The Culture: There's A Reason 1e's Oriental Adventures Did Not Hold Up

This retrospective on Kara-Tur went where you expect.

Muh Racisms. Muh Appropriations. BORING!

These Tourists deserve less.

No, there's valid reasons to nock Oriental Adventures: The reliance on classic Bullshido and other pre-Internet martial arts fabulation for its substance.

We are not talking about any serious attempt to turn a pile of history, legend, and a canon of literature into the source material for an expansion to The Only Game That Matters; for all its (many) faults, Legend of the Five Rings did attempt to do that. We are talking about grabbing all the bullshit of the Ninja Craze, mixing it with Sonny Chiba films as related in a drunk-and-high haze by some Soup Aisle sadsack (that would be Ashida Kim, by the way), and then written in a coke-fueled frenzy with a background of Every Kung Fu Cinema Hachet Job Ever running on a loop on a TV from a second hand shop.

Of course it worked--80s Ninja Craze, yo--but it aged like milk.

It aged like milk because, in order to hold up over time, it had to withstand reconsideration with the emergence of post-Cold War access to information and that includes entertainment media; this is what we saw when L5R--again, flawed as that is--arrived as that property did what OA should have done but didn't.

China, Korea, Japan: These are NOT interchangable cogs. They cannot be swapped with each other, nor with the other great empires and kingdoms of the East, anymore than we tolerate England being hot-swappable with France or Spain despite all of them having knights, chain (or plate), and a shared relgion--even a shared church for a time--and so on.

When your product is informed not by myth, history, or an Appendix N literary canon but by Black Belt Magazine and similar bullshit filtered through half-remembered bad movies, you're going to get a crap product that's going to wear out fast when the zeitgeist shifts. The rise of Mixed Martial Arts and the Ultimate Fighting Championship did as much to destroy these fake-and-gay fantasies as the rise of Historical European Martial Arts.

(You can bet that Mazteca gets the same treatment, and has the same problem.)

You can't sucker the population like you could in the 1980s on this stuff anymore; the basis for the false belief got demolished on Pay Per View, and backed up by the change in Eastern action films, comics, and television.

---

On this day next month, I hit another birthday. I mention this now as a courtesy; if--this is not, never has been, nor shall ever be, expected of you--you like, and you can spare it, head over to this page where I've updated things for this year.

As some of this stuff needs lead-time to ensure it arrives on time, I am saying so now to ensure that this happens.

The Culture: Chainmail, OD&D, & The Basic Expert Showing Receipts

The Basic Expert did a commentary on Chainmail and OD&D.

As he said, The 1973 draft, in my opinion, settles the argument on whether or not Chainmail is needed and how to implement it as Gary and company envisioned. The secondary question is, "Is this good?"

TBE shows his decision process behind why he came to that conclusion, with receipts. This is valuable, as it shows a valuable link in the historical chain of events that would lead from Chainmail through to the various early D&D editions culminating in AD&D 1st Edition. Even with so much of the old lore now far more readily available, things like this still get missed or buried under Just So bullshit that doesn't square with the facts.

You can find Wight Box here.

Much appreciation to TBE for taking the time to record and post this video.

The Culture: Macris Talks With Dominic Martyne About D&D's History

Macris is joined by Dominic Martyne to discuss his crowdfunded book Dungeons & Dragons: An American Institution.

Yes, this is the same guy that was on Dunder Moose the other week. If you missed it, his Kickstarter page is here.

You can expect that the core point is the same: Jon Peterson and his Fellow Travelers cannot be trusted to tell our story, so we have to do it oursevles.

This is Narrative Warfare. Peterson and others of his camp are deliberately rewriting history to suit their ends when they deny that this is a wargaming hobby and thus the game has to be run as a wargame in a wargaming social environment.

This interview is a good follow-up to the Dunder Moose appearance. Watch both, and back the book.

The Culture: Our History Is Ours To Tell, Not Some Soup Aisle Sucker

Dunder Moose had on Dominic Martyne to talk about the history of the hobby and its misappropriation.

@thecriticaldom makes his This Is Dunder Moose debut to set the record straight on the History of Dungeons and Dragons. No disavowals, no disclaimers. No Unhuman pandering. No antagonism for the founders. I KNOW you are gonna wanna hear THIS!

I'm having @thecriticaldom on my show next week! Don't miss it. https://t.co/XJvp8SgOEv

— Dunder Moose (@DunderMoose) June 19, 2025

It is good that the Conventional Play Cargo Cultists are being actively gainsayed. Now we're seeing the record being corrected.

The first good sign: acknowledgement that Fantastic Adventure Gaming is a wargmaing medium.

The second good sign: there is an active effort to get that correction out there in dead tree forming coming soon. (Link here.)

The third good sign: acknowledgement that Jon Peterson is not the only party acting in less than good faith here; old-timers, greybeards, and more also have incentives to bend the record and massage the narrative to favor their ends over others.

The biggest problem is that too many parties are acting like Magic-Users that know they have spells that no one else does, so they gatekeep the hell out of their hoarded lore and receipts in order to preserve their ability to gain from that knowledge. This is untenable in the long term because, like it or not, only institutions can afford to do this for any longer than a single lifetime and this hobby isn't that- yet.

That's coming to an end, and it needs to. We have to be the ones that tell our history to those we bring up behind us- not bad actors, not outsiders. If you have the scratch to back this, do so when his campaign goes live.

The Culture: Uncle Kevin Continues The Retrospective

This past week, Uncle Kevin talked about one of Palladium's lesser-known and appreciated products: Ninjas & Superspies.

The Business: Palladium Rescues A Lost Tie-In Product

Last week, Kevin Siembieda announced that the lost videogame tie-in game would be revived and brought to current consoles and PC.

Expect Palladium jank. The original game was exactly that.

That said, this is what more Tabletop companies that want to Not Die need to do: find AA (not AAA) people to partner with to make adaptations of their IPs, with the specific aim of getting Vidya people to buy their stuff- and thus to pivot out of Tabletop game production into a Brand-focused publisher selling Coffee Table lore books (think Dinotopia) primarily and all else secondarily- as derivatives of the audience's fascination with the world (which, yes, means that the world is the star, not any individual or narrative in it).

If anyone could do this well, it's Siembieda; that's what his publishing company is in reality- he sells a lot, but it's played little, as most read/dream/write fanfic than play these jank games. He just needs to be shown this and convinced he'd do better if he reorganized Palladium accordingly.

The Business: Tabletop Has Reached "Does It Take Glock Mags?" Level Of Maturity

I do not think that there is any design space left in Tabletop. It's been 50 years. What works is now not only well-known, it's well-trod and proven itself outside of Tabletop by being moved to Vidya. We are 20 years past end of the explosive growth and its transition into maturity; not we are in Establishment, and all that is left is refinement into a final form that fits all proven use-cases- unless interrupted by outside events.

The Slop Merchants keep trying to pretend that there's room left, but "LOLsorandom" non-design isn't a design paradigm- it's an excuse to spew blather and bullshit while pushing the duty to make it work on to the end user. Yet we see time and again via Revealed Preferences, Network Effects, and Lindy Effects what does and does not work in this medium- and what failed promises actually work better in other media (i.e. lots of overcomplicated designs work far better in Vidya than Tabletop, but Tabletop still demands a solid structure to make it a proper game at all).

Therefore there is only room to backtrack, to review, to inquire, to investigate what is and what was to find what works and what doesn't- what is and what is not a real game- and for those that fail to measure up, to figure out what needs to be done to rectify it into a real and proper game instead of a line of Endless Product Slop.

Once a given category of thing--an object, a pursuit, a practice, etc.--is known in a nigh-Platonic sense it is not surprising that all change turns into convergence upon that category's final form where what it is gets nailed down and set in stone as Best Practices until an outside factor disrupts it- whereupon that convergence process will begin again once that outside factor is accounted for.

Tabletop Adventure Games, as a medium as well as a hobby and a product category, has reached that point. The recognition of this inevitability came 25 years ago, with the Open Game License and the d20 System Trademark License, but not even Wizards' current management blowing both of them up could stop this from happening. This is what the common hobbyist wants, from the most casual to the most hardcore, as shown by Revealed Preference over time.

Therefore we are now in a retrenchment period. The smart thing to do now is not wild experimentation. The smart thing to do now is to revisit, review, relearn, and remaster--to master for the first time for so many of you--the real games that exist and to interrogate them throughly as the #BROSR has done.

There are Big Things left to be had--I will post one at the Clubhouse today--that I am surprised hasn't been pushed harder or by more people as it answers a lot of complaints, and there are things being uncovered about this hobby born because Prussians had to find a way to cope with Napoleon flexing so hard on them yet to be found. (We're already seeing signs that Levels are not just an artifact of Chainmail.)

But the wild experimentalism? Done. We have defined what this is and how it works by now, so all that remains is to refine to perfection.

Narrative Warfare: Peterson Puts Poison On His Pen

Diversity & Dragons covered this earlier this week.

Yep, usual Death Cult hitpiece bullshit.

Yep, usual Narrative Warfare playbook: do a more or less clean initial effort to get in the door, then start slipping in the poz after this point; if this resembles how the sorts who engage in predatory relationships operate, you're ahead of the game. Cult psychologies do cult things.

Which means that everything he's published to date is suspect. That's a damned shame, because man that's a lot of work to double-check.

I wish I could say that I am surprised or disappointed. I am neither. That's how bad it is.

The Culture: This Hobby Really Did Go Down The Wrong Path

Night Danger posted a fantastic thread on Twitter the other day. Here's what he said:

"According to Donald Featherstone, Tony Bath served in the Royal Navy during World War II and his immediate family suffered when his father's grocery store was bombed.

It was asserted by Jon Perterson in his 2012 book on the evolution of roleplaying that Bath set his rules in a period far removed from modern combat, but this is contradicted by Donald Featherstone and Phil Barker who state that Bath wanted ancient warfare type rules to recreate the wars from his favourite fantasy world, the tales by Robert E. Howard of Conan the Barbarian.

Although the rules were for the medieval period, the goal was to apply them to the world of Hyboria. This is also supported by various photographs of these early games that have captions referring to Hyborian armies.

Bath's act of generosity was giving his rules away for free. They were a set of instructions, without an introduction; a set of rules for an enthusiast to take and play their own games."

- Intro to Tony Bath's 1956 Medieval Rules, edited by John Curry

TONY BATH BELIEVED IN A HOBBYIST CULTURE!!! HE BELIEVED IN THE COMMON GOOD!!! HE BELIEVED IN PRETENDING TO FIGHT GREAT ANTEDILLUVIAN WARS AGAINST DARK SORCERY!!!

Put another way, he didn't commercialize his hobby.

If you want an obvious example of why that's a bad idea, go look at Games Workshop. They are infamous for changing their games to milk their targets for every last penny in a short period of time, including the promulgation of Corporate-Approved Play via its stores and events as the way to play the game and through that artificial Social Proof scheme they enforce the wholesale change of product lines specifically to get targets to CONSUME PRODUCT to stay Corporate Approved.

Notice that this does not account for any Death Cult pozzing. This is pure Mammon Mobster bullshit.

The hobby is better served by having people take a ruleset and showing others how to play it as it is written. That's service, not product. Back then that meant having locals who knew the rules inside and out teaching the game to others on a regular basis in local stores and clubs. Today you can do that with a YouTube channel, and you can do that with just a smartphone and some basic knowledge of how to shoot and present- you can do this on your own and on the cheap.

"But without Brand the hobby will shrink!"

You mean all the locusts, parasites, and clout-chasers will get flushed out once the hobby ceases to be commercially viable? Sign me the fuck up!

This hobby is far, far better off with a much smaller--but far more committed--population of hobbyists who are in it because the practice of the hobby in and of itself satisfies an itch that cannot be satisfied otherwise.

The irony would be that, being no longer a commercial pursuit, it would become a quieter scene because all of the Soup Aisle derelicts would be flushed out with the Tourists and Casuals (used as stalking horses for the Death Cult); the latter sustain the former because the Soup Aisle are ready recruits for all sorts of dumb shit that the Death Cult pushes- just like their counterparts in other cultural niches do.

And without the rejects and their enablers, the overall quality of the hobby would improve- and its net status would be far better than before. It's be something you'd find men like Peter Cushing playing again.

The Business: Why The Cargo Cult Had To Lobotomize The Hobby

The fact that led to the lobotimization of the hobby and the Memory Holing of the Clubhouse

Even from a conventional perspective, this should be the least onerous BROSR take out there after 50 years of disappointing setting books/pdfs pic.twitter.com/vDURIaXtAI

— GelatinousRube (@RubeJelly) December 14, 2024

This is why Fantastic Adventure Games are an inherently anti-commercial hobby.

All material after the rules manuals of the game are completely superfluous and surplus to requirements, if the tabletop publisher is competent and did their job. (Guess what? All but a few of them were not, and are not, and of those that were all but a few of those went to Vidya because you can actually not be in poverty that way.)

In the years before the Internet, sharing the unique creations of hobbyists in local Clubhouses was impractical. That has not been the cast now for 30 years.

The commercialization existed because a few of the old timers thought they could make a living, even a fortune, off doing so. In that historical moment, a moment now long past, they had a workable idea. Unfortunately, that idea was not "Let's teach these kids how to play the game we created" but rather "Let's sell them endless slop" and that would have very bad consequences down the road (as the entire Free-To-Play/Pay-To-Win microtransaction business model came out of the Cargo Cult's gutting of the Real Hobby to make room for Endless Product Slop).

We don't have that now. We don't have the lack of networked communications. We don't have the lack of speed of communication. We don't lack the ability to participate remotely. What we do lack is a very large demographic of young adults and adolescents with plenty of disposable income to throw around, and plenty of alternatives that better serve the Revealed Preferences of the target audience. The conditions that enabled Boomers exploiting their juniors while denying them their rightful patrimony are now gone.

In short, the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play--while it arose out of Boomers fucking over their kids for cash--was only possible in a narrow historical window, one now closed. As the winner of the Boomer Business Bustout, WOTC's on their way to Vidya. That sucking sound will collapse commercial viability and wreck everyone else- including those that live by e-begging, as DriveThru is also going to die a like a bitch when WOTC's defects.

The Cargo Cult of Conventional Play will get wrecked as that collapse goes down.

Tourists, Normies, and Casuals will follow WOTC into the Walled Garden and get sheered like the sheep they are. Conventional Play cultists will follow along or quit, save for a few. The result? The hobby will become as it should have been all along: wholly non-commercial.

The Clubhouse will replace the Game Store, designers will stop being a thing, the con scene will die (Thank God!), publishers will close, and what will replace it are a network of Clubhouses all focused on playing one game to mastery in a single decentralized campaign. Hobbyist creations will be the only additional content sources, spread by publishing as part of the practice of always bringing the receipts for others to review and learn from.

Bust out the stores and the studios. Bring back the Clubhouses. Burn the industry to ash, then mix the ash into the cement that rebuilds Clubhouses worldwide. A better hobby future, one that follows the road not travelled, awaits once we torch Omelas and purge the derelicts from the Soup Aisle that inhabit it.

The Culture: Confirmation From The Last OG

Oh no, Soup Aisle Derelicts.

Weird, i distinctly remember a bunch of OSR types criticizing the Trollopulous campaign's use patrons to kickstart the domain-level interactivity in its first Braunstein... "It was never done like that!" and "the patrons didn't earn it," we were told... https://t.co/YbE4khItyH

— Cirsova MAGAzine of Thrilling Adventure (@cirsova) December 8, 2024

Yes, the Bros are doing what was originally done. Suck it, anklebiters. Even better is that we didn't need any paratext to figure this out; it was in the text.

Bend the knee. Acknowledge the tribal chief. Admit that you too can learn how to win at the game. Then learn how to Braunstein by picking up BROZER.

The Culture: The Cargo Cult Slop Merchant Fears The Collapse

Matt Colville put out a long video about the hobby in the 1970s today.

To which I can summarize thusly:

Why this nearly hour-long diatribe on the early days? Why this promugation of shibboleths and Just So stories?

It's Narrative Warfare. Look at the conclusion you're intended to take away: "Gygax BSed, ergo there is no correct way to play so Conventional Play Cargo Cult is justified."

That still sounds really stupid to say, especially in an otherwise inexplicable and unneeded video that does nothing to promote anything he's pushing, so to find the reason you need to get into what is not said- or named.

There is no reason to cut a video like this unless you're feeling a need to defend your position. Colville knows that SOBS' Big Move is coming and he knows that it's an all-digital, always-online Walled Garden business model. That's an assertion that there is only one correct way to play the game (theirs), but that's not Colville's only target. He's not brave enough to name the leviathan looming above (SOBS) or the behemoth rumbling beneath his feet (the Bros), but he is hoping to stop what cannot be stopped all the same.

As Jeffro has said elsewhere, "The Elusive Shift never happened. People just stopped playing the game."

That's what this bullshit is really about: justifying Conventional Play and buoying the Cargo Cult thereof in the face of an oncoming existential one-two knockout.

And if Colville thinks the Bros are hardline about this, he should sit his contacts within SOBS down and get them comfortable enough to confess that the Next Edition business plan is itself a push far more hardcore than anything the Bros have said or done to ensure that everyone plays the same game exactly as SOBS dictates. That's what being always-online and all-digital does, and the purpose of a system is what it does.

No, Matt, your commercial plans are fucked. So are those of your fellow Cargo Cult Slop Merchants. Walled Garden, Clubhouse, or Quit- those are your options, and you don't have what it takes to follow SOBS' lead into the digital domain, so that route is closed. You can survive by doing like Chris Gonnerman and making your living elsewhere, but you won't do that and neither with all but a few of your fellow Slop Merchants. More likely is that you'll quit, but that's akin to saying that you're more likely to be crippled than killed in a car crash. This means that the Clubhouse is also closed to you and your ilk because you have to abandon the Cargo Cult to gain admittance, and you can't do that either.

So here you are, trying so hard to do anything about what you know is coming but what will actually work. I won't miss you.

(This video also paints the Boomers in a bad light by implying they are, as a cohort, too fucking retarded to read or write technical manuals for shit. Jesus wept, we are dominated by a generation of narcisstic retarded illiterates.)

The Culture: Uncle Kevin's Testimony Continues

Since the last time I posted this there's been a few additional episodes of the series put up.

If you are at all interested in the history of the Tabletop Adventure Game hobby and medium, this is worthwhile to put on. You get to hear Kevin Siembieda's perspective on all the things. Even if you don't agree, you can come to understand and that will go a long way in figuring out how to make the most of Palladium's products; get into the mind of the maker and you get into the design of the machine.

1. Kevin as an Artist
2. Kevin as a Gamer
3. Origins of the XMas Grab Bag (You can get yours here; you can even gift them for others- ask privately for a list if you're looking to gift one for me.)
4. Origins of the Palladium System

As the old timers start aging out, doing this sort of end-of-career retrospective grows in value. Why? To prevent another round of Memory Holing. I hope that I don't need to impress upon you why that is a bad thing.

The Culture: Uncle Kevin Begins Telling His Story

What's the tell that a turnover of leadership is coming? When the current leadership starts doing retrospectives.

Despite my take on Uncle Kevin and the company, don't take this as me criticizing either party for doing this.

What has been a consistent beat on this blog? The need to preserve the history of the hobby and carry it forward. What is this doing? Exactly that.

It is good, therefore, that Kevin is taking the time to tell his story in his words from his perspective. I welcome this series, and I look forward to seeing more of it. You should too, no matter what is said here or in later episodes. Take it from someone that trained in the discipline: this has value no matter the content.

I am certain that past Palladium employees, partners, and contractors have their own tales to tell; some of them have, at various times, been made public. (Alas, finding them as of this moment is difficult due to Wayback Machine being borked by the DDOS attack on the Internet Archive.) In time, I hope, all of them come out and are collected together to piece together the most accurate accounting of what happened. (If you think that's not a thing, consider World War 2 discourse before and after the Soviet Union archives opened to the West in 1990s. Major sea changes happened and are still happening.)

Why do I say that this is a tell that a leadership turnover is coming?

First, the obvious: Uncle Kevin is a Boomer. Boomers are old, well past usual retirement age old, and increasingly taking up spaces in the warehouses for discarded people we call "Assisted Living Centers" these days and "Old People Homes" for when Boomers threw their parents into them. He can't keep it up forever, and he may not want to, but just up and selling out ain't how people like him--who, to his credit, did build up a publishing company in a niche market from nothing and keep in running for generations despite many (self-inflicted) calamities--want to go out. They want to secure their place in their world first, then transition out into retirement.

Second, Kevin wants (and, to be fair, deserves) to be respected for his deeds. That ain't happening if he doesn't talk them up first, letting others repeat them to ever-wider audiences until he reaches a satsifactory level of recognition and reknown. This isn't not something to fault him for; this is typical End Of Career stuff, Lifetime Achievement Award stuff, and in this niche you don't get the Academy to just hand you your moment and an award on prime-time TV. You have to toot your own horn, remind everyone of what you did and how it made Current Year possible, and be shameless about saying "I did that!" Stuntmen, SFX guys, concept artists, novelists, etc.- everyone at that point wants the acclaim for the work they did over their career, which means they're looking to take their leave and this is the Swan Song.

Third, by talking up himself and Palladium now Kevin makes any potential sales offers lean harder in his favor. Yes, including any from those already working for him that offer to buy him out. That's just playing the business game. Can't hate the man for that; it's just smart business, and he's survived enough to learn a thing or two about business by now.

Therefore I'm expecting this to be an implicit announcement of his intention to retire, thus this is part of his farewell tour before he ties up loose ends and hands the business off to someone else (and deposits a fat check to use as his retirement fund). I'm assuming that he doesn't just shut the company down, or retain ownership and just become hands-off on operations, both of which could happen, but most Boomers like him are looking to cash out and that's why I say this is leading up to him selling the company and heading into the sunset.

In any event, this is the beginning of the end. May it be a good one.

The Culture: What Is The Implied Setting Of That Game?

A while back I took a look at AD&D1e's three core rulebooks, read the rules and so on, and deduced what the world implied by those that core ruleset is.

I think it is time to do this for another product. First to see if it is a full and complete game, and second to see what the setting implied by its core rules is, so (again) I am excluding products sold with explicit settings (that filters out Palladium Fantasy, Legend of the Five Rings, etc.) and adaptations from outside the hobby (so no, not looking at Pendragon (et. al.), Star Wars, Conan, Call of Cthulhu, etc. either).

I'm also going to look at something that's not been talked about much, but deserves the attention nonetheless, as it will also be used to compare to the licensed game that got made out of it shortly thereafter.

The game:

Iron Crown tried very hard to make a fantasy adventure game that was sufficiently familiar to AD&D1e users that they could transfer over with little difficulty, but different enough to not only avoid being sued, but that the experience of play itself would be different and thus interesting for those dissatisfied or seeking a palette-cleanser.

Which means that, of course, the licensed game is obvious if you know ICE's history.

Why the second edition? Because that edition fixed oversights that the first missed, starting with some rather obvious ones of "Why not throw around those lightning bolts?"

Why juxtapose them? Because, believe it or not, you could--and it is heavily implied, were--meant to use the former as the full system for playing the latter; what was there was meant to used partially as training wheels and partially as component replacements.

The result? A clear intent that the experience of play in the former would not be the same as the latter, despite using 99% of the same rules, mechanics, and procedures of play. As this is not Palladium Books, that could be the case. I am curious to see if this bears out or, like Palladium, it does not.

Don't expect anything imminent; got to track down materials and spend time doing hardcore academic reading and research. Findings will go up at the Clubhouse, as Rolemaster and especially MERP are obvious cornerstones to build a Clubhouse upon.

As for the question I use as the title for this post, I may use it for later posts where I do attempt to answer it for certain unspecified products.

The Culture: Elfquest Gets An Anniversary Re-Release

We interrupt our regular posting to boost the signal on this classic's anniversary reoffering.

We're thrilled to partner with @Chaosium_Inc to bring back the vintage ElfQuest Roleplaying Game in celebration of the 40th anniversary of its original release. Ayoooah!

All of the details:https://t.co/07JblW2r2V #RPG #ElfQuest

— ElfQuest - Fantasy With Teeth (@elfquest) September 16, 2024

ElfQuest Classic is coming to Kickstarter!

This new Deluxe 2" boxed set is filled with all the material from the original 1984 release and supplements—read more on our website!

Read more: https://t.co/DK5sZit6gG

Sign up now & be notified at launch! https://t.co/WblL9Fhdhl pic.twitter.com/melwfGKlRs

— Chaosium (@Chaosium_Inc) September 16, 2024

This is not going to be some mind-blowing work of game design; it's going to be Conventional Play because by 1984 the Cargo Cult's throwing the Real Hobby down the Memory Hole had been completed.

What is notable is that this is a piece of hobby history, both as a work of technical design and as one of the pre-Star Wars examples of tie-in products using IP from outside the hobby that would set the stage for West End to make an offer at Lucasfilm a few years later.

It would be worth studying it and comparing it to proper games to see (a) what is lacking and (b) how--if desired--that lacking could be remedied.

The Culture: You Can Own Some Real Gaming History Artifacts

We take this pause in our regular beating of Soup Aisle Sadsacks & Brand Cultists to boost the signal on this:

Frank Mentzer is selling quite a piece of D&D history.

His collection of Tom Moldvay’s PERSONAL AD&D core books and Monster Manual. Too rich for my blood.

Would be nice to see it in the hands of someone like @GHC_and_Tacos to be preserved!#DnD #dungeonsanddragons pic.twitter.com/PROtImVfFS

— YoDanno #DragonlanceDragonlance (@YoDanno) August 18, 2024

Get a hold of Mr. Mentzer (on Facebook) if you have $10K USD to burn. These deserve to be in a loyal hobbyist's home or a faithful Clubhouse's archives.

The Business: Sooner Or Later, Someone's Going To Fuck Up The Trend Of Republishing Foundational Works

For all the good stuff coming out about Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, sooner or later someone was going to fuck it up. You are here.

(That press release from the Arneson Estate is here.)

I can't call who's at fault here, nor do I want to; if this ends up in court--and it may--let the lawdogs and the secular priest sort it out.

That said, failing to provide sufficient receipts proving legal authority to the acknowledged owner/controller is a very bad look. No, it doesn't matter if Party A and Pary B as individuals don't like each other. No, it doesn't matter what Party A prefers; Party B does, and I would not be surprised if Party B prevails due to some combination of IP law and Estate or Contract law.

The other thing to note is that this sort of stupidity is far too common in Tabletop and has been since the 1970s. We just didn't hear about it as much until The Internet let all the disconnected hobbyists come together to share all their Just So stories. There may be enough here for the YouTube Lawyers to cover it on their livestreams, especially if the two parties continue to shit on each other in public.

Expect more of this to go on if this gets published. The names of the old timers are Brands to themselves; you better believe that folks who shouldn't will capitalize upon it.

The Culture: Braunstein Talk With Griffith Morgan

Jon Mollison will have a livestream tonight with at 6:00 P.M. Central Time.

Braunsteins, that not-so-missing link between wargames and RPGs, are all the rage these days, and one of the foremost authorities on those heady early days of tabletop RPGs is with us to talk about the birth - and birthing pangs - of the hobby.

I'll be in the chat so I'll see you there.

The Culture: Peterson's "Playing At The World" Gets A Revision

The book that would end up causing a revolution from both above and below is getting a second edition.

As I mentioned years ago, this book and its follow-up (The Elusive Shift) are serious works of scholarly rigor. They aren't light reading; you need to change your approach to reading to get the most out of it.

In short, it's a small miracle that this is happening because we know all too well the general illiteracy of the Casual, the Tourist, the Brand Cultist, and especially Cargo Cultists. The original book found its audience, who then took what was therein and translated it into forms that the aforementioned would accept (even if it comes with a hefty side of disparagement of those who made it) in order to grease the wheels for Current Edition to become what it will be in the near future: a Mobile Trash app.

But it also found an audience of the old-timers and those dissatified with Sorcerers By The Sea, who used it to execute a long-term preservation and revitalization campaign that is now driven by the #BROSR and their concerted, persistent campaign to revive the Real Hobby, preserve it for future generations, and take the hobby down the road that the Boomers did not choose in the 1970s.

The original 2012 publication, two years before the original Gamergate, primed the pump for Jeffro Johnson's Appendix N book which would lead to the explosion of indie genre fiction and the #BROSR as both parties took from that book and began to first read the old masters in earnest and then to build anew from forgotten foundations.

From Secrets of Blackmoor to How To Win At D&D, from Cirsova Magazine to the entire explosion of indie novels and magazines in its wake, Peterson's tome primed the pump for the change in the hobby that we see now- good and ill alike.

The reason? Peterson, without intending to do so, cracked the Conventional Play Consensus by removing the past from the Memory Hole.

I am curious to see if the revision of this tome also indicates a change in the narrative, and if so in what direction. We'll see soon enough.