The Culture: Basic Logic Makes Commies Its Bitch

Boldest channel on YouTube these days.

Keep digging into his backlog. He's got one banger after another.

The Culture: Meet The Wolheim Witch

If you've read JD Cowan's The Last Fanatics, this is independent confirmation.

BTW - here's the poison apple that planted the Upas tree behind "Modern Traditional Publishing" - Betsy Wollheimhttps://t.co/TrqYpUC4cchttps://t.co/KlDS4ds0kJ

Two parts of a fluff article given to her on BlackGate which is the voice of these people - who celebrated the… pic.twitter.com/e5dzCoj9NK

— Maxx Feral (@MaxxFeral) September 24, 2026

Betty Wolheim carried on her father's work, in spirit if nothing else; she's a second generation Fanatic.

She was part of the cohort that began moving into power in the industry in the 1970s, reaching critical mass in the 1990s and seizing power openly from 2000 forward. You can find her successors in the Longhousing of all culture. She was a witch. Her succcessors are witches. Do what is required to deal with this.

Because otherwise this shit keeps happening.

The Culture: The Cargo Cult Shows Its Ass, And The Bros Show They Grok It Better Than The Cult Does

Lots of problems solved by their Cargo Cult and Theater Kid priors being taken out back and shot.

Meanwhile, over at Substack, Jeffro recently talked about unfucking this crap.

Why would you “convert” your game to a Braunstein? This is just weird framing all around. Consider: 1) You can delegate monsters to an adversary player in order to work out how a particular entity will respond to player activity. 2) You can set up a session Braunstein in a single region of the campaign map and then fold the results into the overall campaign state. 3) You can run more traditional style adventure scenarioswhile exploring a mix of competition and cooperation both during session play and also in down time. 4) You can set up a fluid conflict between two distinct adventure parties to be played out over several sessions. 5) You can run a sessionless battle scenario over a span of several weeks with troop movements and a mix of strategy and tactics. None of these options require a consensus or significant cooperation from more than a handful of people for any length of time. The only person preventing you from doing this is you.

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

Not there won't be resistance, but until the AI DMs come online it's Dexter or Death for these people so wear the black hat and Dexter them for their own good.

That resistance has its root in its wrong assumption of what this hobby is, as Rule of Thule explained.

It’s not an objection to something happening elsewhere, it’s an objection to something real happening—to the game being actually played. Consider an abstract game played in a vast abstract space. Within the spaces are two kinds of players: Navelgazers (Ns) and Conquerors (Cs). The Ns believe that all players are Navelgazers and have a shared common understanding of rules that don’t actually exist in the game such as “don’t be unkind towards the pieces of other players” or so on. The Ns are playing a fundamentally different game from the Cs because they presume restrictions and protections etc. which do not truly exist (i.e. they are not actually rules of the game). When they see something that is the product of real play, they will immediately identify that it doesn’t accord with their presumptions. “No one who was trying to Avoid Unkindness [or other such presumptive descriptors] would have engineered this situation.” As soon as they see signs of the game being played to win, they are immediately on the defensive. This explains much of the maligning of powergamers, as Meffridus intuitively understood, because they represent the same threat: that someone will undo the fake game by leaning into the real one.

- RuleOfThule

Read on Substack

David Sirlin talked about this concept in the context of versus fighters. There are players (he calls them “scrubs”) who come into a tournament with the idea that e.g. certain moves are “unfair” or “cheap” and, despite the obvious signs that these moves are clearly powerful, will be shocked and appalled when they are blasted to pieces by other players “abusing” them. The scrub’s false internalization of the rules has caused him to become blind to the game’s actual rules and has led him, on his path of player development, to not only navigate false spaces but to arbitrarily close doors whose opening is necessary for him to achieve his real potential. In the arena of RPGs, we see that scrubs have found ways to form coalitions. They have the ability to aggregate in collectives. Their particular internalizations are not only sanctified by Rule Zero, but each distinct collective can claim membership under a united Rule Zero collective—so long as they acknowledge all the others—and they feel emboldened to claim that no one can tell them they aren’t playing the game, even when they’ve thrown out half the rules and added others. These coalitions are akin to a rogue tournament scene where everyone involved must abide by the new made-up rules, and anyone who insists on following the plain rules can be exiled. We can see the effects of this everywhere. I think it’s no coincidence that Sirlin’s book is titled Playing to Win.

- RuleOfThule

Read on Substack

This is simple to handle. You don't announce the changes; you just implement them step-by-step until you're in full Braunstein mode.

And remember, it's easier thank you think to teach the real game to people. The Internet is not real life, something Cargo Cultists cannot comprehend.

The Business: Explaining Why Big Corpo Hates The Hobby

Last week and over last weekend, Gamza laid bare what Games Workshop is doing and why.

The TLDR is that GW is doing this:

Which means this.

This requires the infantilization of the audience, and Cult Psychology is the proven method to achieve this state.

By doing this, a successful Brand Cult (a Pop Cult) is able to get away with ridiculous things without relying on technical architecture because you make it emotionally painful to contemplate Doing It Yourself instead of swiping the card to buy the Approved Merchandise.

Couple that with deliberately and frequently unbalancing the game and creating a competitive environment--and no, you don't need a playmode of direct PVP to do this; compeititive PVE can and will do this just fine as the MMO world proved over 25 years ago--and you have what you need to create the very Pay To Win conditions we see today in so much gaming media.

Wizards of the Coast's many announced changes will have the aim of creating this effect within its own Walled Garden, and because it is already a proven business model it will succeed and part of that success will come from privledging sweaty tryhard Whales over everyone else- just as we see with 40K, MTG, World of Warcraft (Retail AND Classic alike, and spread successfully to FF14 too, via Race To World First events).

You cannot maintain a commercially viable operation in such an environment, anymore than any MMO game could after WOW hit big. The pattern, repeated across generations and across continents, proves that once this takes hold in whomever wields the Network Effect it will dominate that entire sector of the economy and culture thereafter in a positive feedback loop.

The changes are already felt; every would-be competitor to 40K and Fantasy end up having its players demonstrating the behaviors that make copying GW's moves a no-brainer, just as every MMO post-WOW ends up aping WOW sooner or later because that formula works.

You cannot avoid this now and stand a chance of winning in the commercial space. You can only go non-commercial as a glorified hobbyist or be a grifting faggot like Colville and stay in the Cargo Cult. Otherwise you have to quit the Cult entirely, abandon all pretension of being Le Hecken Game Designer, and just be a hobbyist at the Clubhouse.

The Culture: We Can Freeze Them Out

Last Thursday Chubby Funster cut this video on the new Vampire edition.

Aside from dumping the offenders face-down in a ditch or giving them one-way trips to the Titanic, there are ways to gatekeep.

The first, and most obvious, is to (a) stay within the Network by (b) either using a previous edition or (c) putting our your own fork and filtering out those who do not- and making acquiring copies of that edition piss-easy to do. You are competing on pre-existing presence being your means of lowering friction. If your edition is easy to acquire and use than the new crap, you seize control of the Network and now YOU control what Is and what Is Not.

This is how you win: make your edition less frictive than theirs, take the high ground, seize control (and thus the gates), then freeze them out.

The Culture: You Can't Reason With Those That Kill You When They Can

Vee dropped a reminder to us all on Sunday last weekend.

Normies run off vibes. They are the low-T men and women of the meme.

And we know that Commies Always Lie, thus fulfilling two other memes.

Thus do Commies always run off vibe-fuckery to get and keep power. They are a Christian Heresy based on Envy and Resentment, run by Elite-class cohorts that are on the outs and with dim prospects for fulfilling their class ambitions otherwise- same as it ever was.

They are your enemy. They hate you and want you dead. They hate God and side with the Enemy. They made their choice. Give them their just reward: flame and fire.

The Culture: Of Course They Made It Commie Propaganda

On Tuesday of this past week, Wizards of the Coast confirmed what we all suspected about the Dark Sun revival.

This was not a surprise. This was merely a disapponting confirmation of what was expected.

The entire point of the product release is to push Communist propaganda, removing all of the nuance that existed in the former edition of the setting in the process; you can count on the writers imposing their inverted morality upon the setting's moral compass.

The fantasy that is being sought here is the fantasy of the Party Vanguard establishing the Communist Uptopia. That is it being done in a wasted world where iron and steel is more scarce and precious than gold, where the conditions of life are so precarious that it only compares to Arakis, and as such the implied anarchy championed by the Revolution is Extinction with extra steps.

You'd think that this was willful and deliberate on the part of WOTC and its partners, but no these Dangerhaired Dipshits are not that cunning or savvy. They are the Useful Idiots that get shot when the Revolution is achieved, the Genestealer Cultists that get eaten when the Tyranids arrive, the Chaos Cultists that get used as ritual fodder when their masters need to summon something with power into the world or meatshields when the Inquisition comes calling. They are the minions, not the masters.

They are mask-off with this because they believe that they have achieved the Revolution, at least in Tabletop, and in this they are mostly correct in that because they hold the Network Effect and have successfully achieved an Enclosure of the Commons through erecting the technical architecture required to seal up the funnel that Cargo Cultists rely upon to acquire customers and thus 100% capture the commercial side of the hobby (and with it most of the hobbyist acquisition) into their Walled Garden.

So long as this is deemed Brand Safe by WOTC's C-Suite this is going to continue.

That is the only form of leverage you have left. You must convince, by word and deed, that this direction IS NOT SAFE FOR THE BRAND!

If you are neither willing nor able to do that, then your only other option is to leave that entire model of hobby organization for the older model revived by the Bros.

Or you can quit, which you will inevitably do if you do nothing because you're going to lose players over time and be unable to replace them.

We are past the Collapse now. You either follow the majority into the Walled Garden, you change your ways and earn your place in the Clubhouse, or you're done. Choose before it is chosen for you.

The Culture: Theft Of Credit Is Narrative Warfare

Jeffro noticed a thing:

Let’s talk about the game in which all of these games took place in. The one in real life. I was, ultimately in a kind of prisoner’s dilemma with a couple hundred people throughout this process. Lots of people opted for betrayal along the way. How did this manifest? A) Cutting videos to relay key revelations from my efforts without saying my name. B) Making a lifestyle about complaining about me and calling me a fool. Or calling everyone that has something nice to say about me a dummy. C) Publishing a book that plagiarizes my work. D) Going to people privately and telling them not to speak with me or associate with me. E) Attempting to get somebody to make a Kickstarter Boondoggle based on my efforts while crediting my ideas to an enemy of mine. F) Being ugly to me while I was attempting to run a game session with the purpose of trying something new that wasn’t fully understood yet. You can probably cut some of these people some slack. If you were charitable. I mean… at every stage, it was not obvious how significant and even historic this effort was going to be ultimately. And I can tell you that the vast majority of the people in the vicinity of this work could not even admit that there were problems with what we were experimenting with, much less accept that there might be solutions to any of them. Some of these people that opted for betrayal make a lot of noise. But the one thing they could never make was a lasting contribution to game design that can stand the test of time.

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

While I don't know all of the parties, I can suss out some of them. Respectively:

• Earthnote, Tenkar, Grifting Beast, and the rest of the YT Oldfag Crew and the newfags riding their coattails.
• Griff
• The fake Appendix N book and its authors: Ann VanderMeer (ex-Tor, so a Commie) and Peter Bebergal (another NYC Commie fag). Tor's kept a hand in on Tabletop for decades due to personnel having current or past experience therein, and thus maintained contacts with Fellow Travelers at Wizards of the Coast and its orbiters like Paizo, so when Vox Day (Tor's enemy) decided to publish Jeffro's book they had to respond with their own to attempt control of the Narrative.
• Also Griff
• Would not be surprised if this was also Griff
• Not a clue here

Freezing out Jeffro, and by extension the #BROSR, is Narrative Warfare. This attempt to retroactively take credit for all of Jeffro's work, all of the Bros' work, means that the Cargo Cult can steer the hobby back into the Cult Compound- the same thing that got done to George Lucas, by the way, as the Fanatics never forgave him for shattering their hold on the Narrative.

We're seeing the same reaction in Tabletop. Jeffro and the Bros broke the Narrative, such that enough hobbyists can see it and apply it, and that's too much for the Cargo Cult since Wizards of the Coast is giving them the shaft from the other direction at the same time by rendering their entire business model defunct.

Fuck these OldFags. Sideways. With a shovel covered in shit and burs.

The Culture: Still Trying To Stop The Inevitable

Today in Oldfags Trying To Steal From The Bros.

He completely ignores player-directed development.

Braunstein does this better, and because the receipts are being shown repeatedly the influence spreads without pause. Oldfags have to get out in front or get rolled over, and so we have channels like this trying to steer things back on to the reservation.

Fuck this guy. Fuck all the Oldfags.

Braunstein or death.

The Culture: JD Cowan Sees A Pattern Repeating

Last Sunday, the 2nd, JD Cowan dropped a post about the Enshittification of Culture.

He saw in that, thanks to the very pretentious faggot at Write Conscious, that the same pattern whereby Commies turned Adventure Fiction into "Sci-Fi" and ghettoized it into a forum for their fetish faggotry got played out across all of the Culture Industry.

The blueprint for the sort of literary takeover that destroyed OldPub is epitomized by the siffy cultists way back in the 1930s, who then seized the industry in the 1940s and turned a market for normal people into their own fetish playground. The pulp revolution over the last decade specialized in the rejection of their frame of "Don't Read Anything Before 1940" to discover just how much fantastic writing was buried for petty political reasons and deliberately left out of print. You can read more about this specific problem in The Last Fanatics where I discovered it for myself as I was writing about it. If one cares about art at all, OldPub is a failure at preserving any of it.

For a more general picture of what is going on now, I suggest the above video showing how the Literary Cartel used the Fanatic blueprint to do the same thing to the wider industry. Books about nothing written to no one and heavily leaning upon gimmicks and the promise of becoming a micro niche celebrity is what the Literary Cartel decided to do to their industry. It's like its own Oprah's Book Club, complete with the advertisement of religious cult figures for whatever ideology OldPub wants to foist on you.

The video in question, by the way:

There is no saving this without exercising State power to seize the industry, cull the enemies therein, replace them with sane people while in receivership, and forcibly reform the industry back into something functional and sustainable that can justify its existence.

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: 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: The Theater Kids Aren't Pretending Anymore

The Pundit can't even.

They don't play. They're Theater Kid pretending to be gamers.

This is not at all surprising, and yet Wizards of the Coast keeps trying to pander to these broke-assed poseurs despite their revenue coming from actual hobbyist gamers because the company is captured by Death Cultists for whom pushing the poz trumps producing playable product.

This isn't working in Vidya, Comics, Novels, or another commercial entertainment media and there isn't an infinite amount of money to prop it all up anymore--yes, it's drying up, but those resevoirs got filled before the cutoff so this is a long draining process; the aim being to outlast the pressure--which (so far) only C-Suite (due to pressure from Hasbro) is at all aware of.

In short, Home Office needs to do some Tard Wrangling in Seattle.

This has to stop, for the cold-as-ICE reason that it's damaging the Brand and with it the Network Effect- and as it goes, the entire hobby goes.

Which means retarded shit like what the LOLcow pulled has to be openly, brutally, and ruthlessly mocked and derided--bullycided--into a ditch.

You can see how badly the Muh Narative brainrot hollowed out his skull.

He doesn't play, by the way. He's a Gamma's Gamma, so no one will play with him; this why all he does is ramble in his car. That's why other OSR guys farm him for content while they bully him for being a retarded megafaggot.

Burn the faggots. Save the hobby.

The Culture: Yes, TouristFag, They Are

Bob The Tourist Soyfag said something.

Since he's not worth an embed, I'll let the bot summarize.

Bob World Builder examines how tabletop RPG publishers use nostalgia as a product strategy. By contrasting recent releases from Dungeons and Dragons with successful independent games like Shadow Dark and Neon Odyssey, this analysis explores the balance between honoring classic influences and delivering original, modernized experiences in an age dominated by corporate reboots.

He pushes the same shit GriftingBoi, The Professor, and other Cargo Cult cunts do.

Being a Tourist, he's married (despite his fronting otherwise) to Wizards of the Coast and to Current Edition because that's all he knows or cares about as shown by actions.

He won't do what actually works: playing older editions. That doesn't keep him in the graces of the Cargo Cult, or with WOTC, so he won't go there.

Fuck that poseur Tourist twigfag soyboi.

The Culture: The Grifting Beast Casts Sophistry Again

Grifting Beast back again trying to ankle-bite the Bros.

GriftyBoi uses Appeal To Trivality citing a claimed gap between the "hardcore" and the casual.

• He uses a Troy Press Survey of 204 casual players who claimed to have played D&D- claimed but with no confirmation. Most respondents couldn't name basic rules, classes, or even all six core ability scores.
• GriftyBoi uses this to claim that for the vast majority of players, D&D is a social activity—a "folk tradition"—where one friend acts as the Dungeon Master to facilitate a shared story, while other players simply show up to enjoy the experience without needing to memorize mechanics. We know this is a lie because Vidya exists and mogs the shit out of this claim.
• Grifty says that Mearls confirms that research at Wizards of the Coast often showed similar results when surveying the general public. He highlights that casual players often have a vague idea of the game's mechanics but prioritize the social, storytelling aspects of the session above the technical rule set.

He uses this to justify his Calvinball fake-and-gay bullshit Cargo Cult.

No, GriftyBoi, this is a game, games have rules, and the rules are to be obeyed. "Folk tradition" is not an excuse for disobediance. It's a way to get treated like any other cheater- thrown out and banned. Claiming otherwise makes you no different than the Death Cultists claiming orcs are racist so everything has to be changed, which makes you as much of a noxious faggot needing the flame as any of them.

The Culture: "Do This AD&D Thing To Fix Your B/X Problem" Is What Oldfags Always Do

All these OldFags stuck on B/X "solve" things by doing what AD&D1e presumes as Standard Operating Procedure.

This will become fucking obvious when players start running opposing factions. Now players start seeing why they need to do things with that gold beside rack it and stack it.

Calling them on this has predictable responses. Contempt for Oldfags is justified; just play AD&D1e.

The Culture: The Poz Did Not Go Away

Wednesday last week, Diversity & Dragons posted this.

Sensitivity Readers.

That means pushing the poz, which means that Hasbro has begun gutting Wizards of the Coast of its excess capital via laundering it through stunts like this.

Note I said "excess"; Hasbro wants WOTC to be an operational subsidiary, which requires capital, but as a digital publisher using a lot of LLMs you don't need a lot of people (and thus salaries) or machines (thus physical capital); you need a handful of people and some IT infrastructure (because of Beyond), which is a far leaner operation than WOTC is now. (Go look at the Gatcha operations.)

For all the complaining going on, there is only one publisher in the Commercial side of Tabletop constantly in the Top Five that isn't a poz-pusher: Palladium Books. All others are of the Seattle Set, meaning that those publishers depend on WOTC and WOTC's funding sources for their own operations; most of the also-rans, being Death Cult fronts, are also poz-pushers to varying degrees when they are not Pop Cult heretics.

The Clubhouse side, being non-commercial, can push back effectively against this. No commercial operator can due to Network Effects smothering their efforts, coupled with the far more active efforts WOTC made to cut off recruitment of their castoffs and rejects and the continued refusal to actively market and advertise themselves in order to create their own customer acquisition funnel as well as a customer retention strategy- something every business worth a damn actually does.

The Culture: RIFTS Proves That Genres Are Fake And Gay

"Genres" are fake, especially in Fantastic Adventure Gaming. While naysayers can claim that universal systems aren't proof, 1990 did see definitive proof that every last Normie on the planet cannot deny and it came from Michigan's Most Boomerific Comic Book Guy.

"Muh Fantasy" is in there.

"Muh SF" is in there.

"Muh Horror" is in there.

"Muh Post-Apocalypse" is in there.

It's all there, all thrown together into a single pot of stew, and in that glorious janky mess of dysfunction that is Palladium it is made crystal clear that it's all just Fantastic Adventure in various shades and grades- nothing making it so blatant as using other Palladium products as "parallel dimensions" or "pre-RIFTS eras".

This is the game that has the no-shit-it's-really-him Old West legend Harry Alonzo Longabaugh (yes, The Sundance Kid) as a significant character along with Boomer Truth Regime Obligatory Nazis, Cartoonish Evil Demons (of various kinds), Space Opera that you'd swear was stolen by Marvel for their own superpowered Space Opera comics (because yes, Uncle Kevin is that old), Barely Legally Distinct Not-Gundams/Not-MADOX01s/Not-Powersuits (from Bubblegum Crisis)/Not-Landmates (Appleseed), and so on along with Not-Jedi/Not-Lensman and such.

That RIFTS is not openly acknowledged as the obvious truth nuke that it is regarding that Genre Is Fake shows how Cargo Cult dogma (derived from the SF Fanatic Cultism, backed up by Lester Del Ray's diktat) is just Commie Demoralization by another name.

The Culture: You Cargo Cultists Are All Liars

No more well-known a figure than Mike Mearls confirms that Cargo Cultists are Calvinball Cockups.

Don't lie to me about this. Most of you CANNOT READ FOR SHIT AND SHOW IT BY YOUR ACTIONS!

You are the meme, you lying Oldfags.

I will not hear anymore your claims of knowing how to play. YOU. LIE. You have lied, for some of you, over 40 years and counting.

You will have to prove that you actually play the game before I will hear a word you say henceforth. Post receipts. IF IT IS NOT SEEN IT DID NOT HAPPEN!

The Culture: The Oldfags Still Trying To Seize Back The Discourse

The Bros are the only reason that videos like this get made now.

We have so gotten in the Oldfag's head that they are forced to cut videos like this now, hoping to regain control of the discourse.

Note that, again, this is a Basic video. Not B/X, but Basic all the same, and they are again forced to read the fucking manual (or at least try to fake it convincingly) to attempt the argument.

Attempt, because the reality is that they remain trapped by their priors. They presume Get Along Gang play, with all the baggage therein, so this cannot help but come across as an irrelevancey because there's no player-controlled opposition (or even player-controlled unaligned party) pursing their own agendas operating in the same area able (willing or not) to intercept and interfere.

Until they accept that Braunstein is foundational, they will always come across as (a) chasing the Bros and (b) Trying Too Hard to fit something they don't really do into their Cargo Cult dogma and practice. This is no different a reaction that the Neocons and LOLberts in the Republican Party trying to fuck over Donald Trump and MAGA and constantly failing due to not comprehending just how hated they are by the base and the people at-large because it's the same phenomenon driven by the same principles and thus has the same reactions and leads to the same result.

Good. Death to the Cargo Cult.