The Culture: Substack Is Where The Receipts Are Now

You need to be on Substack.

Umbros Docket: The Second Battle of Firsthaven by Angry Steak

Run: July 14, 2026

Read on Substack

This is where the receipts get posted.

This is where Jeffro can be found.

This is now where the real discourse exists.

The Culture: Jeffro Explains The Suppression Efforts

Jeffro explains why the Bros lack visibility despite their paradigm-shaping work.

This is an interesting suggestion. I can tell you what has happened over the past few years. 1) The big brains of the BrOSR inner circle have been entirely eaten up with working out what rpgs really are and how to achieve the best results of them. This effort largely upends what even the progenitors would say about it all. 2) Meanwhile commentators, historians, and YouTube personalities have taken on a reading of rpg history that interpolates today’s BrOSR practices and framing and even terminology into the past. It is presumed that people in the bad old days did things the BrOSR way even though everyone else in communication with the BrOSR has been telling us that “no one played that way”, “not even Gygax played that way”, and “Jeffro does not play RAW”, etc. etc. 3) My own work, “How to Win at D&D”, which outlines elements BrOSR thinking that actually were extant in the actual game rules of rpgs produced in the 70s and which subsequently evaporated over the course of the 1980s as rpgs were redefined…? It is not cited by anyone at all even though it is the first work ever published to conclusively make the case that something is wildly off in how people have been describing rpg history over the past few decades. I don’t know what the next move in all of this should be, but I have gotten practically no requests at all for me to continue doing “anthropological” work of that sort. People that have attached themselves in a more or less parasitic manner to the BrOSR scene tend to speak of it not at all and betray little interest in the matter. Perhaps because there is no money in it or perhaps because someone bullied them and/or paid them to lay off.

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

TLDR: The engineers did engineering things why the sales guys continued to shill shit no one needed.

He is right about the money. Implemented as we've done, all the money in Tabletop flushes out because no one need to buy anything but the rules themselves. The commercial side of the hobby is all about pushing product. They have no concept of supplying services, other than Wizards of the Coast (and they have their own solutions that are not what we want), so they have no incentive to promote the solution that actually works.

Observe Revealed Preferences: everyone who'se tried did the (very old) meme.

The same goes with the Clubhouse and all it entails. Once they grasp how it works, particularly by seeing it in action, THEY SIGN THE FUCK UP!

The plan is simple: show people how it's done. They will believe it when they see it in action.

The OPFOR plan is simple: suppress awareness.

This didn't work last time. It won't this time. People like free things. People like free things that enhance their autonomy and lives. The Bros offer that.

The Culture: This Oldfag Is Lying To Your Face

This is a flat-out lie.

Tenkar is lying to you.

You CAN run B/X (despite being inferior to AD&D) with wars front and center. It's not that hard; Bros, using AD&D, do this on a regular basis--I did this twice in as many months, and I expect more before the year is out, and that's just my campaign; UMBROS, etc. have battles and wage wars just as often or moreso--and you can have your standard adventuring stuff take place interlaced with the batles, logistics, and diplomacy. The warfare gives context to the adventuring, which in turn gives meaning to the warfare.

Tenkar is an Oldfag who is so deep into Sunk Cost Fallacies that he wouldn't know what not-drowning in them is to save his life. Such is the life of an Oldfag Cargo Cultist.

You can see the lack of skill at reading comprehension, his inability to draw inferences, to know how Order of Operations in use of material works (TLDR: if the rules don't say otherwise, it works as it does in reality so consult real world sources) as he drones on.

Don't believe the lies. Wage your wars. You don't need to invent new rules or use external addons; the trick is scaling.

The Culture: The Bros Showed How Simpler And Easier This Way Is

It really is this simple.

14 people are better at entertaining each other than one guy that thinks of himself as a brilliant world builder, fantasist, author and stage manager.

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

The Cargo Cult and the Techno-Corpos at WOTC are doing the meme.

from Imgflip Meme Generator

The Culture: Reading The Manual Avoids The Issue, Go Figure

This is another "READ THE MANUAL, RETARD!" moment.

Let me save you the time: Run the game as written and you won't have this problem.

Why say this? Because the Bros are forcing the issue.

The thing about Braunstein is that it solves the biggest problem in all of hobby gaming: getting players. No players exist to play the wargame on your shelf that you bought twenty years ago. No players exist to play in that obscure rpg that you have wondered about for your entire life. Every gamer I have ever met has entire shelves of unplayed games and practically zero opponents. Start thinking about everything through the lens of a Braunstein, and… suddenly everything works. Getting games on the table ceases to be a chore. Incorporating people that have no idea what is going on becomes not just feasible but also fun. While conventional rpg sessions seem to devolve into weird humiliation rituals, Braunstein events are more akin to a party. Play is simply happening in this decade in a way that was not happening previously. We know this is the case because BrOSR play generates new referees all the time whereas conventional “forever DMs” have nothing to show for their efforts.

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

The Culture: Witness The Cargo Cult Madness In Action

Chubby Funster dropped this video earlier this week.

To which Jeffro responded:

This is legitimately weird. 1) it demonstrates that playing in a conventional game is really about playing in a game world that nobody is playing in 2) it highlights how turning even a supposedly good campaign setting into a “living world” in this fashion requires you to ignore half or more of the adventure hooks outright. Who is actually going to do this? 3) to simulate the effects of braunstein play in a conventional game requires the referee to track all kinds of things and then present events and scenarios in such a particular way that neither the players nor the factions have any real autonomy 4) it would be far easier to actually run any kind of Braunstein game… But of course, this type of gaming content isn't for people that actually run games. It doesn't have to work. It doesn't have to produce replicable results. It just has to sound smart. That's it!

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

It is simpler and easier for all involved to just use Braunstein methods. Literally the meme here.

from Imgflip Meme Generator

The Culture: They Keep Trying To Steer Things Back Into Their Cave Prison

When Jeffro and BDubs shit on Cargo Cultists for willfully misrepresenting things, shit like this is what they're talking about.

Fuck off, retard.

This faggot knows that the Bros exist- I've flat-out TOLD him so.

He's been SHOWN BROZER and UMBROS. He knows about Winning Secrets. He's no different than the Oldfags who keep trying to steal #BROSR developments and try to reframe them in Cargo Cult non-game terms.

He is willfully avoiding the fact that this hobby runs off Braunstein, which means he's not an honest actor- and that applies to all of the Cargo Cultists, regardless of whatever flavor of shitsandwich they shill for. This is what "Gamers are terrible people" means when you hear people like Jeffro or BDubs shit on them.

The Culture: Yes, Point Out The Obvious One More Time

Oh look another Oldfag having to pivot to softer targets after breaking his ego on the Bros.

Again, a summary:"This system shifts player motivation from "killing everything" to finding creative ways to secure loot. Because combat is highly lethal in older editions, players are incentivized to use traps, distractions, and clever negotiation to avoid direct fights"

Again, "Fucking duh." Again, too many Commies and retards in the hobby so this needs to be made brick-to-face obvious.

That's nice. Why are they after the treasure?

It's not for the XP. It's for what that treasure buys, which XP is symbolic of: power, prestige, property.

You need it to pay the Training costs. You need it to pay medical costs. You need it to pay Upkeep costs. You need it to do Spell Research. You need it to do Item Creation. You need it to hire/retain Henchmen and Hirelings. You need it to build our your man's power structure--the castle, the town, the farms, the mines, the manufactories, the housing, etc.--needed to seize and hold land, land in turn needed to be the base from which your man strides forth to achieve his objectives and win the campaign.

All of that needs metric fucktons of gold and gems to do, as it is the fuel and the lubrication that keeps the war machine that is your man going.

Doing all of that cannot help but to lead to acquiring the experience needed to accomplish the Objective; Gold For XP merely formalizes this into a playable useful abstraction.

Which would not need explaining if this OldFag actually played the game properly.

The Culture: Yes, Dungeons Are Good, But That's Not All Of The Matter

OSRfags confess their defeat by the Bros through studious avoiding of mentioning them while using their arguments is a theme for this week.

Case in point, below:

To save you the time, a summary: "This video features a discussion between Joe, Tim Shorts, and Paul Turner about why modern Dungeons & Dragons (5e) adventures—often written like long, novel-style modules—can detract from the creative joy of being a Dungeon Master. They argue that the best adventures should be defined by a dangerous location and a reason for players to explore it, rather than a rigid, predetermined plot."

To which anyone with the sense of a syphlitic surfer slut will say "Fucking duh" but NarrativeFags Are Not People so they lack this.

What is missing is WHY GO THERE?

Braunstein answers this by making that location be somewhere that either has something your man needs to achieve his Win Condition, has something an enemy needs for theirs, or otherwise is useful to control for strategic purposes. Yes, even the smashing of a random monster lair has uses to it; it provides a location that your side can control and thus operate from in turn.

Dungeons, once they're more than That Place To Jumpstart That First Wave Of Newb Mans, are ready-made defensible locations for ambitious actors to exploit for their own ends. Overworld lairs are the same way; they are no different than the castles, temples, guildhalls, etc. we see in other locations on a campaign map.

Which also means those in the dungeon should also be using them as bases to run their own operations from.

The result is that any serious move on a dungeon or lair should result in a Braunstein session, assuming you have enough players on hand to toss around playable actors like that- and in a proper Clubhouse, you will.

The Culture: The Booker And The Tribal Chief Talk Victory And Conquest With Dunder Moose

Last night Jeffro and BDubs1776 come back two years later to share with you the Triumph of the #BROSR and TTRPG's bright future!

No one comes at us anymore with any teeth.

They are all found out as fake-assed faggots, especially the Oldfags, so said ankle-biting assholes have pivoted to softer targets. They refuse to Git Gud; they sucked out just like the Theater Kids they whine about.

We have won, decisively, and as such we are moving on to fix problems that the Oldfags could not and cannot even comprehend.

Note the BrOSR’s departures from the old guard: Wesely’s Braunstein One: Each player has three goals. Players are scored based on whether they perform their goals. Wesely’s players: “Okay, let’s just read our goals to each other and see if there is anything we can collaborate on.” Jeffro and Budbs after reviewing 12 playtest reports on session Braunsteins: Braunsteins are better without assigned goals and without point scoring mechanisms. The key thing for producing great play is honestly… for the players to lean in to playing their roles. When the dust finally settles, nobody will be able to deny who the winner was. Gygax’s: “As this book is the exclusive precinct of the DM, you must view any non-DM player possessing it as something less than worthy of honorable death.” Gygax’s Players: “Derp derp… Gary didn’t use his own rulez! Lolzololzo” Jeffro: This game is too big for me to master on my own. I need all of the players to be familiar with the rules so that they can help me run the game. The BrOSR: Here are a dozen ways to remove the referee from the position of being the bottleneck on campaign activity. Here is the best way to distribute the load he bears across every player in the campaign so that scaling becomes possible. The old guard did not isolate what made these games work. They did not identify what was holding campaigns back. When Gygax attempted to make a giant leap of refinement in the medium… they turned on him because of his attempt to walk back rule zero type thinking. The old guard was committed to chaos and disorder from the very beginning. About the only reason they speak up at all is to take credit for creating the nongame that D&D quickly became during the eighties. But they don’t even deserve credit for that. People that had no idea what in the heck the early D&D pamphlets were talking about were quite up to the task of inventing that without any help from anyone in Wisconsin or the Twin Cities.

Read on Substack

We not only drive the bus, we designed and built the bus. It's our bus now; you're just riding in it and being a bitchy backseat bozo. Either step up or fuck off.

The Culture: The Oldfags Never Bothered To Figure Out Why So They Had Nothing To Pass On

Not one untrue word said. NOT. ONE.

Here is the evidence we do have: There were a number of campaigns being run was TINY. The expertise of setting them up and running them resided in a SIMARLY SMALL NUMBER OF PEOPLE. All campaign instruction documents before AD&D were rough prototypes. No earnest development could have occurred because each campaign was distinct from all others in its theme, concept, and scope. The people playing in these campaigns may have some nice war stories. But they have no idea what was actually going on due to the rules being entirely in, for example, Dave Arneson's head. (This is the “just asked Wesely” cultural ethos of the era.) Any commentary on 1:1 time type rules will immediately give you insight into the level of understanding of gameplay dynamics a person has. (See Lewis Pulsiphers's remarks on that from an old White Dwarf magazine as a PRIME example.) We have published material that shows that key figures were unfamiliar with second order effects of the rule and what type of play structures it could feasibly support. Wargamers of the sixties were not a preliterate culture. Many of them are still alive today. What did they do when there was a resurgence of interest in campaign play? Did they suddenly decide to show up with the “practice and demonstration and mentorship and play reports and conversations at the table” that would help us achieve success at the table? NO THEY DIDN'T. In fact, they did the opposite of all that. They elected to outright oppose the efforts to recover campaign play. Because “not even Gygax played that way”, “only David Wesely can run a Braunstein”, etc. AD&D was the first time in history that anyone elaborated on the subject of campaign play dynamics at all. Apart from Gygax, every one of these “preliterate wargamers” walked away from the very game rules that even make such campaigns possible. They didn't know what they had. And there would be evidence to the contrary if they did.

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

The Oldfags, too many of whom being Boomers, did what Boomers do and refused to pass on their patrimony.

The worse part is that what Jeffro describes here is something I've seen across the board from Boomers over the years. It's not just a Tabletop thing. They genuinely do not comprehend why they do (or did) what they did, only that it works/worked that way (at the time) so of course it always does so what's the problem? Why bother questioning a damned thing? It Just Works That Way.

This is why they get mad when you show the receipts. You are telling them, to their faces, with facts and evidence, that no It Does Not Work That Way You Fucking Retard and had you bothered to Read The Fucking Manual and properly comprehend--work through--what you read you'd be agreeing with us and not being an arthritic anklebiting asshole.

Now you know why I've come to call them "OldFags".

And those who echo them might as well be Oldfags, so they get the brush too.

The Culture: No Tolerance For Shit Gameplay Anymore

You miss out on some great observations if you're not in the scene. Hence me bringing them to you here. This is a collected Twitter thread which began here.

“An adventure may take 8 hours so we need to use pause time” carries the assumption that the party enters the dungeon and probably won’t leave until it is cleared. AD&D is built primarily on “get the money and run.”

“Creative” DMs: I am putting together a series of encounters that culminate in one moment! My players do not have the will to tell me it wasn’t really exciting.

Actually creative DMs: I have to weave together the results of gameplay to create a cohesive player driven story.

That’s the problem with prep addiction! The DMs either get really down on themselves for not producing an amazing narrative or they get high on their own supply!

Fortunately we can play The One Ring where apparently all the “story leads” are already in place.

Just italicized the title of a product, but otherwise presented as written originally.

Most players and Referees are dogshit faggots at this hobby, including the Oldfags (especially the Oldfags) and deserve to be shamed for their faggotry until they either shape up or ship out.

This also means that "D&DTube" is fucking useless and likewise deserves nothing but scorn and ridicule until they delete their channels or change their ways.

Don't think this hasn't been noticed by those wankers. It has, or you wouldn't have bullshitters like Grifting Beast constantly trying to get in front of the Bros and steer that ship back on the reservation; it hasn't worked, but rather backfired every time.

We know how to win. We're just going to have to do it the hard way.

The Business: The Bros Proved That The Hobby Is Not Commercially Viable

Jeffro observed the following:

You need to appreciate just how new all this is. There is all this stuff that people can see suddenly. And there has never been so many eyeballs on this one domain before. If the insights are not compiled down into essays or documents like Brozer and Umbros… then we lose out on the next round of developments and refinements. The people collecting Superchats and publishing clones cannot assist in this effort. A failure to synthesize the gains of this summer will rob the future of not just a slightly better campaign but entire realms of possibility. “Well, surely someone must have gone further along on this during the golden age.” No. “Well, surely this is just a minor technique here that is unimportant in the grand scheme of things.” No again. “Well, at the end of the day, aren’t you just doing what the old rules say to do.” Actually, no. I honestly don’t think that what we are looking at can be sold. And there is something about that that makes it that much more important that we communicate what we have observed and developed to whoever is going to move the ball down the field two to five years from now.

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

He's right; this can't be packaged and sold as a product.

It's arguable that it can be rendered into a service, and it is unlikely that it could- not a commercial operation, in any event.

This, I say, is part--not all, but very clearly part--of why the Oldfags, the Cargo Cultists, and the PDF Merchants are so mad about the Bros. By restoring the Real Hobby, they reveal what had to be lobotomized in order to cripple it into something that could be commercially viable.

The Bros proved that all of the problems with Tabletop are self-inflicted, starting with Oldfags like Sandy Peterson confessing that they couldn't read (and still can't) so they gutted the game to conform to their illiteracy.

This, in turn, proved Jeffro right again: Tunnels & Trolls was the first Cargo Cult product that is "an RPG" as that cult defines them- not The Only Game That Matters, which is based on (and derivative of) Braunstein.

Boy are they going to be mad when the folks now demonstrating that Traveller also works as a Braunstein show it by their own receipts as they're being published.

The Culture: A Worthwhile Zine By The Purple One

This was worth it.

PDF is here.

Worth having on hand in concert with Winning Secrets and How To Win At D&D.

The Culture: One Move Showed The Superiority Of Braunstein

UMBROS upset in one move.

>Me as Ferigno vs 2 faction leaders and MU3 riding a bronze dragon (also a faction leader)
>win init, cast fireball on riders, 32 damage
>MU3 reacts quickly and absorbs spell into Staff of the Magi he held
>staff is already at full charge, explodes and does 204 damage to all https://t.co/3dVjdrbHUK

— Dungeoneer (@Dungeoneerhere) June 30, 2026

Go ahead, Conventional Play, try to reproduce this organic campaign-changing event by your own practices without resorting to Narrative Logic and thus to forcing results.

You can't. You cannot reproduce the occurance of three faction leaders attempting, and failing through their own incompetence, to kill one mutual enemy leader because you will not ever hand faction leaders over to players to play, and you will not let them engage in PVP combat, so you have to do your Theater Kid agency-nullifying moves to badly ape the result; Uwe Boll does this better than you.

You also can't comprehend this happening away from the table, or with someone else running things while you handle another group's actions, with the results having impact upon everyone else- if not right away, then shortly thereafter as consequences at the Second and Third Order manifest and fallout forces changes in the State of Play.

You Cargo Cultists cannot comprehend this being in players hands to determine. Meanwhile, we who deal in Braunstein do.

The Culture: The Bros Prove That They Know The Way Again

As if in answer to yesterday's post:

Just look at this. The game as it is played by millions of people simply does not have space for this type of thing to occur. Meanwhile, when you play the game as a Total Nonstop Braunstein, you have space for EVERY SINGLE type of game. https://t.co/HZCjeT1N4H pic.twitter.com/rqB8uvqc9m

— Rump (@RumpDM) June 16, 2026

You can see the rest of that thread here.

That's a direct and immediate refutation of claims that it can't be done because it's being done here and now.

The Bros prove their way correct again, and Conventional Play loses because it can't reproduce the results without cheating.

The Culture: It's A Lot Easier When You Play The Game Properly

He did the meme again.

To save you time, this summary:

In this video, RPGPundit argues against the common trend of prioritizing "story" or "narrative" in Tabletop Role-Playing Games (TTRPGs), particularly within the OSR (Old School Renaissance) movement. He posits that a campaign should function as a living, virtual world rather than a scripted story.

See, generative AI has its uses. And the meme, well you know it by now.

Braunstein fulfills this function. It does so far easier than any other approach, doesn't require DM Fuckery to do, or any other form of Narrative logic; running a proper wargame campaign--yes, that includes economic and political warfare, folks--will be more than capable of achieving the desired results with superior engagement and satifaction from the players while greatly reducing the workload from the Game Master.

Simple as. We've proven this by now through Actual Play.

The Culture: A Frenly Man Sharing The Fun on Twitter

Most Bros post receipts on Substack. Some are on Twitter.

In the #Barrowmaze tonight, #FrenlyClubhouse hopefuls the Mernius with hirelings in tow go to delve the dungeon depths. Vermin were waylaid and starving Diabolists were tossed about the crypt & then forced to chew on grave dust before the Curate would absolve them of their sins! pic.twitter.com/9A21jrQVDH

— DM Raptor (@DMRaptorJesus) June 19, 2026

He runs three different groups on the map over a week, so you'll see his reports every couple of days.

So far, he doesn't have any Halfling Death Squads committing war crimes for fun and profit.

The Culture: The #BROSR Finished What The Boomers Cast Off

Rule of Thule, over at Substack, posted this long note on the Bros and Braunstein.

Braunstein is an eternal construct like the Pythagorean theorem. The people who brought it to us deserve to be credited and remembered. 1) Wesely: discovered it 2) Arneson: exploited & mastered the form 3) Gygax: isolated & enshrined its form into game rules 4) Jeffro Johnson: defined it and completed it All four points are important. Points 1 and 2 are made plain in Secrets of Blackmoor. We are only aware of point 3 because of the Trollopulous group’s efforts to run AD&D Rules-As-Written (RAW). They did not set out to demonstrate point 3—they were not even aware of the existence of Braunsteins when they started this process. It was totally unexpected that they find anything at all; they were just playing a game! Thus, this eternal principle—this thing that every roleplaying game wants to converge towards—was identified through the process of obstinately following the rules. It’s worth restating: the Braunstein conceptualization of RPGs would not be understood right now without running AD&D RAW. This fact underscores the importance of both RAW as well as AD&D, on multiple layers. What makes AD&D different? Gygax was an intuitive genius, and he (along with Arneson) understood the sprawling concept of ‘fantasy gaming’ very early on in a way that was far ahead of anyone else. He wrote AD&D as a reaction to seeing people run OD&D wrong (this is clear from reading his tortured lamentations and warnings in the AD&D manuals). In order to get it right, he had to lock down the correct behavior into a rules fence so people wouldn’t screw it up. In doing so, he encoded Braunstein play and assumptions (which can be seen in Boot Hill as well) into the ruleset’s DNA. RAW is important here because look at the path Gygax went on after TSR’s success. If he had not had a RAW mindset—if he had not believed that the rules necessarily communicated structure and precise intent—if he did not believe the rules could enshrine a form of play, then we would all be none the wiser. Imagine all we had was Gary’s interviews and forum comments and remarks from his visits to conventions and a rules-lite You Do You manual: we would think D&D was just a frivolous non-game colored and connotated by the (largely irrelevant) rulebook. When a “game designer” puts out a rulebook which cannot be seriously followed, which does not seem to encode a form of play or any precise intent, comparison with AD&D (or other more seriously designed games) tells us that there’s nothing there to be examined. RAW is important because only by the players adopting a RAW mindset can a game designer convey (via RAW) a substant vision. Designers must demand players play RAW. Players must demand that designers give them something worth playing RAW. AD&D is the example we all—designers and players—aspire to achieve, from both directions.

- RuleOfThule

Read on Substack

TLDR: The #BROSR saved the hobby. The Clubhouse is their castle. What Wizards of the Coast does, ultimately, is irrelevant; we are the future of the hobby now.

The Culture: All The Bros Post Up At Substack

Over at Substack you'll find more people posting their receipts.

Umbros Ep21: "Life Has Many Doors, Thedd Boy!" by Angry Steak

Run: June 16 2026

Read on Substack

As I said before, the action is now at Substack.