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.
I'm not a Dolemwood guy. Don't see the point of it.
But it's worth it get a passing familiarity because then you can easily follow along such articles to find and appreciate things like this:
The Duke’s player’s intention for this Braunstein was supposed to be a ducal summit to redraw borders. Instead, the capital was invaded, the Duchess was kidnapped, Baron Hogwarsh was murdered by a (star) man wearing his face, a senior Church official died in the streets, and half the great powers of Brackenwold watched it happen. Whatever this setting was before this, it is not that anymore.
Hie over to Substack if you're not already there, find the Bros and their friends (including myself), and read along.
— Marshal Bohemond ⚔️⛨ | Space Marine Vtuber (@HMBohemond) April 1, 2026
This is evidence of Refusal To Engage.
The further tell that Games Workshop is backpedalling? The new edition. Fan favorite Imperial Guard hero is back? Blood Angels get the focus again? 4th War of Armageddon? They're retreating due to the poz push failing.
Retreating, but not surrendering. The tells are still there in the new releases--there's a signal for a new Girboss Commissar to take over from our hero, but GDubs has not yet committed to it--and you still have other signs of the sickness therein but this means that it's time to double-down on the pushback and hammer GDubs harder where it hurts--where they care--and pirate harder.
Those new models? The STL files should be in the wind ASAP so Printer can go BRRR and you can make them at home for a fraction of the cost and equal quality.
"But they demand official models!"
How will they know? You're going to treat those wankers as Enemy Agents and lie to them about the provenence, right? Of course you are. You do your part, and they'll pass any inspection necessary, so print away and give no fucks--or money--to corpos that hate you.
This is how it has to be done; play the game, but give them no money. Make the spreadsheets bleed.
Remember the massive Proof Of Concept that proved the BROSR correct, the Drakonheim Campaign? They're back, they're on Dunder Moose, they're talking Winning Secrets, and they got Jeffro and Rule of Thule to come on with them.
You can all sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up now. The receipts are to the moon! You can read for yourself when you back Winning Secrets.
There's plenty of commentary to be had. Players deserve less. Frustrated Novelists deserve nothing. Muh 50 Years Are Always Wrong, and The Bros Proved Themselves Right.
Sunday saw Jeffro go on with the Superversive crew.
Winning Secrets is going to be a world-shaking book, first in Tabletop and then--because Tabletop exercises stupidly-outsized cultural influence globally via Dungeons & Dragons--into other culture-shaping media, where it is not out of line to conceive of Jeffro being a hidden pillar in the future culture to come by the end of the century as Gygax and Arneson was for the 20th (and preserved that of the 19th via Appendix N).
This not being a Gaming show, we get to see Jeffro talk about the intellectual and spiritual side of the hobby.
You want the other side of the matter? You'll get it here.
We know that Wizards of the Coast bribes YT channels to shill. Some are honest about it. Some.
It is worth looking to see who isn't, and who else (there aren't many, but on the other hand DungeonTubers are cheaper than crackwhores to buy so it could be done) is playing the John to these whores.
And folks wonder why I oppose commercializing the hobby.
Note something that a lot of detractors omit: Jeffro mentioned that the Bros got to where they are BY ITERATION VIA TRIAL AND ERROR. Step by step the Bros pulled all of what the Boomers tossed down the Memory Hole back, figured out how it worked, and (as of now) not only got each part working but successfully reconstructed the real machine that those Boomers originally published and got it operational again.
"The rules were not incomplete for Braunstein play."
The Real Game was complete. People played it wrong and the Boomers did sweet fuck all about it. They just willfully lobotomized the game. That should have led to outright seizure of the company instead of what went down, but that would have inconvenienced Boomers so no- and that's before the Blumes and the Buck Rogers heiress did their damage.
The Bros recovered the Real Game, and restored the Real Hobby. The machine is spreading in its use; all that remains is the organization that needs that machine, which is why the Clubhouse is now ready to return.
That's Good Enough. Normies will watch it. They will pay to watch it. Folks screaming about how bad AI is now are either performative wankers or grossly overestimate what Normies will accept in media.
Remember that is is Nomies that demand "The Same, But Different" in their media; they absolutely accept AI-generated media that is Good Enough and keeps up the industrial-level production of The Same, But Different in their preferred media.
This is not about going from hand-painted cel animation to near-perfect photorealistic live-action. This is about one or two folks, using AI tools, replacing 80% of the people doing bitchwork in media production with machines and software; human involvement moves up the value chain to Command Decision level by cutting out everyone under that level. As it is now, you can have those folks churning out ads (and they already are, as Corridor Crew noted recently) and trailers.
We have people using it to make political ads, merging Meme Culture with Ad Production to be able to seize the zeitgeist effectively and efficiently; AI-generated ads will be the norm within a year or two because they are 90% or less cheaper to make and easier to produce. With the wide release of AI models able to generate consistent video of longer and longer lengths (again, reference what Seedance 3.0 is already rumored to do) this will eat up the entire business.
Live Action is not safe. Animation is not safe. Nothing in media production of any kind is safe anymore. Commercial pressures will compel widespread adoption, trumping everything else, especially since the Chinese will use it to swamp the world with media that is Good Enough to satsify the Normies and that alone will be enough to force the issue. Holdouts will lose, lose fast, and lose decisively.
Hand-crafted, for lack of a better term, will become an luxury. Luxuries do not generate revenue; they are COSTS, EXPENSES, not GENERATORS. The AI-generated production is what will make the "all-human" stuff possible- not viable, POSSIBLE. Just like mass-produced knives, clothes, guns, etc. are what make the hand-made versions possible because otherwise the skills would be lost due to disincentive to learn and practice them- as we've seen with hand-production of paper, hand-binding of books, etc. vs. machine-produced versions.
You had better believe C-Suites across the media business landscape are paying attention. This turnover is already happening, and now it cannot be stopped.
Dude gets it. Lots of these bundles of sticks deserve their job losses; they deserve worse and less.
AAA believes they are entitled to your time, attention, and money. Games Journos--those subhumans--are the goblins running defense for them.
They deserve their failures. They deserve their backruptcies. They deserve their job loses, their career setbacks, their enventually--and, now, inevitable--blackballing.
I support AI for one primary reason: that is the technology that guarantees the destruction and deletion of these hacks, and their eventual discovery near tall river-spanning bridges everywhere.
As for Vidya, so for all media.
That is worth the price of YouTube being filled with a Googleplex of AI-generated fanfilms; you'll find something worth watching out of that- not so as things are now.
The books? The comics? The music? Games? All the same: you WILL find something worthwhile- you won't if the Death Cultists and Mammon Mobsters retain control of the media.
Yarvin's going to get his world of endless absolutist city-states with No Say and Free Exist; it will just exist in pop culture, not in political reality.
In the wake of Ashes of Creation's collapse, we get several takes. Nix gets it: Network Effects trumps all.
Josh Stryfe Hayes explained this (again, in the MMO context) previously.
And, as Preach showed, Blizzard gets that the Network Effect is real- and they seek to capture that utility within its own brand bubble.
Tabletop works the same way.
This is Network Effects in action. This is how and why There Is No Alternative to The Only Game That Matters.
All the folks who quit WOW inevitably return to it; Preach did, Zepla (FF14's Bunny Queen) returned, I quit and came back, everyone does this. The same is true of D&D, and like Blizzard, Wizards of the Coast captures its own disaffected by making older editions legally available thus severely inhibiting attempts to use them to compete from within its own Network Effect. (Not that they don't try; also, private WOW servers exist- same concept, different media.)
The reality is that, due to the very nature of the medium, it is inevitable that it collapses on the dominant Network Effect. What already exists within Roblox comes for ALL of them in due course: one dominant player, within which users generate what they want with the tools at hand.
With a proper game, that's not a problem. That's not the case with most crap on the shelves.
My friend Oliver Campbell has opened a storefront for his art. It's called "The Digital Noosphere" and you can find it here.
The Noosphere: the "sphere of human thought," representing a stage of evolutionary development where collective human consciousness and mental activity become a dominant influence on the Earth.
This place, the Digital Noosphere, combines our creative human minds with generative AI tools, and the necessary delicate human touch that sparks life into art, helping us stay connected and be human.
Stay and explore, and find something you enjoy. Buy with confidence; all of the works here are extremely high quality, and unrivaled.
It's an art store. Oliver makes his own images to Print On Demand. He takes commissions and he'll frame things for you, even if it's not currently listed; if you want something Just For You, ask him. I suggested the Aviator pic you see below, and as soon as I can spare the cash I'm buying the framed version.
Examples:
You want to know how he does it? Talk to him. See those socials on the main page? Check them. He is one man, using the tools now at his disposal, to use his acumen as an artist to create works of quality with such alacrity that it is astounding. This is stuff that would otherwise take weeks or more to produce, and he can do it in minutes--I've seen him do it; that's how the Avaviator got made--and he's already fulfilling orders- including one to Finland and one to Japan, so far.
The best part? There is nothing he's doing that you can't. He'll talk about that too if you ask him.
Like something? Buy it. Want something? Ask him. This isn't the old days; you don't have to chose between fast, good, or cheap now. You can get all three.
The Basic Expert reminds people that The Past Is A Foreign Country.
When The Pundit decrys Wizards of the Coast for turning The Only Game That Matters into Current Year Seattle In RenFaire Costumes, this lack of comprehesion of how the past worked is what he was talking about--and is talking about still--because it betrays that Death Cultists have no Theory Of Mind for anyone outside their cult- their own religion.
They cannot comprehend anything but themselves.
It's no surprise that TBE's getting stick about this in the Comments, proving this point for him. We call folks like this NPCs for a reason.
Arch, following up from Janovich, on Trench Crusade pulling a fuckover job that GDubs would never do.
Shit like this is why TC will not surpass or replace either Fantasy or 40K. At this point it will struggle to compete with BattleTech.
Calling out the YouTube shills for boosting these Commies is just and proper. Arch and Janovich remains undefeated; Pat's looking kinda suspect right now.
LOL-fucking-no. WOTC's position is so dominant that this dogshit is all they need to do to stay on top indefinitely.
Everything that the target audience needs to know that Current Edition is still The Game To Play is right here.
No, you're not the target audience; that's the Stranger Things/Corona-chan crowd, the sort served by drivel like Critical Role.
No, contra the Professor, they are not aging out; they don't have the means to age out, so they're developmentally arrested by institutional powers beyond their control and thus they are staying because damn is it dirt cheap to log into Discord and Beyond and play Current Edition exactly the way that WOTC sells it to them and spend via microtransactions to get the virtual widget access they crave for that dopamine hit that real life denies to them.
Do they need to buy physical product? No. Do they need to order things from a store? No. Go to a store? No. They can do it all cheap or free from home, so they do that; Door Dash, pizza orders, or grocery deliveries take care of the food and drink issue. Chances are good that, unless something they want to use is paywalled and tech-locked, they'll share their virtual content too.
Then they do their performantive psuedo-gaming that is really Fanfiction With Extra Steps, mainline that dopamine (especially the women and girls), and try to do it again as soon as they can because Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangster and the odds of running into a situation like Episode One of Goblin Slayer are slim to none.
That ad? Targets that audience's narcisism drive (again, especially the female players) directly and with the impact of a raging bull.
Yes, WOTC knows what the psych profile of its target audience is; yes, it knows damn well what's going on between their ears; yes, that's why Current Edition is what it is.
So long as WOTC feeds the beast, they cannot fall.
Tuesday night saw Dunder hosting guys playing with Scuttifer Mike.
What did they talk about?
In this AAR of an epic D&D Braunstein campaign, @mikepewpew's players come on to tell about the secret order of druids facing an impossible choice: feed the slumbering horror at the world's core... or watch everything burn. What started as a simple mission to gank a linkboy, spirals into betrayal, kidnapping, and a blood-soaked ritual at ancient ruin that ignites faction wars, sets the Players against each other, and changes the game forever. You won't believe the players' ruthless decisions—and the consequences coming for them. Did they save the world, or doom it? Dive into the drama, PVP breakdowns, and DM insights. If you're into gritty fantasy RPGs with real stakes, hit play now
This is what happens when players play all sides of a campaign's conflicts. Sometimes they are all on one team. Sometimes they are against each other. This was one of those scenarios where players aren't going to be all on one team, but instead are in a Prisoner's Dilemma complicated by a clear incentive for withholding information.
Read the linked Substack article. Someone had to be sacrificed; either the intended patsy gets got, or someone else does, or everyone does. Lots of incentive to defect, but catastrophic consequences for no one getting got.
That's something that Conventional Play cannot do and will not do because they cannot conceive of play being anything but the Get-Along Gang chasing the ruby, especially if they think this is a performative themepark experience where they expect to win as soon as their emotional self-indugence is met.
The Real Hobby is far greater than that, and that's why the #BROSR is succeeding.
Pat here demonstrates a common delusion among the Terminally Online sort.
The delusion: That Wizards of the Coast has any competition within Tabletop.
WOTC is not stupid. They know who their competitors are--Fortnite, World of Warcraft, Genshin Impact, etc.--and there is not Tabletop operator that matters.
Most people who play Current Edition are not Terminally Online and do not care about anything but Current Edition, the same way that most wargamers are 40K Only Andys and don't care about anything else and that cardfloppers are Magic Only Andys and don't care about anything else. If they aren't playing The Only Game That Matters, they aren't playing at all. This has been known for 25 years thanks to Ryan Dancey.
This has been reinforced multiple times, in multiple media where Network Effects are the source of value, over those 25 years. The majority of players in a given medium of that sort are not general players; they are Top Dog Only Andys and refuse to play anything else because, rightly, they see anything else as a waste of time and money. We see the reason most clearly with MMORPGs, but it is there in all of them: the sheer size of the Network enables these people to play how they prefer, and smaller competitors do not. Josh Strife Hayes proved this with math a while back.
Skip to the Conclusion; it's the Highlight skip. That gets to the point I've made, which he independently arrived at.
Pat's assertion that any of these defections matters is delusional. If that were the case, Palladium Books would have overtaken WOTC (or TSR before that) by 1990- by 1995 at the latest. That never happened, and it never will happen. All of these folks, like folks who quit WOW for another MMO, will be back in short order once it becomes clear that Current Edition is where the action is.
Watch for it, and watch how shameless they're going to be about it.
They do not interpret your complaints as valid so long as you buy their shit- any of it.
This is why they go after third party alternatives, legal and not alike. This is why they enforce Official Product Only and maintain their Cult of Officialdom, and why they turn on fan channels on a dime.
They want to establish and enforce Fear of Missing Out and There Is No Alternative. If you would only ignore them and just print your own minis, use counters, and just use PDFs downloaded for free you'd starve these people into compliance with your will.
Again, BattleTech fans know how this is done; learn from them. You can play the game without giving Catalyst a penny.
You can do this, but you have to actually put in work and maintain discipline.
Third, this is a big deal. The tools are now here for small, dedicated teams to not only preserve this lost media but to bring it up to a state where it is stable on current systems and thus make it available again. This is the sort of thing--like MegaMek and Living Legends--that is what makes BattleTech truly owned by the hobbyists and not some shit-tier corpo cockgobblers (dangerhair optional).
I said quite some time ago that we were in for a collapse.
That hit a few months ago. At the time I thought it would be confined to Tabletop; I was wrong- it's across all media. What I did get correct was that this would be an Outside-In collapse pattern of implosion, where--despite the Professor attempting to gainsay this--the historical pattern was, and is again, that Normies (the majority) and their adjacents (Tourists and Casuals) will abandon everything but the top brands in that sector: they are going to retreat to the safety of Brand and Dominant Network.
Why? Despite that too being dogshit, why?
Because it is What Everyone Knows And Agrees Upon. Everyone will collapse back on D&D in Tabletop. Everyone will collapse upon Mouse Wars (which is going to blackpill so many). Everyone already has returned to World of Warcraft. Magic, 40K, etc. are all going nowhere while all of their competition within those niches are increasingly falling away: they're shutting down, downshifing to a self-funding hobby, or (vainly, as it turned out) attempting to swap media to remain viable.
Viable, that is, as a commercial enterprise (i.e. as a business) and thus as a means of farming and accuring prestige and status. All of that is over unless you're The One That Matters.
It doesn't matter if you have talent, or grit, or even acumen and the intelligence to fuel it. You cannot command the attention required because you are outside the dominant Network and its associated Brand.
There are only two ways to fix this, both of which you cannot pursue: be backed by an institutional player (thus negating all risks you otherwise must face), or be independently wealthy (so this is already just a hobby for you), but if you are chosen by one or the other then you can compete from without that dominant Network.
You're not.
Therefore you must learn to compete from within the Network. This is the realm of the "spiritual sucessor" and the "legally distinct not-a-spinoff" where we can and do see success arise, sometime where the offering is a quality work (Xenonaughts) and sometimes not (whatever that not-a-Potter-smutfic thing BookTok femcels are getting off to as they complain about how Wrongthink it is about as of this post). It is this ill-acknoledged element that led to the success of RetroClones in Tabletop; they cloned (a past edition of) The Game That Matters, so folks played them when Official Game did the same stupid shit that WOW did with Shadowlands and Warlords of Draenor (and came back when WOTC did what WOW did with Legion and Dragonflight): come back in greater numbers than what left.
We are a civilization dominanted by Network Effects in all things, from entertainment to firearms ("Does it take Glock mags?") to geopolitics (rail gauges, yo), and more.
The collapse we're seeing are the marginal players and non-aligned actors going first- those least loyal or least valuable to the dominant Network. The collapse will stop when everything surplus to requirements, defined as "Not 100% aligned with the Network", has fallen away or been rendered irrelevant. Convenience, ease of end-use, and conformity to the standard are the measures for survival; successful competition leverages these while tweaking on the margins, like we see with private WOW servers or D&D retroclones.
The bots--"AI"--will only accelerate this process, and it has already begun.
Which dovetails nicely with a Dark Herald article at Arkhaven this past weekend. Key points:
Generation Born Into Decline
Warhammer 40k is their mythic mirror
Tone Resonance: Irony Without Illusion
TLDR: "For Gen Z, Warhammer 40k isn’t nostalgia. It’s mythic realism — a world that reflects the one they’ve always known, just turned up to 11 and rendered in gothic sci-fi.
Which means it is piss-fucking-easy for the Right to win them over for life. Meme the fuck out of the enemy using 40K!
This is the last step Arch needs to take to go from commentator to leader, and chances are good he'll be bullied into it by the enemy sooner than later; his lingering LOLbertism is steadily eroding and soon he'll be where Gen Z is: wholly embracing the Imperial Truth out of survival. The Pontius explained this in one of his videos, and what he said of the Imperium in 40K applies to all children and adults in the West (and I am including "adjacent" nations like the Japanese and Koreans here): THIS IS EXISTENTIAL!
The future can be summarized thusly, if we are to survive: "An open mind is like a fortress with its gate unbarred and unguarded."
