Sven van der Plank released a new video on the last campaign of the Third Succession War. It's long, but good.
We're seeing units with 85 and 95% casualties taken.
I see you, VetBros. Yes, that's insane. Yes, that's 40K levels of "Dude, what the fuck?!" Fighting like Vraks, but it's not even close to Vraks, is insanity- and thus, bad writing, because even given certain allowances there is just so much Nope going on here that cannot be justifed.
All this over a Star League Defense Force supply cache, by the way. They thought it important enough to send hundreds of BattleMechs, entire Air Wings of fighters, entire squadrons of DropShips, and six-figure or more numbers of personnel to one planet and--because of leadership that is decidedly pre-Modern in sensibility--they kept going well past the point of practicality which was the same as throwing good after bad and making things worse.
Sven did a fantastic job; I can't wait for him to do the Fourth Succession War, 3039, Clan Invasion, etc.
The Black Pants Legion and Sven van der Plank inadvertantly explained How To Run A Real Campaign.
You start at the top where players control The Great Men, then go down to the bottom to play as The Grunts, and ocsilate between the two perspectives in a Perpetual Feedback Loop until someone wins or everyone loses.
As these video selections go, that can take a very long time- both in-setting and in real life. (And yes, the Warhammers and the Five Ringers and the Secret Warriors are all the same thing in terms of campaign play structure.)
That is a good thing.
It is also good that players can choose to only play on a given level; some only care about the big picture, while others only care about the man in the thick of it. Conventional Play cannot, by design and admission, accomodate this and many products pushed by publishers don't even try.
You want a hobby by and for functional adults? Use the original model that didn't chain you to a fucking schedule like it's your job. We want more of the below, and less of the freak show.
My wife after being taken to a game convention with a sizable wargaming contingent (zero 40k): “Wargamers are COMPLETELY different from other gamers; they seem to be functional mostly married adult males who are intelligent and can focus for long times and aren’t slobs”
That's why "But this doesn't work for me" is a bullshit complaint: the campaign IS NOT ABOUT YOU. You're not the only man; you're one guy running one table and there's a lot more doing that in a real campaign, all playing on the same map in the same campaign, with mans and players floating between them as they will.
Which is exactly what you see in the BattleTech videos above, when translated to Real Gamer terms.
That is why the #BROSR is the leading edge; we brought back How Things Actually Work, how the machines work and how the social dynamics work- we are #ObjectivelyCorrect.
I should not be surprised that this happened, but it happened.
This is opportunistic law-trolling, and Pat gives context.
Catalyst Game Labs needs to slap Games Workshop over this, hard, for no other reason than to protect the brand they're licensing. Nevermind the politics; this is business, and in particular this is about Trademark. Doesn't matter if the law firm did it; they did it as agents of Games Workshop- the Principle is responsible for the Agent's actions. That is why Catalyst should move on this; if not legally, then socially by verbally defending their audience and (believe it or not) quietly compensating those affected (because that is a show of loyalty that pays BIG dividends for DECADES).
C'mon, CGL, prove that you're worthy of anything other than mockery and scorn.
And a lot of those making stuff usable with 40K or Fantasy need to learn how to shield themselves legally.
He's not wrong. Catalyst, as I (and he) said previously, is not the first operator to fuck things up. BattleTech's players have long ago seized the game from the official owner and, for all intents and purposes, control it.
That's why Gothic is Dead On Arrival. No one wants what is clearly a Super Robot premise in their Real Robot Mil-SF setting.
Therefore, I have something that those who do find this premise appealing should hear:
Make Your Own Game
Mekton Zeta is RIGHT THERE! Jovian Chronicles is RIGHT THERE! Both games have buildsystems that explicitly account for the sort of Mecha tropes that Gothic is about. HERO is all about that, from the ground up, as is GURPS. There are other options that better handle the premise than the retards at Catalyst: USE THEM!
You don't need Catalyst's product slop. You can roll your own, and get playing today. You don't need to wait. You don't need to CONSUME PRODUCT. You can just DL some free PDFs--look around; not that hard to find--and go to town.
Hell, RIFTS does this better than Catalyst. You can just play RIFTS!
Nothing Catalyst controls needs MORE PRODUCT! Not BattleTech, not Shadowrun, not ANYTHING AT ALL.
Fuck them. Fuck all of them. This is the trash taking itself out and I could not be happier.
The IPs Catalyst operates are even more innured against the tariff troubles than others- as Razorfist explained a while ago (because what he said about BT applies to SR).
The old games are still out there. You can buy them used. You can get PDFs and print new copies. You can play off the files. Point is you don't need those slop merchants. Fuck them; let them tank that colony drop to the face and die. The hobby's getting that purging cleanse that's been long overdue.
There's no need to fuck with something that works. There is, instead, a long-overdue reconsideration that the viable business model for BattleTech is not to produce Endless Product Slop. Instead, it is to be a service organization intended to connect people together to play the game in a network of local clubs.
Also, to stop advancing the timeline; tie-in media are to focus on the backstory that sets up the eras that player actually want and not the fake-and-gay bullshit brought on post-FASA. This should include embracing MegaMek, but not bringing it in-house; a lean and efficient publisher works WITH the audience, not against them and that means acknowledging the limits of one's competencies and collaborating with others who have what you don't- but, alas, that's never been a strong suit in Tabletop.
Instead, players--operating through that network of local clubs--are to advance the timeline through a massively multiplayer wargame campaign until someone wins are everyone loses. Catalyst only needs to handle marketing the property and keeping campaign results public-facing so everyone can follow along.
And those alt-settings? Yeet them. All of them. No one wants that bullshit or asked for it.
This not because of Troons, Gay Race Communism, or other Death Cult insanity.
This is pure Mammon Mobster insanity, all in service of Line Must Go UP! Why? Because someone at CGL figured that Muh Multiverse allowed them to unleash the Endless Product Slop business model that the mainline game has not been able to do.
No one asked for this. No one wants this. No one wants any other Muh Multiverse take on this. No one at CGL got told how comically litigious Games Workshop is, or how this approaches the lore for Pacific Rim or the aesthetics of Trench Crusade. If this doesn't tied up in LOLsuits, I will be surprised; at the very least I expect some Cease & Desist letters firing off in the near future.
As Mage Leader said, this is trumping the existing business obligations of the company and the serving of the established audience. This is a top-down imposition by the management, not an organic iterative development born of analysis of the audience's Revealed Preferences.
As this is meant to be the first in a series of sub-lines, each with their own setting and continuity, we're seeing CGL repeat TSR's mistakes with the explosion of D&D settings under late AD&D1e and all of AD&D2e- the thing Wizards of the Coast (under Dancey and company) wisely ended when they took control.
What this means is that CGL's C-Suite does not care about the core audience. They will do as they like, as they see the audience as Normie paypigs who will eat the slop.
Wizkids and FASA thought that too. Look what happened to them. Time to watch the Razorfist video again.
Remember that Captain Harlock is your friend, MegaMek is free, and that CGL hates you- so don't give them money.
I hit up Grok again and made this query: "Do you know what the game called Braunstein is?"
Grok's output:
Yes, I can tell you about Braunstein! Braunstein is widely regarded as a groundbreaking game in the history of role-playing games (RPGs). It was created by David Wesely in the late 1960s and first played in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, with its initial session occurring around 1969. The game emerged from Wesely's experiences as a wargamer within the Midwest Military Simulation Association (MMSA) and is considered a pivotal step in the evolution of modern tabletop RPGs.
Originally, Braunstein started as a Napoleonic-era wargame set in a fictional German town called Braunstein (meaning "brown stone" in German). Unlike traditional wargames where players commanded entire armies, Wesely innovated by assigning each player a single, specific role within the town—some military, like opposing commanders, and others civilian, such as the mayor, banker, or university chancellor. The setup was multi-player and multi-objective, with around 20 participants showing up for the first game, far more than anticipated. Players were meant to relay their actions to Wesely, the referee, in a separate room, but they unexpectedly began interacting directly with each other in character, moving around the "town" and improvising their roles.
A notable moment came when two players challenged each other to a duel, forcing Wesely to make up rules on the spot. He initially saw the session as chaotic and a failure, but the players loved the freedom to role-play and requested more games. This led to subsequent Braunstein scenarios, including one set in a fictional Latin American republic called Banania, where players worked to stage or prevent a coup. These games retained the core idea of individual roles and open-ended action, with outcomes determined by the referee.
Braunstein’s influence lies in its introduction of key RPG concepts: a one-to-one player-to-character relationship and a flexible framework where players could attempt anything, with the referee adjudicating results. It drew inspiration from games like Diplomacy (for negotiation) and Strategos (for the referee concept), but its emphasis on individual agency set it apart. Dave Arneson, a player in the original Braunstein, later expanded on these ideas in his Blackmoor campaign, blending them with fantasy elements and eventually co-creating Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) with Gary Gygax. Meanwhile, Duane Jenkins built on Braunstein with his "Brownstone" Wild West games, introducing persistent characters across sessions—an early form of campaign play.
Though no formal Braunstein rulebook was ever published, its legacy is profound. It bridged wargaming and role-playing, showing that games could focus on individual stories and interactions rather than just tactical combat. Today, "Braunstein" also refers to a style of play—often competitive, multi-faction scenarios with a referee managing a "fog of war"—that some modern gamers revive to recapture its freewheeling spirit. Does that give you a clear picture of what Braunstein is? Let me know if you'd like more details!
Not bad. Still not quite up to speed, but this is Good Enough.
Now the real test: "Take the concept of Braunstein and apply it to the BattleTech setting, circa 3025. What are the playable factions, what rules and procedures are recommended to handle their interactions, and how do you recommend incorporation of the tabletop BattleTech game into an ongoing BattleTech-themed Braunstein campaign?
For this purpose "BattleTech game" includes the full ruleset, so including conventional armored warfare, infantry, aerospace fighters, jumpships and warships, etc. You should be able to replay key events in the lore such as the Star League Civil War from the top-level down to that of tactical battles."
And this is what I got:
Let’s dive into designing a Braunstein-style game set in the BattleTech universe, circa 3025, and then weave in the full BattleTech tabletop ruleset for an ongoing campaign. The year 3025 places us at the tail end of the Third Succession War, a time of technological stagnation, political intrigue, and relentless conflict among the Successor States, with the added shadow of ComStar and periphery powers. A Braunstein-inspired game thrives on individual roles, multi-faction competition, and a referee managing a dynamic, player-driven world—perfect for BattleTech’s rich lore and sprawling scope.
Playable Factions in a 3025 Braunstein
In a Braunstein-style game, each player takes on a unique role within a faction, rather than controlling an entire army or state. The setting of 3025 offers a mix of Great Houses, mercenary units, ComStar, and periphery factions, all vying for power in a fractured Inner Sphere. Here’s a breakdown of playable factions and example roles, centered on a hypothetical contested region—say, the border world of Verthandi in the Lyran Commonwealth, near the Draconis Combine, during a flare-up of the Third Succession War:
Lyran Commonwealth (House Steiner)
Archon’s Envoy: A diplomat negotiating resource contracts or seeking mercenary aid.
LCAF Colonel: Commands a regiment defending Verthandi, balancing orders from Tharkad with local needs.
Industrial Magnate: Runs a Defiance Industries outpost, prioritizing profit over loyalty.
Draconis Combine (House Kurita)
Tai-sa (Colonel): Leads a raiding force from the Dieron Regulars, aiming to seize Verthandi.
ISF Agent: An infiltrator sowing chaos among Lyran defenders, reporting to the Coordinator.
Yakuza Boss: Smuggles supplies or intel, playing both sides for gain.
Remember what I said last week about how the bots can make the Slop Merchants irrelevant? Here you go. You can do this with a free Twitter account, and then copy/paste the results into a document for human review before using them.
That bot-generated response put down an entire campaign structure for a BattleTech Braunstein campaign, complete with procedures for triggering tabletop battle play, and did so in seconds. That is faster, easier, immediately usable, and free. Slop Merchants can't compete with that, so they're going to die. No one will pay for slop product when they can get the same thing for free in seconds just by throwing a prompt at a bot.
This gal came across my feed a week or so ago. She's a professional freelancer in the fiction world. She upset the OldPub hive.
While she's worth your time if you care at all about Men's fiction and men writing fiction that gets and keeps an audience, that's not why I'm pointing this video out.
No, it's this Comment:
@Stinky-Pete 2 hours ago
This problem is going on in almost every form of male escapism for the past 15 years. The only male dominated entertainment/hobbies left untouched from colonizers are ones that take mechanical or technical skills (cars/wood working/model making/etc.).
I've bolded the important part.
Consider the changes in The Only Game That Matters over time. What has been done with every edition? A slow degradation in the necessary technical skill and literary acumen needed to play the game properly. The latter was the first to go, and with the last two editions the former fell away too.
It is no surprise that the things that took away the need to be technically proficient--Virtual Tabletops on the tool end, disdain for procedure on the cultural end--coincided with the feminization and infestation of the hobby by the Death Cult due to Mammon Mobsters doing things to make Line Go Up.
This squares with my position that the Real Hobby is an inherently occult practice best suited for the Clubhouse and its fraternal environment, and it explains the hostility for the positions that the #BROSR advocates- especially Rules As Written. It's a revulsion at the idea that there is a technical skill requirement to use the machine properly. It betrays a failure of the objector to conceive of something entirely in the unseen realm as being real- it is the rejection that Ideas Are nouns, ARE THINGS!
The machine that exists in the manual is still a machine even if no one builds it. That is what a Tabletop Adventure Game is. The fact that several of them have been turned into literal machines--videogames--proves this.
The way out is to RETURN HARDER to games and game design that demand the cultivation of technical skill and acumen to successfully participate. Returning to the wargame roots is a necesary element to achieving that end, and in so doing the cultivation of fraternal bonds is going to happen because without that you don't have a viable Clubhouse for long.
There is one thing here that Moron exhibits that is actively detrimental to the cultivation of wargaming: the insistence upon including terrain and miniatures as requirements to play. His shot at BattleTech (originally played with cardboard maps and cardboard standees, still playable now with counters and a paper map) proved this. He has Warhammer Brain and it affects all of his OPINIONS.
Fuck no, minis and terrain are not required. One of the best wargames published proved that over 40 years ago.
Let me say this louder for the folks in the back.
WARGAMING IS A CHEAP HOBBY WITH STATUS ANXIETY!
The reason for Warhammer Brain--what I call the insistence upon requiring miniatures and terrain to be considered "real wargaming"--is because publishing tabletop wargames is not commercially viable otherwise.
Games Workshop pushes minis in particular because that's what makes the money- not the games. They change the game for the same reason that governments under Modern Monetary Theory (all of them) impose taxes: to compel the adoption of the widget associated with it (minis/currency).
The thing that people forget is that the game plays the same with counters and a paper map. You can play 40K or Fantasy or Shitmar just fine with a Ziplock bag full of counters for each army and another for terrain- something G-Dubs is desperate to keep people from doing for very obvious reasons. Kill the sales of minis, paint, terrain, etc. and most Big Tabletop companies like GW suffer a stroke and die.
GW (and others following its lead) uses the Cult of Officialdom for the same reason that governments shove guns in your case: to pressure you to adopt the widget. Unlike guns, cults run solely off social pressure- dilute the pressure and the cult loses power. GW's practices are no help in maintaining that pressure, and having Death Culists in their ranks only makes it worse for them due to incompetence.
Yes, you can just cut a series of counters and put art on them for your army. GW can't do shit about it. Yes, you can just throw down a vinyl mat and use overhead projector pens to draw terrain features on it. Yes, you can--and, given how some armies are meant to operate, should--use far larger tables than they say; hell, you could (and should) just play on the floor. If literal War Colleges can do it, you can.
GW's brand cult relies on unthinking Consumerism, which in turn relies on you thinking that you have to have the widgets to play. You don't. The game is not the merch; the merch is not the game. (The Network is not the Brand; the Brand is not the Network- you see this every day when some YouTuber does a React video to one of Bricky's Intro to 40K vids.)
You want a viable resistence to the Stupid British Toy Company? Start playing without the widgets. Counters, paper maps, ad-hoc terrain- whatever it takes to reduce the cost as close to zero as possible. Then pirate the rules and strip out all of the Coffee Table bullshit bloating up the page count to get at what the actual Technical Manual is; clean that up and distribute that instead.
Now you can play The Game That Matters without giving the shitbags in the UK a penny. That is effective resistance, and GW knows it.
So, regarding D&D, does Wizards of the Coast- which is why they too are going full Brand Cult and will do what they can to get that same cult pressure going.
You want gaming to be a hobby again? Kill commercial viability at every turn. That's how it has to be.
* Initial divergence during SLDF Gunslinger Program * New timeline end: 3060 (after Battle of Huntress) * ELH/ComStar Alliance Kickstarts Star League early * No Jihad/Dark Age * FRR does not submit
And not just because Catalyst had to inject their Death Cult dogma into the game.
No, this was already necessary due to FASA and Wizkids doing their own dumb shit while they controlled the property. There's a reason that the bigger BattleTech channels don't go past the 3060; that's the end of it being something worth playing.
As Call of Cthulhu successfully made the medium jump years ago. Pathfinder has some well-regarded videogames. Paranoia has a game, and we all know that BattleTech (as "MechWarrior") has been in Vidya for decades. R. Talsorian used Cyberpunk for a videogame and single-handedly overturned decades of being the also-ran of cyberpunk gaming, going from Also-Ran to Winner.
More Tabletop losers need to go this route if they want to stay in the commercial end of things.
Legend of the Five Rings? Shadowfist? Ars Magica? All those Theater Kid products? All of them would do far better as videogame products than in tabletop, and videogame publishers are always on the lookout for new IP to exploit. It's long past time for most of the people wasting time and money in Tabletop to give up, go to Vidya, and make something that would actually get played.
And you'd actually make a real living by doing so. Just ask Warren Spector, Ree Soesbee, or Scott Harring.
Leave Tabletop to The Only Game(s) That Matter and the non-commercial hobbyists because there's no more fortunes to be had here for anyone else. That's why you have to beg on Kickstarter.
This follows from another well-known complaint about Conventional Play: No one gives a shit about your fucking lore.
Lore creation by publishers, especially by people paid via Work For Hire contracts, exists solely to build up the property as a Brand for non-hobbyists to consume. As with what Jeffro said about a few related topics:
Players really don't care about your big brain house rules. They already don't want to listen to you talk about your campaign updates. They definitely don't want to hear about your "lore". House rules? Even less so.
The BEST source of campaign information of ANY kind are OTHER PLAYERS recounting their experiences or else mentoring each other on sound tactics and strategies. Ideally, the referee should be the most boring person at the table.
Back to the Lore matter: the purpose for Lore, for a publisher, is to develop a Brand that is better suited to a Narrative medium: film, television, comics, novels. Not games. A competent publisher, in developing such a body of lore, does so with the aim of creating a Series Bible for the Brand that hired guns and corporate partners will adhere to when doing work for the Brand. (Note: There are no such publishers in the hobby. NONE!)
Lore can be consumed without participating in the game that it came from, which is the point of its existence from a commercial perspective. The ongoing success of lore channels for BattleTech and 40K and Fantasy show this in action, and thus become unpaid Brand Ambassadors doing marketing for the Brand.
Over time this non-gaming audience will grow to eclipse the hobbyist audience and the publishing operation will pivot operations to cater to this new audience over the original, eventually to discard it entirely as a legacy element that impedes the Brand-focused business that the publisher has become.
Games Workshop is already well down this path, as is Wizards of the Coast, and a lot of corporate business media pushes the drive to depreciate the original core audiences in favor of the more numerous non-gaming one attracted by the Brand-focused material that lore publication cannot help but to attract.
If you are a commercial operation in the hobby, you have no reason to not go down the route of writing reams of lore because this effect is a desirable consequence- assuming, again, that you are a competent operation. A mature form of this business has no in-house ludological capacity or acumen at all; that's all licensed out to corporate partners- just look at Hello Kitty as a successful example.
(This also puts the lie that Tabletop gaming is itself commercially viable; if you have to spin off subsidiary product pure to use as leverage into a different medium and business where the actual money lies, you are not commercially viable.)
An honest hobby publication, operating on a non-commercial basis, has no need to do anything but to produce a competent technical manual for the hobbyist game and then leave well enough alone. The hobbyists, as end-users, will take that turnkey product and make their own content to use with it through playing the game as the manuals command them to do. There is no need to publish lore, including setting material; let the users do that themselves, for they shall do better than you ever could.
That is what AD&D1e and several other classic Fantastic Adventure Games allow; that they are not exactly just a set of technical manuals is a flaw put into the design due to commercial incentives. The rest are lobotomized crippleware meant to enable Endless Product Slop, through which they can also enable Endless Lore Publishing and thus turn the product into a Brand that becomes the road to where the money is (and thus the path to selling out).
This needs to stop for the good of the hobby. Destroy the slop and the lore. Replace it with teaching, training, and building up new hobbyists; the Clubhouse is the Dojo.
TLDR: The value of ANY game is directly proportional to the number of players, because games work just like telephones- their value is derived from the ability to use it.
THAT is why there is such a thing as "too many wargames". In any marketplace so driven, there is room for a Master and an Apprentice- no more. Everyone else is an also-ran/never-were that is wasting their time and would be better served supporting one of the two that matter (by default, the Master, but this is wargaming and GW is stupid).
Why two? It keeps the Master from being complacent, and there is one example to demonstrate that in action: EverQuest vs. World of Warcraft. The former WAS the Master of MMOs, but it got complacent and failed to keep its users happy; a small, organized minority got together, formed WOW, and OVERTOOK Everquest by providing that user network a competitor that did what EQ would not. Now EQ is a has-been with no route back to dominance, while WOW's ruled the roost in MMOs for 20 years (despite having a few Apprentices come along, currently FF14).
It is true for all forms of multi-player gaming. The vast majority of would-bees are better off shutting down and just supporting one of the two that matter.
(Link and Bolding is mine.)
The refusal to admit that Revealed Preferences exist (and are Revealed; most prospective players prefer Vidya for all the reasons I mentioned yesterday), Network Effects exist (and explain everything about why (X) is The Game That Matters), and that demographic change has turbo-fucked things so hard that Tabletop is reduced to having people e-begging for handouts instead of conducting business like they're supposed to, and you can see why Tabletop Minions is a paste-eating retard.
Alas, so many tabletop hobbyists aren't much better. The Soup Aisle has so many derelicts in them, and some pretend to be competent businessmen.
*Me not listen to customers and stock things no one care about.*
(months later)
"Why business fail?"
The C-Suite at WOTC and GW holds the common gamer in contempt for good reason, as man that thick-headed stupidity is all too common. A brilliant man showed up, solved a long-running problem, explained how and why it did so, and no sooner was he out of the picture than they immediately fuck it all up and the dysfunctions immediately return because bruised egos wouldn't admit they were wrong.
(Yes, that is also the real story of every Kitchen Nightmares episode.)
As in adventure games, so in wargames. Same medium, same solutions, same OH GOT IT BURNS levels of stupidity.
This is why I look forward to see you all fold like Superman on laundry day. When that happens:
The #brosr argues like Gen X/Y and zoomers Gen X/Y: -“lol whatever kid” -gamer words Zoomer: -seeing through virtue signaling (grew up with it) -irreverent about pop culture norms -“skibidi di” This is why we win.
And he adds on this: "Millenials also do “gotcha” arguments of “you said x but now you say y heh heh I caught you in a heckin hypocrisy buddy so I win”.
It shows how millenials are shapiro “own the libs” NormieCon coded to think the way to win an argument is to be the best rule follower."
Which reminds me of a recent Academic Agent video:
The anklebiter, our most recent Gamma Male from the Soup Aisle, is exactly the Total Loser that Academic Agent describes:
Rule Follower (the context for this should be obvious; if not, watch AA's video to get it)
Amateur Referee (Le Gotcha Snipe)
Always Reactive, Never Pro-Active
Maintainer of Status Quo no matter what (in our context, the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play)
Seeks "respectability"
Atrocious capacity for Friend/Enemy Distinction
Supports "their side" no matter what (explained in the video if you need context)
Cowardly and easily bullied
Always digs in over the wrong issue
Easily misled with obvious bait
The Bros, and especially Jeffro and BDubs, are the Winner sorts:
Rule Makers (we decide what Is)
Rule Breakers (in the Carl Schmidt sense of Sovereignty: we decide what Is AND what Is Not)
Always pro-active, never reactive (we have the initative and maintain that tempo; YOU react to US)
Look to change what is not working (which is Conventional Play and its Cargo Cult, among others)
Redefine what "respectable" means (THIS IS THE KEY THING RIGHT HERE!)
Meticulous in applying Friend/Enemy Distinction
Do not support "their team" unconditionally (ditto; this is what folks mistake as "infighting"- it's the Bros figuring out How To Win Now)
Bold, bullies others
Know what issues are minor and can be let go vs. what to dig in on and hold fast to.
Eyes On The Prize At All Times.
You have your checklists.
Now, compare all the ankle-biters that come at the Bros and gainsay them. How many of them are exactly as BDubs says and AA defines? All of them. That's why the Bros win against them so consistently, and its why they seethe so much that they maintain their resentment such that the Bros come to live rent-free in their heads. Meanwhile, the Bros go on to the next conquest and don't think of them at all.
(Yes, I do want to clear out ALL of the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play; they are that feckless, useless, and unfit for purpose as well as surplus to requirements.)
Yes, you will find that a lot of things that apply to the Macro apply to the Micro; life is fractal like that, which is why AA--not at all a gamer, by his own admission--made a perfect video to describe the derelicts from the Soup Aisle nipping at the Bros.
The key difference is that the Bros want you to be a winner. You just have to bow to reality, see things as they are, and conform yourself to those requirements: you must Git Gud. The rest is just details, and the transformation will greatly improve your life all around; it is as close to experiencing becoming a superhero that you can in real life.
And this is why, inevitably, the Bros will win as they sally forth from the Clubhouse to Make Adventuring Great Again.
Author Brian Niemeier wrote, some years ago now, about corporate fandom and dubbed it "The Pop Cult".
This is the key element he identified then:
"...the PopCult doesn’t offer any answers. It’s pure escapism. The problem is it’s an escape from self-mastery and virtue into the clutches of soulless megacorporations."
Since then what we've seen is that the members of the Pop Cult are not so easily herded. Psuedo-religions are still religions, and as such the Faithful can and do reject the direction of the leadership if they (a) detect that the leaders are going where they ought not go and (b) they sense that there is a critical mass that agrees on (a).
This leads to the question: "Who decides what is Canon?" It was presumed that the Pop Cultist would slavish conform to whatever their idols told them. This turned out to be not true. What Is or Is Not in Canon, once the Creator is gone, is for the Audience to decide: not the Corporation.
Why? This is why.
So a friend did some digging and apparently Alan Merrett, the guy upheld as the source of "female Space Marines used to be canon," is a pathological liar who was disliked by his coworkers and helped Games Workshop make some of it's worst business decisions. pic.twitter.com/xptfrXJsgr
— Marshal Bohemond ⚔️⛨ Space Crusader Vtuber (@HMBohemond) October 12, 2024
Good stewards recognize this fact. That is why they are scrupulous about the property that they sheppard, especially if their compensation is directly tied to its long-term health (and thus value).
We see this being the case (most of the time; there have been mistakes) with the Howard and Burroughs Estates. It was the case for Tolkien until Christopher died and the new stewards did some truly Boomer-style things to what their ((great-?)grandfather created.
One need look only at Lucasfilm, Marvel, and D.C. to see what happens when good stewards are not in place.
"But how can the audience make those decisions?"
Force of numbers. In addition to SpaceMace 39K, Mouse Wars, BattleTech, and many others under incompetent or traitorous management are increasingly cut out of the culture by the audience.
Or do you think that corporate seething at user-driven online publishing isn't just about Mainstream News losing their Narrative monopoly? No, far more important for day-to-day living is that those same platforms allow the audiences of various properties to completely cut out corrupt and incompetent corporate management from the conversation and thus push them out of what is and is not in the canon. No amount of Official Pronouncements means jack shit without buy-in.
Proof? Sorcerers By The Sea outright bribed a cohort of YouTube channels to shill for Corporate Positions because they had considerable audiences, were rather effective and efficient at it, and could be bought with the pocket change usually reserved for tipping the pizza delivery guy.
Why? Well, you get things like this out of them and this is far more effective at determine what Is and Is Not than what they say or do.
I can go on.
The corporate stewards that seethe over this are, at best, Mammon Mobsters mad that the audience will not mindless Consume Product and then get excited for Next Product. You see this most with Stupid British Toy Company and the Devil Mouse.
But the ones that hate it most are the Death Cultists that serve Molech, and as their entire apparantus for taking the openings made by Mammon Mobsters acting as 5th Columnists to turn the corporate operations into recruitment funnels into the Death Cult. As these corporate actors (unlike those in more important segments of the economy) do not have the ability to just use State power to silence these dissidents they have to compete using personal connections with Fellow Travelers in either those platforms or related ones (like Stripe or Patreon) to do it instead, and in the meantime find or build up a compliant group of shills spouting the party line.
They have to do this, because otherise their attempts at being sly about their Death Cult pozzing will keep getting exposed and thereby rendered impotent.
Oh, and that includes their attempts to regain their previous cloak of invisibily via BRIDGE.
This is what corporates and propagandists don't get: the audience gets not only a say, but the final say.
That audience? VETO! VETO! VETO!
And those attempts to pozz non-Anglo media? Already meeting even heavier resistance than the Western pushes ever got. No blackpilling folks. This can be beaten.
Especially once you account for audience use of Print On Demand technology to keep what is considered Orthodox available. We just want our Hunchbacks, and we'll have them the way they must be one way or another.
Last night, Dunder Moose hosted the folks behind a BattleTech Braunstein, "BroTech".
This stream is a group After Action Report, a Debrief, once folks got settled in.
If you want to read the Session Reports, start here and read to the Conclusion.
Note the lessons here:
Have your boundaries and specific rules ready before the fact.
If you have NPCs on the table, have your Invisible Player procedure in place before the fact.
Design your scenario to compel player interaction.
The AARs, as they are post-morten play analysis, reveal everything a player needs to know to get better at playing the game.
The game, as we see, is not just working the rules. It is also knowing how to read other players; all you Poker players know what I am talking about. It is also knowing how to handle your errors before hostile players can recognize and exploit them, or to mitigate damage if they do.
It also means that the best players are those with the fastest capacity to recognize things for what they are and adapt to overcome them- and not just on the hex map where your Stompy Boys are putting in work. It's in the ability to recognize Intelligence failures before they create conditions for disaster to strike. It's in the ability to recognize the need to secure resources and prepare logistics networks before embarking on an operation. Each of these makes victory easier to achieve, and when all are in order miracles can happen because the liminal spaces wherein individuals can make far outsized impacts can occur- like what happened at Twycross, as the Black Pants Legion covered last weekend.
There's plenty more to take away from this game. Rewatch as you require to learn all that you can.
Fuck Catalyst. Give the Black Pants Legion, or Sven van der Plank, or Big Red, or Mechanical Frog, or the MegaMek gang your money instead. It will actually go towards something that betters the hobby instead of funding your enemies' own attempts to destroy you and what you love. Remember to buy actual BT stuff used or ask Captain Harlock for PDFs, and miniatures are OPTIONAL.
Yes, that includes the tie-in novels and other media.
Also, this is your periodic reminder that Fang of the Sun Dougram might as well be a BattleTech series because it hits all the right notes.
We take this pause in shitting on Griff the Grifting Faggot to direct your attention to a pair of big BattleTech lore drops that shit all over what the faggots at Catalyst Game Labs do.
(Sven will have a compliation video for his Terran Alliance series Soon (TM), returning to the Third Succession War next weekend.)
This is what sells BattleTech now. Not CGL's pozzed propaganda, or the Mammon Mob enablers among them trying so hard to respond to commercial incentives.
You don't need what CGL sells. There's decades of used materials in print, and PDFs aplenty floating about, and that's before realizing that MegaMek has all you need to play without giving CGL a penny.
Oh, and here's a bonus video, courtesy of Mechnical Frog.
And yes, Tex and the gang have something coming soon also.
Fuck CGL. Fuck commercialization. This is a hobby, and it is the hobbyists that matter. Everything else can die in nuclear fire. This is the lesson CGL, and other pozzed publishers (Mammon and Molech-aligned alike), shall learn by suffering as the Collapse hits like a Colony Drop and destroys them.
This past week, Sven van der Plank released a new BattleTech lore video- the second about the Third Succession War.
I want you to watch it, because Sven's excellent work (as with that of the Black Pants Legion) inadvertently reveals how to make a property like BattleTech into a proper hobby campaign game instead of a Brand slaved to the commercial concerns of a publisher.
Specifically, it presents a way to explain how the Real Hobby works to those unfamiliar with it- including a lot of Cargo Cultists.
"Replace all of those publisher-dicatated actions by nobles, generals, admirals, Comstar officials, etc. with the decisions of players running those characters and the factions at their command. That's how you begin a positive feedback loop of perpetual gameplay."
"Where's the stompy robot action?"
"Created as a consequence of the big picture action, along with the scnerios for aerospace fighter action and space fleet action, including what the objectives are and what the consequences of success or failure will be."
Watch the lights go on between their ears. Those with any time spent watching military history videos or reading the (often superior) books will instantly grok all of that. Alas, too few in the hobby have such familiarity these days so you do have to spell it out in small words very patiently to them.
Now a lot of things make sense: restrictions on available designs, available technologies, morale issues, logistics issues, strict timekeeping, strict rules adherance (because, again, Player-v-Player always compels this), and the restoration of the Referee as neutral and disinterested arbiter.
Why? Simple: it is now a game to be won, not a passtime to vibe with.
The two other notable Real Robot game properties in the hobby can work the same way: Totally Not VOTOMS Heavy Gear and Totally Not UC Gundam Jovian Chronicles. Each of the states on Terra Nova (and a few other notable organizations or groups) as well as every state and organization in the future solar system of JC can be set up as a campaign in the same manner.
I see you there, Mike. Yes, your precious Algol (Mekton) can be set up the same way.
Take away the robots and you can do this with something like Renegade Legion.
Take away the space adventure and you can do this with Twilight 2000.
Take away the real world and you can do this with D&D.
Because the real hobby is a fantastic adventure game, which is a wargame, and this structure will always work no matter what trappings you put on it.
