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 Business: Wizards Confirms The Fortnite Strategy

Wizards of the Coast dropped their keynote at GenCon.

What I told you is on the cards is confirmed.

WOTC's taking Official D&D down the Fortnite route of All The Brand crossovers while outsourcing its own IP to aligned 3rd parties to make stuff and going mobile-centric with MXT. Time for the smug face. pic.twitter.com/bnQAF6U4SY

— Bradford C. Walker (@MrBCWalker) July 30, 2026

Major Announcements

Dark Sun returns (Season of Survival, 2027) as D&D’s first mature-rated fifth-edition setting. The harsh world of Athas features defiling magic, psionics, and sorcerer-kings. Releases include the gameplay expansion Dark Sun: Blood and Power, the adventure expansion Dark Sun: Edge of Oblivion, a map pack, DM screen, and a limited-edition Player’s Handbook with alternate art. It introduces the Scion/Psion class and carries content warnings for violence and mature themes (shrink-wrapped with a warning). Localized editions (French, Italian, German, Spanish) follow later in 2027.

Universes Beyond launches as a new crossover initiative:

• D&D: World of Warcraft (Season of Champions, November 2026; early access ~Nov 3, full release Nov 17) brings Azeroth to the table with 13 classes (new/reimagined subclasses and specializations), 16 species (including Dracthyr, Vulpera, etc.), 60+ spells, monsters, dungeons (including reimagined iconic ones), factions with renown, mounts, and more. A map pack with Icecrown Citadel content and other accessories are planned.
• A Star Wars collaboration (Season of Rebellion, 2027) was teased, with more details to come.

D&D Icons (led by Joe Manganiello) pairs legendary creators with the studio:

• Dragonlance with Tracy Hickman.
• Greyhawk with Luke Gygax (drawing on Gary Gygax’s notes, partly through Melf’s perspective).
• Drizzt Do’Urden content with R.A. Salvatore.

Greyhawk: Crown of the Witch Queen is a full-length adventure expanding on Drelnza (vampire daughter of Iggwilv/Tasha) from classic material.

Studio partnerships for more setting content: Ghostfire Gaming (Ravenloft, 2027), Visionary Productions (Eberron adventure featuring the Lord of Blades, 2028), and Kobold Press (Forgotten Realms content, 2028).

D&D Beyond

updates emphasize making the game easier to play together:

• Live Looking for Group tools (Event Finder for stores, rebuilt Discord LFG, limited-time cheap sessions via StartPlaying).
• Upcoming features: rebuilt search, DM prep tools (scene manager, map pins, etc.), mapless encounter tools.
• New mobile app (early 2027) powered by a new rules engine.

Other notes: The Warlock video game protagonist’s patron is the archfey Tasha (voiced by Maggie Robertson); full gameplay reveal at Gamescom Opening Night Live (Aug 25). The official actual-play series Dungeon Masters will visit Azeroth then return to the Forgotten Realms (Icewind Dale). Arcana Unleashed (Season of Magic) arrives in September 2026 with subclasses, backgrounds, feats, spells, and more.

The presentation positioned these as additive to core D&D worlds, with staffing increased to support both classic settings and crossovers, aiming to bring more players to the table across formats. Official details and the full roadmap are available on D&D Beyond and the Dungeons & Dragons site.

Told you so.

All that's missing is the AI bots to run games and fill out parties; those are still in the works, so we'll hear more about those down the road.

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: Observe Cargo Cult Cognitive Dissonance In Action

While I have little respect for Glickner, and none for that goblin with the receding lairline that shits out copy for him, that Derek guy gets it right more than not and Glickner if he in his very narrow range of expertise tends to be right half the time.

Derek said that Hasbro would push WOTC to spread their Fortnite strategy in Magic: The Gathering to The Only Game That Matters. WOTC is doing exactly that.

This is going to work. It worked for Magic. It will work for Official D&D because WOTC's target audience--those hopelessly yoked to Beyond--are exactly the sort of Casuals, Tourists, and Normies that want to do The Current Thing and have no problems treating D&D like an all-you-can-eat buffet.

They want it all. They want it in one place. They want to pay one price to get all of it. They want one set of rules to play all of it. That is the Fortnite and Roblox model AND IT FUCKING WORKS! They know it works because they have the data showing that it works, and they have sufficient institutional knowledge of what Network Effects are, how they work, and why they work that way to prove that this is the smartest strategy for them, Commercial Corpo Tabletop.

For the hobby as a whole? That's a different question.

Being that RFC is made up of Cargo Cultists, they cannot fathom why despite acknowledging that this is going to work and work like gangbusters there is no viable form of competition within the commercial sphere- and that includes everyone that begs on Kickstarter for money.

To the extent that they are played at all, it is because they are within D&D's Network Effect and leverage that to their advantage. That said, they aren't played nearly as much as boosters and publishers want you to believe; none of them solve the Six Session Suckout, the dropoff of interest is akin to that between Normal and Savage raiding in FF14-

Not exaggerating; that sort of "Fuck This Shit I'm Out" has been consistent across the generations, as Ryan Dancey revealed over 25 years ago. The Brand matters, as it is the heart of the Network Effect.

This is why Only D&D--real D&D--Can Kill D&D.

So just play D&D--real D&D--and leave the poseurs selling Temu D&D behind.

The Culture: It's Not Just The H-1Bs Scamming You, Gamer

Witness three useless faggots try to justify their existence.

"So Professor, why did you make Yet Another B/X Retard Clone?"

"Because I am a Very Smart Boi who knows the Real Thing better than the creator so I made the game in my head and suckered you retards into giving me over a million for it."

"You are very smart."

Fuck fuck's sake, this is as Jeet as it can get without anyone actually being a Jeet. Sure, unlike the Scam Race, the Professor will actually deliver but we have Yet Another Fucking B/X Clone when the real B/X is right there and legally available; the only reason to buy a clone is to either do scummy shit with the money or because you're a retard that can't hack playing the real thing.

That is before accounting for B/X being inferior to the Real Game (AD&D1e).

You don't need this crap. You don't need to Consume Product. You need a real game and you need to Git Gud at it. 10K Hours playing the Real Game is superior to giving this waste of flesh, or anyone else making clones, a penny of your money or a second of your time- and yes, you can play for free if you have the hookup (i.e. dig through the Internet Archive or other online PDF archives).

Or you can play a fully functional game like AD&D.

The Business: You Can't Carrot Your Way Out With Retards

On Monday, Arch dropped this.

Pain--the whip, the stick, the brick--is far more likely to get the desired results than the carrot when dealing with midwit and worse quality people.

Arch didn't get into it, but those familiar with how Jeets in power operate are not surprised; they are always eager whip-wielders when placed in power over others, willing to enforce whatever they are told by their masters and patrons, and women are not only no less likely they are often more hair-triggered when they do. Thus Queen Jeet of XBox doing this surprised no one aware of this.

She serves the shareholders. The shareholders want Number Go Up. Whipping the studios producing the products that drive that number, when they have been indolent and incompetent for years on end, is going to produce positive results for now. Given the cultures of those rotting in their chairs there, that is the only way to get results out of these losers.

It's a mixed bag; the shareholders are not our friends, and there is no guarantee that the games produced will be any good, but for now this is a net-positive development. The question that remains is if the public--us--have any leverage over the shareholders, ideally by just Not Buying Shit and (just as important) Not Talking About Shit.

That includes a certain movie currently in theaters.

The Business: Behold Grifting Beast Shilling Crap No One Needs For Games No One Plays, Again

When I say that most Cargo Cultists are Consumerist Product Pushers constantly shilling on the position of "Your game is shit. Buy this widget to fix it" this is it.

Civilized societies string these leeches up and hang them from lampposts.

You don't need this if you have a competent game. You make your own as you go, and as such you care about what happens because YOU HAVE SKIN THE GAME!

This? This is Frustrated Narrative Faggot Syndrome in action, the refuse shat out the anus of a frustrated fake writer and repackaged as a Tabletop supplement hoping to score some sucker's paycheck. Even the Pundit doesn't crap out this waste of wood pulp.

You need a real game (AD&D1e), a blank map, some dice, and about 15-30 minutes. This, at a leisurely pace, gets you what you need to get started.

Everything else is a waste of time, a waste of money, and a waste of attention. Everything. Else.

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: These Wankers Are Pathetic

This was a two-for-one.

Ignore the wider culture faggotry. Skip to the Theater Kid Roasting Hour.

The Oldfags can't (and won't) contend with the Bros, so they have to go at easier game like Theater Kid fags like that wanker they roasted.

Then came the Oldfag Yells At Clouds segment featuring Bob The Bullshitter where they whine impotently about what Wizards of the Coast are doing, when the correct response is "Pirate that shit, buy used or turn those PDFs into POD-ready files and use Lulu for private guerilla products." (Yes, that works; no, it's not necessarily cheap.)

And yes, Bob's a Tourist clout goblin twat who only does Calvinball.

The Bros will steamroll these people as the restoration of the real hobby spreads, in large part due to it not costing you money to play.

The Culture: No Tolerance For Delusional Cargo Cultists Anymore

The delusion is obvious here.

"Everyone" is playing The Only Game That Matters. They are not playing Faggot Bullshit Theater Kid Pirate Fanfic Crapfest.

There, saved you a few hours of wasted time. Go play D&D.

The Business: Even The LOLCow Sees Why The Cargo Cult Is Cooked

The LOLcow gets it. Too many Cargo Cultists refuse to see it.

He didn't say the phrase, but he does comprehend Network Effects. In particular, he comprehends the key element of a Network Effect: control over friction.

Conformity to the Network's dominant party is how and why Wizards of the Coast gives no fucks about the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play; they set the rules, and they know because they have witnessed it in action FIVE TIMES in 27 years that all they need to do is inflict some pain via ramping up the friction on the non-compliant and all other parties will bend the knee.

"But Palladium-"

Is a D&D Knockoff and always has been; it is in the network, run by a man who still thinks it's 1980, which is why people come and go between D&D and Palladium.

Paizo's deep in the shit and unlikely to survive. Lots of other resentful bottomfeeders are in the same boat. Palladium will endure because its flagship took over the space vacated by Gamma World, until its Boomer founder finally fucks off and his successors somehow screw the pooch.

There is no future pushing product. There is only a future in providing a service.

WOTC's pivoting to a service model.

Everyone else is getting crushed, and those not yet showing signs do so at the expense of their neighbors- staving off the inevitable. Things are playing out as I said before; this is an Outside In collapse, an implosion, taking those furthest out first as the frontier collapses inward towards the core in an implosion function.

What WOTC wants is everyone else serving The Only Game That Matters. This is more benevolent than it sounds; a truly Full Corpo regime would pursue extinction of other parties, but WOTC instead wants subjugation in perpetuity and by transitioning the Network Effect into a Walled Garden via Beyond (already the case) this is enforcable in the same way that inflicting a curse does- at a structural level.

WOTC wants to offload the costs of product support to external parties, but retain most of the revenue (and thus profit) from that product support.

They're going to get it because as most Casuals, Tourists, and Normies only go to the dominant party in a niche that means they only use Beyond and thus are readily captured by the Walled Garden. That market vastly outsizes everyone else, and they outspend everyone else (as they are conditioned to be mindless consumers), so WOTC will have the leverage needed to keep everyone else in line. If you want to pay the bills doing this going forward, you are WOTC's bitch.

Unless you seek out the Clubhouse.

(Side Note: UMBROS is now available as Print On Demand via Lulu.)

The Business: This Commercial Gaming Scene Can't Collapse Fast Enough

While made about Vidya, this applies to Tabletop also.

The details vary, but the general state of Tabletop being in a state of collapse is the same.

As usual, Network Effects means that only The Only Game That Matters is going to be a viable commercial enterprise after the collapse concludes. More Tabletop "companies" are actually glorified buskers begging on Kickstarter for their money instead of forming a proper business plan, gathering operating capital (via a bank loan, from family/friends, etc.), and executing that plan in the hopes that it works out.

That's not a business sector. That's a mass psychosis pretending to be a cottage industry.

We're seeing more of the same in Vidya, with more and more "indies" and "AA" going cap-in-hand via crowdfunding instead of doing the smart thing and just plugging away slowly in your time away from your day job until you have enough to go for Early Access on Steam.

More people pretending to be commercial operators need to be forced out of the scene, one way or the other, and that's going to be done by hook or by crook because the economy is no longer willing or able to accomodate this mass delusion in either Tabletop or Vidya- nor should it. More people need to go back to productive day jobs and stop pretending to be Muh Creatives. Their enablers on YouTube need to follow them.

Put on the hardhat and go do your factory shift; it's what you're actually good for, and thanks to Trump reviving Hamilton's economy policy you'll actually have one to work at sooner than later. (Including printing, fuck you Glickner.)

The old days are done, and with it are the priors presumed as true (but never were).

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 Business: This Is What Fighting A Dominant Network Effect Looks Like

Remember what I said about the private server scene being the MMO equivalent of Tabletop's Retroclone movement?

Well, we just saw yet another expression of that being the case. Yesterday, Project Ascension launched their latest game mode: Conquest of Azeroth.

Since a lot of you are neither current nor former World of Warcraft players, I'll spare you the details. Suffice it to say that I'm playing Ranger and Witch Hunter right now and enjoying it. I tried Barbarian during the pre-launch Stress Test, which took a bit to figure out but also turned out fine. Trying the new Support role with the Ranger class. Can't say about the rest.

What I want to explain to you is this:

1. There are Vidya analogies to Tabletop issues.
2. World of Warcraft is the D&D of MMOs.
3. Due to long-running antagonism to its legacy audience, there's been splintering that lead to cloning of past editions; this would lead to official Classic realms, but that was not enough, and neither did the recent Remix limited-time servers do that either, but rather a "Classic Plus" (Vanilla with different decisions implemented, and more content added) is what folks want.
4. Private servers fulfill this demand- as retroclones do for people who want their specific flavor of B/X (etc.) put into a single plug-and-play product. This is mostly a WOW thing, but private servers are also how dead MMOs carry on (e.g. Star Wars Galaxies).
5. Blizzard has become more hostile to this over time, and operators are becoming more savvy about protecting their operations- and not just in immediately rebranding and relaunching after a shutdown (as Turtle WOW did, twice). Other corpos are no friendlier.
6. Network Effects dominate MMOs harder than they do Tabletop, as Josh Strife Hayes proved a while back, so the only viable way to compete is to fight WITHIN the Network Effect.
7. Therefore, only WOW can kill WOW- and thus a superior private server is a threat to Blizzard.

Due to the nature of the medium, and the specific game, something like the Bros happening is going to take a different form than it did in Tabletop.

Instead you're seeing OSR, not BROSR, insurgencies; they're doing the retroclone thing because that's what works. Some wipe their asses with IP law (like Ascension), some pretend it's real and do the "legally distinct" thing, but both of them are doing clones of MMOs with proven audiences because the risk calculation of MMO launching for anyone that is not Le Big Corpo now is too high to be acceptable- and recently failures only doubled-down on that perception (Ashes of Creation also being outed as a scam).

That's why the real expansion is in competing with the dominant Networks from the inside, and as private servers have already proven to work they're going to keep working.

The next step will be to find a way to make a WOW server that finds a way to do Braunstein style play--which, in this context, means somewhere between EVE Online, Warhammer Online, Dark Age of Camelot by way of Guild Wars and its sequels--as was done in many a MUD before that.

And the crazy thing is, I bet some guy--and it's going to be a guy--is going to be the one to take things like Winning Secrets and find a way to make that happen.

The Business: WOTC Turning The Game Into A Solo Mobile Game Confirmed

Pat confirms that what I knew Wizards of the Coast would do next is being done.

Watch the video; Pat shows the job tenders proving it.

You can either enjoy pay your HOA fee to stay in the Walled Garden, or you can prove you're ready for the Clubhouse.

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 Business: "Rules LOL" Is A Cargo Cult Self-Own

Roll For Combat on the narrative attack.

Predictable blather is predictable.

But it does open up a massive line of attack: If, as you say, "Folk D&D" doesn't care about rules then why are you selling yours? LOLCow Garipay gets it. Dancey got it. Cargo Cultists pretend not to get it, but they do as their behavior reveals.

The reason is simple: there is no reason to buy anything but Official Game if the rules don't matter. This is another reason to Just Play D&D.

The reality is that Only D&D Matters. Nothing else does. Not even Cthulhu (most don't know COC exists), Traveller, HERO, or RIFTS.

In reality, what matters is D&D, Warhammer, Star Wars, and BattleTech. Not even Cyberpunk and Shadowrun (despite videogame tieins) matter anymore, while both BT and SW hang on by threads.

The Culture: No, Oldfag Cargo Cultist, They Will Not Just

The Professor shills for CONSUME DIFFERENT PRODUCT to solve the problem his own cult caused.

This is a "Just do (X)" argument.

Fuck you, retard. THEY WILL NEVER JUST!

Network Effects means this is a non-starter, and the Professor is a dunce to make it because he knows--I've told him, repeatedly--that this is not an answer and linked him the receipts.

So yes, he did the meme.

The only viable action is to play older D&D editions. That keeps you in The Only User Network That Matters, reduces friction to zero, and actually fucking works.

You'd think he'd know better, but he's incentivized not to so here he is being stupid on main. 50 years of history shows he's wrong, over 25 since Dancey explained with charts and graphs why he's wrong, and independently demonstrated by parallel competing media multiple times since, and here he is telling you that you're really going to kick that ball this time Charlie Brown.

Just play earlier--better--D&D.

The Business: Paizo Deserves Its Destruction

Paizo is in the shitter.

Death Cultists eating their own is never a bad time.

I want to see Paizo burn to ash. It cannot justify its existence anymore, and could not for over a decade, not after Wizards of the Coast proved the Network Effect is real. This was always a sector on borrowed time, and that time has run out because Diamond fucked the entire sector and only WOTC can tank that without notice. Expect other bottom-feeding scum like this to falter this year and moreso next year because the collapse is here and those that get destroyed deserve it for not moving when they had the chance.

Fuck Paizo. Fuck all these faggots. BURN!

Only D&D Matters. Only WOTC Matters. Everything else in the hobby worth a damn is non-commercial, and thus is in the Clubhouse, where these wankers are not allowed.

The Culture: Winning Secrets Up For Ebook Preorder

In case you missed out on the Winning Secrets Kickstarter, you now have a chance to buy your own copy.

Click on the image above to preorder a Kindle copy, which will be released on the 17th. Another post will be made when print is available.