most of the Boomer OSR crowd by taking Current Edition, stripping out all the latter edition faggotry, use the old school trade dress (which WOTC still owns), and thereby repeat the same stunt that Blizzard did with Classic WOW.
See that? Derik correctly perceives that WOTC's Network Effect is so dominant that they could spend a trivial amount of time and capital to recoup the OSR folks by releasing "Classic D&D" (moreso than just making Past Edition D&D legally available) and doing nothing more than taking the same chassis and putting into a frame that the Boomer OSR prefers.
Derik is correct that Shadowdark is Proof Of Concept.
All WOTC would need to do is make their own version, which would be wholly compatible with the digital infrastructure they own and run as well as possess the Mark of Officialdum that Normies/Tourists/Casuals rely on for acceptability signalling, and a critical mass of refusniks and holdouts would quit their own form of performative signalling to rejoin the WOTC-controlled Walled Garden; this would finish off the Boomer OSR crowd of PDF merchants by taking their audience away, and thus the commercial viability of anything outside The Only Game That Matters would be over.
Only the non-commercial hobbyist scene would remain.
Merry Christmas, folks! Hope all your gatherings are good and your gifts don't need to be returned tomorrow on Boxing Day.
Time for the annual Haul Report
Stalin's War in paperback
The Indo-European Family in paperback
Motorolla G smartphone (Android)
The Magic of Palladium Books
RIFTS: Titan Robotics
RIFTS: Firetown Crisis
RIFTS: Merc Ops
RIFTS: Black Market
An Amazon gift card
Four new pairs of pants
Two new shirts
Plenty of assorted chocolates
One of the things they don't tell you when you become an amputee is that you need to adjust your wardrobe to account for the size of your prosthetics. This makes buying pants for me a bother, but not impossible, much like how my socks now last twice as long. Over and above the usual gain in appreciation for clothing as you get older, getting clothes that fit you as an amputee is a big deal.
Oh, and to the surprise of no one familiar with them, Palladium Books extended the Grab Bag out to January 14th. Also, the special anniversary edition of the TMNT RPG is now available for sale. Love or hate the jank, this is still worth having.
This dropped about a week ago. Nothing changed since then, and Clownfish is right to say "We told you so!" about this.
Lots of people are going to either learn how to do the startup game, or they're going to have to rely on patronage via Patreon/Subscribestar/etc.
No, you ain't going to Japan, South Korea, etc. either (unless you're one of them AND you're accepted as by them- not the same thing).
Remember the "safe anime" video? That's coming for Western animation out of the corpos, and because you can reduce all of that to a Madlib template you can automate that shit good and hard; what formerly took teams of dozens, scores, or hundreds will soon be done by single-digit teams- and it is an indie animated satire that proves that this is how it will go.
The Will Stancil Show! [FULL EPISODE]
Episode Four: Triumph of the Will After a failed campaign causes him to crash back to reality, Will Stancil binges on tacos and beer with his friends. By Emily Youcis 2025 pic.twitter.com/llNiaUAaT0
You can bet that a handful of people, with financing from a dedicated Patreon following, can easily do better than that on a far more frequent publishing schedule going forward.
"But I can just work on a corpo IP show."
LOL-fucking-NO! They're going to hand that to some connected insiders, who are going to have someone riding heard over them all the way, who can do top-end production cheap, on time, and to spec- exactly the sort of thing bots are excellent at delivering.
At this point, and for the foreseeable future, LLM-based machine generation works like spinning up a factory: you're going to spend a lot of time tooling the machine to execute on the template that you impart upon it, but once you do then you can churn out The Same But Different dirt cheap at industrial scale. Then, when you are done, you can archive all of that up-front work instead of letting it rot or wear out; if demand again returns past the threshold of commercial viability, pull it out from the archive and start the machine churning out more of The Same But Different until that welcome is again worn out.
Lather, Rinse, Repeat
That's how corpo animation will be in a few years. Live-Action will take a while longer, but it will follow; data used for one form is applicable to another, and motion-capture is a thing (as are virtual sets), so all that tech James Cameron pioneered for Avatar will--like Lucas did generations before--will become industry standard by the time a child today comes of age.
Which, by the way, means that current issues--like the recent cessation of Super Sentai production--will be permanently solved inside a decade.
You won't be worried about having nothing to read, watch, or play. You will be worried about being buried under a mountain of mediocre mass media and be (nigh-)unable to opt out of it.
And don't be surprised if getting away from this is not commercially viable. I've warned you about the need for the underground to exist, to be non-commercial. Now you're starting to see why.
LOL-fucking-no. WOTC's position is so dominant that this dogshit is all they need to do to stay on top indefinitely.
Everything that the target audience needs to know that Current Edition is still The Game To Play is right here.
No, you're not the target audience; that's the Stranger Things/Corona-chan crowd, the sort served by drivel like Critical Role.
No, contra the Professor, they are not aging out; they don't have the means to age out, so they're developmentally arrested by institutional powers beyond their control and thus they are staying because damn is it dirt cheap to log into Discord and Beyond and play Current Edition exactly the way that WOTC sells it to them and spend via microtransactions to get the virtual widget access they crave for that dopamine hit that real life denies to them.
Do they need to buy physical product? No. Do they need to order things from a store? No. Go to a store? No. They can do it all cheap or free from home, so they do that; Door Dash, pizza orders, or grocery deliveries take care of the food and drink issue. Chances are good that, unless something they want to use is paywalled and tech-locked, they'll share their virtual content too.
Then they do their performantive psuedo-gaming that is really Fanfiction With Extra Steps, mainline that dopamine (especially the women and girls), and try to do it again as soon as they can because Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangster and the odds of running into a situation like Episode One of Goblin Slayer are slim to none.
That ad? Targets that audience's narcisism drive (again, especially the female players) directly and with the impact of a raging bull.
Yes, WOTC knows what the psych profile of its target audience is; yes, it knows damn well what's going on between their ears; yes, that's why Current Edition is what it is.
So long as WOTC feeds the beast, they cannot fall.
