The Culture: You Want To Be There On Wednesday For This

You'll want to be there for this one.

If you don't have this book, and you can't get it via your county library, Amazon has you covered.

The Culture: A Reading List To Compliment Appendix N

JD Sauvage did everyone a solid over this past weekend and posted a nice reading list; some Appendix N overlap, but not all of it.

The full thread is here. Below is the first post.

The reason for the list? Talk about getting away from Pink Slime Fantasy slop, which means reconnecting to the fantastic literature that existed commonly before Lester Del Ray's 1975 diktat that make "Muh Tolkien" Clone into said slop.

You may balk at some of them, but you shouldn't; everything not of Appendix N that he included fits just as well if not better. (Flash Gordon and the original Buck Rogers novel certainly do, as they are derivative of A Princess of Mars as much as Brackett's novels about Eric John Stark are.)

Through that connection, notably at the pont of Dunsany, one needs to use these to bridge back to the mythic and thus past literature to mythology. (Yes, history is important, but we're talking about a failure of imagination and that stems from a lack of connection to the mythic via mythology.) Treating the myths of old, and the folklore that arised from them, as real as history and physics are- to see these as the means by which our ancestors (and some peoples today) see how life works and why it works that way.

This is what was lost during the 20th Century. It can be corrected now.

Once that connection is restored, that meaning needs to be expressed anew in ways that matter here and now. That's how this flattening is reversed.

The Culture: Yet More Proof That The Time Of The Cargo Cult Is Over

This is the opening post in a thread. It's also bait; he's talking about Forgotten Ruin.

Ruining Braunstein

I'm here to Ruin your Braunstein. By which I mean that I am going to attempt to connect the newest old thing in D&D with my favorite contemporary fantasy series. pic.twitter.com/JLKpjVhFVT

— Benjamin I. Espen 🏛 (@BenEspen) April 19, 2026

The rest of the thread is here.

This is a worthy and necessary pursuit.

Yes, reconnecting with the culture that birthed The Only Game That Matters is necessary. That takes time to achieve at scale. This? This is a stop-gap measure to get folks playing the Real Game now by presenting it in terms they understand, which buys times for the cultural reconnection to complete itself.

Also, Forgotten Ruin is a lot of fun.

Just as there is, at last, acknowledgement on the disastrous damage of Lester Del Ray's diktat on what "Fantasy" is we have arrived at acknowledgement that The Only Game That Matters is not Le LOTR Game, or Muh Medievalismsmsms but instead a Fantastic Adventure Braunstein game where one comprehensive ruleset is more than capable of achieving the incredible objective of fulfilling the fantasy of being Someone That Matters in such a milieu. Swords, sorcery, six-guns, starships, Solar Rayguns, Psionics- The Only Game That Matters not only can do it all, it has.

Which is why, in the end, you only need one game to do it all- you just need to Read The Fucking Manuals and apply what's written.

The Culture: They're Trying To Steal Credit For Appendix N Revival Too

Again, the Bros moved the needle so hard that the Soup Aisle has to get out in front lest they lose all Narrative control (too late).

It wasn't that long ago that, as with the gameplay, this too was "No one reads that!" or "It doesn't matter!"

Now they're trying to say they've been with it all along and it does. Counterfeit and catemite as usual. These videos came out at the same time this past week. I won't say that there was some Slack channel coordination, but rather that it's curious that this all is coming out with the appearance and as someone long used to "my betters" doing coordinated Narrative Warfare against me and my interests I automatically take it as a red flag when I encounter even such an appearance thereof.

If so, my God are they bad at it. If not, but instead this is a rapid iteration of Monkey See, Monkey Do, that is just as pathetic.

This is some Bahgdad Bob bullshit. Just stop. You make the Death Cultists at WOTC look cool and competent by comparison.

You want the real Appendix N lore? Jeffro nailed that years ago, such that they had to run out a knockoff to grift off its success.

Accept no substitutes.

The Culture: There Is Only Fantastic Adventure Gaming

"Fantasy" is fake.

"Science Fiction" is fake.

This is the list from Appendix N of the AD&D1e DMG.

The "Fantasy" side:

• Robert E. Howard's Conan series — Barbarism vs. civilization, ancient sorcery, monstrous horrors, and heroic adventure (no scientific framing).
• Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd & Gray Mouser series — Urban thieves, wizards, demons, and quirky sword & sorcery in the world of Nehwon.
• J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings — Elves, dwarves, orcs, ents, halflings (hobbits), rangers, dragons, and epic quests (Gygax downplayed Tolkien's overall impact but acknowledged specific borrowings).
• Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword and Three Hearts and Three Lions — Norse/Arthurian mythic fantasy, faerie realms, regenerating trolls, paladins, and Law vs. Chaos alignment.
• Lord Dunsany's works — Dreamlike fantasy, gods, and wonder-tales.
• Michael Moorcock's Elric/Stormbringer and Hawkmoon series — Chaotic swords, multiversal fantasy, and Law/Chaos themes (influenced alignment and artifacts).
• Gardner Fox's Kothar and Kyrik series — Sword & sorcery pulp with liches and lost-world adventures.
• John Bellairs' The Face in the Frost — Wizards studying spellbooks (direct Vancian precursor, but pure fantasy).
• Lin Carter's World's End series — Distant-future fantasy (but leans more mythic than technological).
• August Derleth, Manly Wade Wellman, and others — Horror-tinged fantasy or weird tales.

The "Science Fiction" side:

• Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars (Barsoom), Venus, and Pellucidar series — Planetary romance with alien civilizations, radium-powered airships/flyers, ancient tech, hollow-Earth inner worlds, and sword-swinging adventures on other planets or inside Earth. (Sci-fi framing via "science" of alien biology/tech and interplanetary travel; heavily influenced exotic settings and lost-world dungeons.)
• Poul Anderson's The High Crusade — Pure sci-fi: medieval English knights capture an alien spaceship and fight interstellar invaders. (Spaceships, aliens, and technology as the core conflict.)
• L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall — Time-travel sci-fi: a modern archaeologist is transported to the Dark Ages and uses knowledge to prevent societal collapse. (Temporal displacement and applied science/history.)
• de Camp & Fletcher Pratt's Harold Shea series and The Carnelian Cube — Modern protagonists use mathematical/logical formulas to enter parallel mythic universes (e.g., Norse gods, Irish legends). Magic is analyzed and countered scientifically; alternate dimensions via equations. (Direct influence on D&D's planar/multiversal travel and "logic vs. magic.")
• Philip José Farmer's World of the Tiers series — Pocket universes and artificial worlds created by god-like ancient beings using advanced technology; interdimensional gates/portals and unique solar systems. (Sci-fi multiverse and demi-planes; inspired Oerth-like settings.)
• Jack Vance's The Dying Earth and The Eyes of the Overworld — Far-future Earth where the sun is dying and ancient super-science has decayed into "magic." Spells are memorized formulas (Vancian magic system); ioun stones and bizarre tech-magic. (Core to D&D's spellcasting and thief elements.)
• Roger Zelazny's Amber series and Jack of Shadows — Shadow worlds as reflections of a prime reality (parallel dimensions); a tidally locked planet split between science and magic sides. (Multiversal travel with tech-magic blend.)
• Sterling Lanier's Hiero's Journey — Post-nuclear apocalypse on a mutant-riddled Earth; telepathy/psionics, ancient tech remnants, and priestly quests. (Science fantasy with psi powers.)
• Fred Saberhagen's Changeling Earth (Empire of the East) — Post-apocalyptic Earth where magic and technology coexist (AI "gods," changelings). (Blended sci-fi ruins and sorcery.)
• Margaret St. Clair's The Shadow People and Sign of the Labrys — Dystopian futures, vast underground labyrinths, and societal collapse. (Inspired dungeon complexes, drow/underdark ideas, and sci-fi horror.)
• Leigh Brackett, Frederic Brown, Stanley Weinbaum, Jack Williamson, and Andre Norton — Mostly planetary sci-fi, space opera shorts, or speculative tales (aliens, future tech, mutants); Brackett's planetary romances echo Burroughs.

There is NO DIFFERENCE! The trappings are not the genre. The setting is not the genre. The genre is in narrative structure, not marketing a product; these stories all have the same narrative structure, so they are all the same genre: fantastic adventures.

Therefore they can all fit into--and use exactly as written--the same ruleset because they're all part of the same game: a fantastic adventure game of Braunstein play.

This is why, decades before Banpresto gave us a different example of the same thing in Super Robot Wars, AD&D1e could and did handle all of this using the rules as they are- and it explains why, despite the Boomerism of its designer and publsher, RIFTS maintains its enduring appeal as it too put the lie to "Fantasy", "Science Fiction", and "Horror" as separate and distinct genres- they are, at best, product categories following Madlib templates like Harlequin reduced love stories to Chicklit mass production content output- something that LLMs can do better than any human writer could ever achieve.

This is why, believe or not, these are Fair Game for the Real Game.

The Culture: Jeffro And The Superversive Crew Talk Winning Secrets And The Culture

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.

The Culture: The Mighty Sons Of Hercules Vol 2 Now Funding

Friend of the Retreat, Cirsova Publishing, have a new campaign.

You can find it here.

The rest of Cirsova's catalog can be found here with purchase links. Buy their stuff.

The Culture: Oldheads In Tabletop Need To Be Checked

This past week, Cirsova mentioned this stupidity from one of the oldheads.

I concur with Cirsova's reaction.

"Tell me you haven’t read any Appendix N without telling me you haven’t read any Appendix N.

Tell me you haven’t read the pulps without telling me you haven’t read the pulps."

I've been reading Lin Carter's Zarkon: Lord of the Unknown series of pastiches of classic Hero Pulps. There's been dungeons in each one. Those are pastiches of the old pulps, set in the 1970s and '80s, and they have dungeons that could have come out of Appendix A of the AD&D1e DMG.

The first two books are from 1975. Carter put out plenty by that point, hence his inclusion in Appendix N (and why I've been reading his stuff), and Carter was well-known by folks like Gary and Dave at that time; there is no way that the presence of those dungeons were not known, especially as Carter (along with others like L. Sprague de Camp) were instrumental in keeping Conan (another hero that delves his share of lairs and dungeons) alive and in print during the long night before the ressurrection and rehabilitation of Howard's original writing that we've enjoyed in the last 15-20 years.

Sandy's talking out of his ass and you can read for yourself to prove it. He, like so many other oldheads, are showing their ass by consistently getting things wrong that we can independently verify. Shut the fuck up already, Boomer!

The Culture: Turns Out More Than SF & F Is Fake

Night Danger makes a bold, but correct, claim.

Video going up later on Lovecraft, "Cosmic Horror" isnt a real departure from Gothic, and why contemporary artists fail to capture what Lovecraft was doing

— Night Danger (@WithNightDanger) June 14, 2025

Here's the video.

Death Cultists will not react well to this. Then again they don't react well when they are confronted by reality.

Night Danger gets it. It's the matter of the Sublime that makes the difference, and it is this quality--a non-materialist quality--that is what makes fantastic literature its power. It is what makes horroric tales scary, yet satifying. It is what makes heroic tales thrilling, yet safe. It is what makes tales something more than the ordinary, and thus it is what separates a lot of slop media from the pinnacle they immitate like a Cargo Cult.

The same is true for those in Tabletop trying to use this hobby to chase a high they had with some source material, not realizing that they're using the wrong tool for the job and then getting mad when nothing they do "fixes" what they see as "broken". Why? Because when you're playing Tabletop, you are--for all intents and purposes--not separated from the danger or awesome incident at issue. You are in First Person mode, so it many respects when your man kills the dragon it is real to you and it's also why recreating what Lovecraft (et. al.) did in literature does not work; there is nothing keeping you from it- whatever it is.

Virtual experiences, so far as your brainmeats are concerned, are as real any literal ones. Trainers know this; that why they do it.

You can't do the Sublime without destroying the power of the Tabletop medium.

That's why, in addition to Gothic Horror being fake, Tabletop-as-Narrative-Medium is also fake. Virtual Experiences can only had in First Person mode; this is why Videogames are better at Muh Narrative faggotry than Tabletop because you can do that.

The Culture: You Will Never Run A Book Club This Cool

It is good that some of the folks out there are pushing hobbyists to engage with the foundational literature of the hobby.

The #BROSR's big hype man BDubs got a few of his pals together to turn what could have been the lamest of things--a book club--and made it into a competitive event by turning it into a tournament of competitive book reviews and essays. That event? #BROXT.

Due to my distrust of my crooked co-bookers @SaintsOfOHS and ESPECIALLY @DunderMoose I am removing the #BroXT booking committee from judging the Jeffro Crown Tournament! We’re also putting @JohnsonJeffro in a cage to prevent interference on behalf of Dm Rump again! #dnd https://t.co/xktpHMcRhq pic.twitter.com/fb15sskhWm

— BROXT Dubs (@Bdubs1776) January 30, 2025

Yes, all this for a book club.

It was simple enough: two men take a up a reading assignment, then write an essay about it in a public-facing outlet (e.g. Substack) with regard to playing the game. Best writer advances.

But no, BDubs doesn't do simple. There's Twitter threads, there's wresting angles, there's melodrama, there's sound and fury and sincere absurdity that only a Bro event can provide.

Hit up that hashtag. Read back through the threads and posts and the number of times someone came out of nowhere with the steel chair. Pure hype, pure amusement, pure excitement, and more than a few marks got rooked into helping BDubs promote the event thinking that they'd ankle-bite and instead broke some teeth on a piece of iron instead.

As I write this it's reached its climax and will soon descend into its denoument, but already there's hint of another stunt--another event--seeing if anyone will bite.

How brilliant is this? Enough that if I needed a light to torch vampires with, it would count as real sunlight from a clear sky at noon.

BDubs and the Bros clearing out the Soup Aisle (Dramatized)

You're not going to be able to pull this off for your book club. You can come up with something good enough.

The idea here is simple: hand each player in the book club the role of a Sage. Each round of competitive essays is two Sages disputing some issue of academic import, import that has impact on the campaign, with the winning player getting their Sage's opinion to become the consensus opinion (and if you've been in academia, you know that "consensus" and "correct" are not the same thing).

You can even do this in real time, representing Sages traveling to some location to dispute the matter before an audience of their peers (as real world medieval academics did), which may also prompt the intervention of other parties (i.e. hiring an Assassin to murk one or both with a literal poisoned pen, the Master of Winter takes offense at the topic and attempts to kill everyone there, World War Wish: The Sequel erupts as a direct consequence, everyone is turned into Muppets, etc.).

Hell of a way to run a book club, ain't it? Not as cool as #BROXT, but still pretty cool and it allows people not ordinarily playing in the campaign an avenue to do so.

"But what happens if my Sage gets murked?" You get another one. Sages are free; you can just roll them up. I have 435 Sages at home (they are very, very smol).

Sounds far more fun than "This week we're reading The Time My Incompetent Girlboss Ass Coundn't Decide Between The Rapist Prince Or The Princely Rapist At Dragon Riding School, doesn't it?"

The Culture: Literature Is Not A Medium Of Ludology Either

Cirsova Publishing appeared on Rollin' Bones to talk LitRPG. This is the flipside of "Gaming is not a Narrative medium."

First, this is a good podcast episode. Starting with BROZER as a way to ground a podcast built around Tabletop Adventure Games before transitioning out of gaming to talk about genre fiction (and thus getting over to LitRPG) was a smart move.

A lot of the discussion about LitRPG and how it affects Tabletop Adventure Games (and, at some remove, videogames) would get lost without that grounding in the present moment, then backing up to Appendix N, before moving forward again to first Pink Slime Fantasy and then to LitRPG.

And yes, I definitely see that the core issue is incursive spiraling of self-referentiality. I take my own experiences as a Boy Scout, and my observations of the experiences of others--military, paramilitary, etc.--whom I've been able to read or listen to. It's telling that someone's writing stories about this stuff when they lack either first-hand experience or have done extensive research or reviewed the foundational texts on the matter; it's just most obvious with Pink Slime Fantasy because too many people think All Fantasy Is The Same and thus treat it like they're filling outa Mad Lib template.

One thing that I would like to add: having real-life experiences that are analogous to what goes on in Tabletop Adventure Games makes both the design and the play of same a lot better for all concerned, just as having real life experiences makes writing fiction better. It's just more difficult these days because almost all of the experiences are locked down with non-disclosure agreements, Court-ordered sealing of files, or National Security sealing of the same.

Which leads me to my core point: just as Gaming is not literature (Ludology is not Narrative), the reverse is also true. "Storygaming" reveals the former error, and LitRPG the latter. It works only in a few corner cases, exceptions that most do not comprehend and thus prove the rule's validity by their incompetence because Cargo Cult Gotta Cult.

Gaming is not Narrative. The two media have very different and antithetical incentives because they work towards entirely antithetical purposes. Stop trying to ram square pegs into round holes.

The Culture: The Consequences Of Memory-Holing The Past

Yesterday we had a one-two punch of Why Your Conception Of Fantasy Is Pants-On-Head Retarded.

One came from Cirsova and the other from Grames Barnaby. I'll put both threads' first posts here; click through to the linked threads for the rest.

Something I've observed and repeated is that most people's idea of "Tolkienian Fantasy" and the modern state of the fantasy genre is actually Warhammer filtered through the lens of Warcraft. https://t.co/jGb44EPdxH

— Cirsova - JD Cowan's Star Wanderers Live Now on KS (@cirsova) May 11, 2024

Daddy Warpig's post starting all this, regarding Tieflings, had in turn exposed just how degraded our culture has become.

Modern day “Twee & D” isn’t for me.

It makes epic evil into something cute, harmless, and twee.

Tieflings are Demonspawn and Demonspawn GET THE KNIFE.#BringBackActualEvil pic.twitter.com/d3BmNdilSP

— Daddy Warpig (@DaddyWarpig) May 9, 2024

Which feeds back to Jeffro Johnson's quip: "Don't read anything after 1980."

The Cargo Cult of Conventional Play coincided with the latter generation of the Fanatics in American adventure literature ("fantasy" and "science fiction") taking over OldPub during the 1970s, with 1980 being the tipping point. You did not see today's "fantasy" and "science fiction" before then.

This older, better literature is what Gygax put into Appendix N. This is also literature which most Cargo Cultists have never read, as we have seen after Jeffro Johnson wrote his book on the subject years ago- something so threatening that there's been deliberate attempts to gaslight people away from Jeffro's book.

That includes many of those making deratives of the game, in any medium, and that definitely includes Fightstick and Fightcraft. The most charitable take is that this is the result of information degredation via a long game of Telephone (aka Chinese Whispers).

The more likely take, given the histories involved, is deliberate Memory Holing by a few and the exploitation of the laziness of the many; it is no surprise that every edition of D&D after AD&D1e deliberately went further from its literary (and thus cultural) roots, sometimes for crash and petty reasons (e.g. anything to do with Lorraine Williams and the Blumes) and sometimes for ideological ones (e.g. the latest gaslighting out of Sorcerors By The Sea).

Severing a people from their roots takes many forms, but one manifestation is persistent across incidences: making it easier to gaslight the targetted people into believing lies that their forefathers knew to be such.

"It's not evil. It's just misunderstood and unfortunate."

"Alignment is just a personality marker."

Both of these are lies, and it would not be possible to say them with a straight face had the culture of yesteryear not been deliberately hijacked, suborned, shivved, and tossed into the Memory Hole. This is what Daddy Warpig got at, and thus what Grames and Cirsova followed up with, to predictable blathering from Death Cultists (arguing in bad faith, as usual) and others engaging in Normie-style Ego Defense freakouts.

In short, non-answers. Just bullshit and tantrums.

It is no surprise, therefore, that the same Memory Holing that threw the real game--and thus the real hobby--into a dank dungeon of its own until Jeffro rescued it was also the same process that pulled a Satanic inversion of morality on the hobbyist subculture as part of the larger cultural inversion via lesser successors of a great original game.

The literature that persists is that which is grounded in the real. Fantastic literature is no different. Folks already forgot about Westeros, but remember Middle-Earth.

The same thing will be true when Globe of Gankcraft finally dies; no one will remember it for long. The same has, to a great degree, already happened with the "legendary fantasies" and "epic science fiction tales" from 1980 to the present.

They are built on lies, from the cornerstone on up, across all media. No one wants to watch, or play, a Humiliation Ritual- which is what Death Cultists make everything they take over into.

This is why AD&D1e is one of the few games that are worth playing, long after it was Current Thing; it is rooted in the real, while its successors are not and thus why they fade ever-faster once they are replaced by a new Current Thing.

This is why Call of Cthulhu persists, above and beyond Network Effects, while others like Chill and All Flesh Must Be Eaten are forgotten.

This is why Traveller persists. This is why BattleTech persists. This is why RIFTS (and all things Palladium) are in deep shit once Siembiedia is gone.

That rooting in the real, in a real more real than mere material existence, matters.

And that's why severing that connection, even in something that seems so inconsequential as tabletop adventure games, matters. It's not the only thing that matters, but it is often the decisive thing, and too many find out too late why that connection matters when they're ruined due to something that their severed connections would have prevented.

Your game sucks because it's fake. Simple as.

The Culture: Successful Campaigns, Based Booky-Books, Big Boomer Blowouts, & The Wish List

First, Macris definitely has something to be thankful for.

To all new members of the #PoplarEmpire, we salute you.

ACKS Imperial Imprint 666% funded!

Congratulations @archon on a very successful Kickstarter!#ACKSII #OSR pic.twitter.com/2GL0ydp75h

— Philomancer (@philomancer76) November 23, 2023

I hope those of you that could afford to back it did so.

The Culture: Cirsova Talks Hercules With Warpig & Dorrinal On The Gab

Today on Geek Gab, Daddy Warpig and Dorrinal welcome back Cirsova Publishing to talk about the new summer issue and a new crowdfunding campaign for a project called "The Mighty Sons of Hercules". I'll be in the chat as usual, so I'll see you there at 1pm Central Time.

(This post would have been out 12 hours ago, but the Gab didn't have the link up.)

Here, for your convenience, is the Sons of Hercules movie playlist on YouTube. Enjoy.

The Culture: Geek Gab Talks About "Small Worlds" (And More)

Author Misha Burnett returns to the Gab to talk Small Worlds.

There's going to be other talk also. See you in the chat. Any insights will be edited in after the show.

Meanwhile, last night saw Discount Tex (Big Red 40K) drop his first feature-length video.

The Culture: Jeffro Announces A Contest

We interrupt our regular commentary on AD&D 1st Edition (et. al.) for this announcement by Jeffro Johnson.

To enter the contest, all you have to do is:

1) Post something awesome on the internet on the subject of either classic works of adventure fiction or else "real" D&D

2) Promote the latest issue of @cirsova and the latest volume from @PilumPress when you do it

That's it! pic.twitter.com/LbzrGCwXFv

— Cardinal Jefforieu (@JohnsonJeffro) May 23, 2023

The Campaign: Where We're Playing, We Don't Need "Genre Lines"

Look, blasters! This must be Blackmoor.

Folks, it's time to talk about the thing far too many gamers over the decades freak out about in fantasy RPGs- and thus in all forms of Dungeons & Dragons: tech.

This is despite one of the classics in Appendix N having them as an explicit item of native technology that heroes and villains alike wield.

See that? John's packing a brace of pistols to compliment his sword, and they get used. (Oh, and don't forget that telepathy is a thing in the Barsoon books.)

You know what else is in those books? Airships. With guns.

All this is to remind all the folks that lose their minds over Muh Strict Genre Lines that they can go fuck themselves. Those conversion notes between Gamma World/Boot Hill and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition aren't there for shits and giggles; Gygax and others back in the day knew damn well how blurred genre really was- something artificially created by the predecessors of the SJWs that are riding OldPub's corpse into the ground like Slim Pickins road the bomb. As I said last week, AD&D is Thundarr- not Tolkien. Don't let the Dwarves, Elves, and Halflings fool you.

Far too many gamers have had far too constrained notions of what fantasy is for far too long. If there is any benefit to be gotten out of the last couple of generations since Cultural Ground Zero hit, it is that this former state of blurred genre lines between the fake-and-gay "fantasy/scifi" split (itself a midstep towards their erasure) means that it is easier for people now to accept strange technologies alongside their swords and sorcery once more.

In short, we can thank the videogame and Manga/BD sets for unfucking what the Futurians (et. al.) fucked up by murdering the Pulps first and then giving the paperback novels crippling obseity by 1980. (You're welcome, Jeffro.)

And it's going to be this week's theme for the blog: "Wondrous Technology In D&D."

The Culture: Jeffro Johnson Talking The #BROSR, Appendix N, And D&D's Outsized Impact On Culture

Jeffro Johnson appeared today on Applied Virtue to talk about Appendix N as the crossroads where vastly outsized cultural influence got exercised to shape the world into what it is now. Some of this is about the literary end, some about the gaming end, but the influences cannot be ignored and Jeffro is right to hammer on both ends of the matter here.

Jeffro's recounting of how he went about recovering the lost lore of D&D from the Memory Hole, coupled with my commentary in the chat--turn on Chat Replay--is going to help a lot of you people out in getting up to speed on what the #BROSR is about and why D&D is a Big Deal in global culture despite its presence being so small.

The Business: Why Too Many RPGs Sell Gimped Rulesets

Cirsova made it clear why the OSR has issues with the #BROSR.

If the rules don't mean anything anyway, reading good books undercuts the only grift "game designers" have left.

— Cirsova: Winter Issue Out 12/15 (@cirsova) December 13, 2022

If that wasn't enough to make it clear, here you go.

Pundit and people like him's angle, though, as a game developer, you need to be sold settings and supplements in order to play out those fantasies. If you can use what you want on the fly without buying supplemental game products, you've kneecapped "the product-driven OSR."

— Cirsova: Winter Issue Out 12/15 (@cirsova) December 13, 2022

This is the legacy business model for tabletop RPGs summarized.

Before the arrival of both digital distribution and Print On Demand technology, the only way to get product into a prospect's hands was to use traditional publishing technology, techniques, and practices--including distribution via Diamond to speciality stores--and that itself arose from another legacy issue.

The issue was that the presumed shared knowledge of '70s-era wargaming turned out to be a false one. TSR and then its competitors got deluged with letters--we're talking snail-mail year, kids--asking questions about the rules that expose a lack of awareness of those presumed shared norms.

This, coupled with the sudden pressures to actually make this a viable business--complete with all that entails--is what those old-timers back in the day decided to solve by selling them the solutions. This is the origin of the Product Supplement Treadmill business model.

Why did this turn into edition churn?

Take a Normie into the store. Assuming that merely entering the store isn't repellant enough, looking at the shelf space would repel many of those left, and store staff--never trained in how to do sales, and hilariously biased in their preferences--would filter out many more getting wrong what is actually needed to play either out of a desire to max out a potential sale, our of spite for a property they hate, or simple incompetence at the task.

Put simply, asking a Normie for more than--in today's money--the price of a videogame console and at least one game is a losing proposition. It always has been; it's just that, for the longest time, tabletop could get away with it becuase There Was No Alternative and tabletop was vastly cheaper than videogames.

Some kid had the Christmas of his goddamn life in 1981 and I have the receipt. pic.twitter.com/FiNsyhhmne

— Super 70s Sports (@Super70sSports) December 13, 2022

Just 20 years ago a complete set of rulebooks for D&D3.0 were $60+tax (US). Those rulebooks for Current Game combine to $150+tax now and that is still not enough because you are expected to buy supplementary material--mandatory supplements--and services now.

Or you can spend $50 for the latest Globe of Gankcraft expansion and pay that subscrption, get superior convenience and product support (yes, seriously), have full control over your time commitment and a superior gameplay experience than Current Game.

I know what the Normie sees as a better value proposition, and so does everyone else with two functioning braincells and the ability to look at a user graph since 2004.

The #BROSR breaks this pattern.

"You don't need Current Game. You need only a proper wargame you can get for the price of Current Gankcraft Expansion or less and to enjoy some other time reading classic adventure literature."

You can see how the OSR sort, still married to the legacy business model and making some or all of their living from it, would object to this as it directly attacks their source of revenue- it fucks with their money.

"You just need to master these slim rules, and you will benefit from enjoy these classic stories."

Your typical OSR guy sees this and hears "You don't need to buy their shit to have fun. You can play the old games, read the old books, pay less money and have as much or more fun playing a real game."

Therefore I share what BDubs said a while ago: Every OSR sort will either join the #BROSR or turn into a Cult shill for Current Game. The axis of this split will be their ability accept the fact that the #BROSR speaks the truth about RPGs.

Either way, selling gimped RPG rulesets in the hopes of doing the Stupid Britsh Toy Company method of milking customers dry over an edition and then tossing them aside is done because--on both ends--this model is being rendered obsolete and thrown on the heap.

My Life In Fandom: Geek Gab Talks Stormbringer And Edgerunners (And More After That)

Daddy Warpig and Dorrinal are back today to talk about Edgerunners and "The Fate of Stormbringer", the big cosmic mass battle to determine the fate of multiple worlds in the #BROSR's campaign. Top of the hour, and I'll be in the chat.

After that, hit up Nick Cole's personal YouTube page to hear him read his solo side project: "The Tolkien Project". What's that? This.