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: The Best D&D History Book Yet

Last Wednesday, Dunder had on the man behind D&D: An American Institution.

You want a copy? Buy it here.

The Business: Another Axanar Arrived

We have another Axanar situation.

The man behind Star Wars Theory put out a fan film that clowned on the Devil Mouse.

I am not exaggerating; compare this to what we saw out of D23 for the new season of Ahsoka and you can see that it does make Disney look poor by comparison. SWT isn't the Axanar gang; he doesn't have professional actors, costuming, practical sets, etc. and the expense that goes with it. He's made a CG fan film, but he did it right and thus it puts to mind the trailers for SWTOR that Blur did years ago- trailers that also clowned on the official live-action media.

This is what is coming.

No, Disney can't stop this- try as they might. The savvy will just lie about it, then upload it from jurisdictions that tell Disney's lawyers to pound sand to ensure that once up it stays up (even if you may need a VPN to access it).

"But Muh Copyright!" stops meaning anything when you have a global Internet and several countries that are more than happy to host this stuff Because Reasons. Couple that with the ready availability of hardware to burn things to disc, flash drives being cheaper than batteries, and all other forms of DIY distribution being available (including Torrents and FTP servers) and you have the conditions for the long-awaited Fan Coup.

Network Effects are real. Fighting within them matters. This? This demonstrates Proof Of Concept, and with it comes the test of what defines Uncle George's Space Opera now that Uncle George has abandoned his creation. You can argue that this should be spent on original creations, but then I must respond with the Enemy's words: "No one will watch it."

The people want the Brand. Now the tools are here for the people to make their own Brand media, and they will with increasing skill and frequency henceforth. Revealed Preferences are Revealed.

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 Business: A Reminder That Vidya Does Cargo Cult (Non-)Gaming Better Than Them For Less

Vidya continues to make the Cargo Cultist offering look as bad as it is.

Light No Fire in particular is a threat to Temu D&D and even to Official D&D because you have a Domain Game.

Better than others like it (Valheim, Enshrouded, Pax Dei, etc.), this threatens the Cargo Cult in particular because of--you guessed it--reduced friction compared to Cargo Cult play and it being full of fake and gay lameness.

Want to play solo? You can. Want to get the boys together? You can. Build up your own domain? You can.

Lots of what makes Vidya in general a superior alternative to Official D&D and Cargo Cultist knockoffs is here, is refined, and is going to be far easier to acquire and play (and get others to play with you) at a cheaper price compared to Cargo Cult non-gaming.

Unlimited L Works, Cargo Cultists. All the Ls. All for you. All the time.

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 Business: Jon Del Arroz Showed WHY The Cargo Cult Is Cooked

Jon Del Arroz, writing at AI Central, wrote this on Monday this past week.

VIDEO: Testing Abacus AI Agentic AI To Make Your Own Apps by Vox Day

Read on Substack

Therein he posted a video of himself demonstrating his use of Agentic AI. He showed the vibe-coded agent that lets him do solo play of Official D&D.

Sit with that.

This is exactly what Wizards of the Coast is pivoting towards. All of the signs, for over a year now, point this way. As WOTC is Big Corpo, this takes time to execute and not just because they have Danger-Haired Dipshits on staff. The rest of the company's operations need to be brought inline, and then the Narrative massaged to make acceptance of these changes a fait accompli.

Jon showed--not told, SHOWED--how WOTC is going to kill the Cargo Cult.

The reason? Frictionless convenience. That agent is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. It never says "No". It can add additional AI-controlled party members, run sessions wherever on the map and (once mobile-deployed) wherever you get reception, run for as long as you want, all the time.

Cargo Cult Dexters have no leverage anymore. "Not at my table" gets you kicked to the curb; the bot is always there, doesn't cheat, doesn't fuck with the rules Because Reasons, and doesn't play favorites. As Cargo Cultists deal with attrition on the regular, recruiting replacements is required; agents like this kill that deader than disco because you will NOT convince the Casuals, Tourists, and Normies that WOTC targets to put up with friction of any kind once they are aware that agents like this exist.

The Cargo Cult model dies whimpering due to this.

Only the Clubhouse, rooted on Braunstein, can compete because it doesn't try to fight WOTC on its own terms.

The Culture: Stealth Archer Rocket Tag Got Rejected By Players, Retard

DD did a Dumb.

Vitality/Wounds got rejected for a fucking reason, retard: it was more bothersome than the problem it claimed to solve.

Consider the normal way it works: Roll Damage, Track Hit Points. Crits don't matter unless and until they impose additional effects; recovery is equally standardized.

Now: Did I crit? No? Roll damage, Track VP. Yes? Track WP. Took WP? Complications on recovery.

What happens next? Anyone serious about being effective optimized for crits. This happened in previous WOTC Star Wars editions. It happened with Spycraft (and its deratives such as FantasyCraft), and it happens every single time this is implemented because PEOPLE FOLLOW INCENTIVES YOU FUCKING MORON!

What did you do with this? You introduced a means to bypass the ordinary damage capacity mechanic, which rewards those who are better able to achieve that bypass effect with superior combat performance, which incentivizes players to optimize for achieving most-consistent-bypass-performance and thus compels opposition to do the same lest all sense of challenge disappear.

Congratulations! You just made the game into Stealth Archer Rocket Tag. Everyone has to become a Stealth Monkey just to stay alive. Combat comes down to Who Can Detect Whom First; the losers get Alpha Struck with Overkill levels of Firepower and get the Swifty One-Shot Macro treatment. When players saw this in action 20ish years ago, they rejected it en masse which is why it disappeared from d20 Star Wars and Spycraft ended up losing hard to competing offerings.

No, it didn't make the game more fun. No, it didn't speed up gameplay. No, it wasn't fun to be on the wrong side of. No, it got boring to be on the shooting side of in short order too. It also lead to Narrative Faggotry when things went against the players, further degrading the integrity of the game and the hobby.

You should have been bitch-slapped for even thinking about this failed idea, DD. It failed for damned good reasons, such that even the obstensible source (HERO) is notorious for being janky and wonky in the execution of it- thus part of why HERO remains obscure to this day vs. The Only Game That Ever Fucking Mattered.

Oldfags, man. Not even once.

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: No One Wants To Do Homework For Entertainment

I said a long time ago that Normies don't work for their entertainment. They sure as fuck don't do homework.

This is not how it's done.

Normies have a toleration for two prior movies or series before they quit in big numbers; this is known to the Hellmouth, which is why Trilogies are a thing and long-running franchises have soft resets between them as well as recaps/reintroductions and why there are few exceptions to this rule.

Feige could easily sort all of this continuity stuff in the opening minutes of this movie--Bond films have used the opening credits sequence to do this, and Jackson did this with the LOTR films with the loredump as the sequence--but he's turned out to be a collosal retard so no we have to witness this incompetence in action.

This applies to Tabletop.

As Macris noted recently, most Tabletop products are bought to be read and not played; they are not real gameplay products, but instead disguised Setting Bibles and Adaptation Pitches with extraneous game shit attached.

This is why, in addition to the Cargo Cult, we have the majority of buyers being Lore Nerds and Worldbuilding Wankers who inhabit a space without engaging with it at all and get mad at anyone--publishers and players alike--that do.

Cargo Cultists that play hate being constrained by Lore as it gets in the way of their autonomy. Real Players, being The Man In Command with agency, make the lore their bitch by assuming the roles of those able to shape it and then doing so.

The reality is that players only care about what happens in play. Everything else does not exist. This is why making players run all actors with agency in Braunstein forms is the hobby that works, why Cargo Cultists keep crying about shit games, and why publishing publishes disguised Setting Bibles because the real hobby does not need or want what they find viable commercially.

No one wants to do homework for entertainment. Feige's just the latest to figure this one out the hard way.

The Culture: Sole Play Tabletop Rises For A Reason

Jon Del Arroz made this observation.

Roleplaying Star Trek and not having to deal with any humans sounds fantastic. pic.twitter.com/iF4ZijRyrI

— Jon Del Arroz | Sci-Fi And Fantasy (@jondelarroz) August 9, 2026

He's been to, and thus has seen, what the common Cargo Cultist is like.

For those unable or unwilling to get admitted to the Clubhouse, this is their go-to option to get away from those losers while staying in Tabletop.

You can't get derailed (unless you're utterly dysfunctional) by some low-rent loser, get held up by the least invested player, get tyrannized by a power-tripping Dexter, or have any other Known Issue in Cargo Cult Tabletop gaming if you just play on your own.

Those who do this, and then want the social aspect, post to social media their receipts. Some do videos on YouTube. Some post to Twitter, Instragram, etc. They use the parasocial aspect to show people how they play the solo game, and in so doing advertise for it; the smart ones get affilate links and then link to the game's online storefront page to get some cut of the sales.

The move is to solve the Known Issues by changing the product to remove the risk factors; you can play when, where, how, and as long as you like if you're the only player- the same value proposition that you have for single-player Vidya, only without the need for electronics.

This is also a losing proposition long-term, unless you want to change how this hobby is defined into a solo pursuit. The only route that preserves the hobby is the Clubhouse.

The Culture: Hawaiian Man Schools You On Things Cargo Cultists Want You To Ignore

Jon Mollison dropped a couple of videos recently. You should see and share them.

He's doing the Good Cop part of the Good Cop/Bad Cop routine.

You can guess who the Bad Cop is.

The Business: The Private WOW Server Scene Keeps Showing Tabletop Cultists Up

This got announced on July 31st.

I keep telling you that WOW and D&D are analogous due to occupying the apex of their respective media and market niches.

We see these private servers keeping coming despite Blizzard going after them because ONLY WORLD OF WARCRAFT MATTERS (as much as FF14 wishes otherwise; they had their chance to usurp WOW and MISSED- that's never happening again).

Look at what they consistently offer: giving the target audience what they want, with superior convience- same as what WOTC did and does, but no Tabletop competitor even thinks to offer. Only that Project Aurora guy has even broached the question- that's how deep in the sauce Cargo Cultists are. If this Russian-based private server can deliver half of what it promises, it will CLOWN on Blizzard hard.

This is how competition within a Network Effect works. You only win if you can deliver what the target audience wants better than the big dog. This can be done in Vidya; Tabletop should be easier, but it's not because Oldfags are retards who can't think past their nose or they'd be doing this sort of thing to WOTC on a regular basis.

This is how Blizzard deals with it: shut them down, then steal their best ideas (and code) to incorporate (in a watered down manner) on Retail and/or Classic servers.

WOTC could have done the same thing; they will not need to going forward because there will be sweet fuck-all to steal.

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: Ryan Dancey Told You This Was Coming Nearly 30 Years Ago

Network Effects, motherfucker. You WILL grok this.

What did Dancey say?

TLDR: "Most people only ever played D&D. It's D&D or Nothing."

Then he explained why by introducing, for most of us back then for the first time, what a Network Effect is and how it works.

That's how the Open Gaming License, the d20 System, and the best time for Cargo Cultists to be around and making money came to pass before he got replaced at Wizards of the Coast and Yet Another Retarded MBA Faggot ruined the good thing.

Ryan, as he explained at the time, was being magnanimous. He wanted everyone to enjoy the prosperity that The Only Game That Ever Mattered brought, so he made it piss-easy to play nice; save for a few outliers, most Cargo Cultists did.

What Ryan downplayed, but did not omit, is that most of Tabletop, well past the 80/20 threshold, is UTTERLY IRRELEVANT.

Cargo Cultists did not believe him them. As most of them are Oldfags, they still don't; they think that somehow not being bankrupt and out of business means they are relevant.

Lex Luthor Wrong GIFfrom Lex Luthor GIFs

Relevant means "Can be found in Walmart or Target, and is readily played by everyone in a manner that doesn't invite mockery by mainstream media."

No one on Stranger Things played Theater Kid Fag Non-Game or Temu Oldfag Houserule Non-D&D. They played The Only Game That Mattered.

That understated fact, backed up by data at the time, was never contradicted after the fact. The one thing that has not been talked about, but plays a huge factor into the strength of a Network Effect, is control over friction.

The holder of an Effect controls competition within the network by controlling the friction generated by non-compliance.

Friction, in this context, is measured by inconvience. Tabletop is notoriously inconvient; if you're a commercial operation, solving that issue is your top priority, and nothing is more inconvient than getting people to play at all followed by deciding on what to play.

WOTC's new pivot solves BOTH. Going mobile-first solves the Schedule Your Fun part; you can play whenever, however. Going All You Can Eat Brand Crossover Buffet solves the what you play part by standardizing the form of play while increasing the options within it.

Going against this increases the friction, exponentially so now that WOTC will be mobile-first, which is detrimental to convincing people to go with your Temu Tabletop offering over Official D&D in commercial terms. Only non-commercial alternatives, which don't compete on the same level, are viable now- and no, that doesn't mean serial busking on Kickstarter. That means going with a different organizational model entirely, such as the Clubhouse, which solves the same problems differently.

Don't take my word for it.

This is, of course, terribly frustrating to those of us who release products intended to be played. But the reality of the network effects and switching costs of RPGs is inescapable. If people didn't buy for art and lore, there'd be almost no indie industry at all.

— Archon | Autarch Games (@archon) August 4, 2026

These people would be better off making this shit as glorified Coffee Table Art Books like Dinotopia, with playable notes as a separate PDF for download.

This is why I say that Tabletop is no longer commercially viable. There is only non-commercial alternatives and delusional Cargo Cultists.

The Business: Too Many Don't Grok How Normies Work And Thus Miss Why WOTC's Move Matters

At GenCon, Wizards of the Coast confirmed what I said was the play: the Fortnite strategy.

People do not grasp what this means.

All of the Brand collaboration releases for Magic are allowed in all formats. You want Aragorn and Optimus Prime and Y'stolha Rhul in your deck? You can.

This is exactly what WOTC's target audience--Normies, Casuals, Tourists--want: all together, all in one place, all under one ruleset, all Officially Sanctioned, in a mandatory crossover environment.

That is the Fortnite strategy. That target demo is a Low Agency Demographic. They do not trust Unapproved People. They only trust Brand because Brand is Approved. Brand is Authority.

The Big Deal here is granting permission to these Low Agency people to do what their Revealed Preferences say that they want: to have an All You Can Eat buffet of Approved Stuff that they like, priced cheaply, to play with in the Approved Sandbox.

They will not--have not, never have--just done it themselves. They do not accept the validity of homebrewing. They do not accept the premise of users just doing things. They show, again Revealed Preferences at work, that they need permission from someone they view as the authority on the matter- which in this case is the Brand. WOTC knows this. Hasbro knows this. Their Brand counterparts either know it or quickly catch on.

This goes well beyond HERO allowing Marvel vs. DC fights to be resolved.

As it is in books, so it is in games: NORMIES WANT "THE SAME, BUT DIFFERENT" ALWAYS!

That means NETWORK EFFECTS! Who is the Big Dog in Tabletop? WOTC and D&D. What do Normies only play? Official D&D. What does this move do? Load up the only game that matters with all the stuff that Normies want in the only place they will ever look. This is a very full, and growing, Walled Garden. Couple that with the announcement of Official D&D going mobile-first and you can see the plan--the pivot--in action.

All the Cargo Cultists are still deep in denial.

So are a lot of others that ought to know better, but due to those influences still refuse to see reality for what it is.

This is not a Death Of Physical. This is a Death Of Schedule Your Fun. This is a move towards what Normies proved--and have proved for over a century, by Revealed Preference--that they reward: CONVENIENCE AND FRICTIONLESS ENGAGEMENT!

Being mobile-first means that they can and will play Official D&D at work on their breaks, between doomscrolling binges, on their commutes, etc. and they will happily drop a fiver on a new race, class, etc. if it means they get a leg up on everyone else at the table. All that remains are the AI-controlled bot players and Referees.

Yes, you will live to see Snake Eyes, Optimus Prime, Estiniam Wyrmblood, Cloud Strife, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Tirian Fordring team up against Abaloth the Devourer in an official D&D module and the Normies will eat that shit up, making WOTC and their partners BILLIONS.

And because of this, "RPGs" will be defined as "Officially Licensed Brand Crossover Let's Plays".

No one will ever look at your Temu D&D again.

Commercial viability outside of this is OVER. Yes, even for Palladium; they'll just be among the last to die.

There is this, and there is the Clubhouse.

The Collapse is not only here, it is Past Tense.

The Culture: The Real Hobby Incentives After-Action Review To Upgrade Their Performance

Jeffro comments on Dunder's running adventures in the BROXT's UMBROS campaign.

This whole scenario makes no sense. Like, I really don’t get how guys like Dunder can hang around the scene for as long as he has and then still do this off the wall stuff. Judging from the way this discussion has gone the past couple of days, it is likely because he lives in kind of a cloud of people that reflexively fight any attempt to elucidate matters. Why would you put a canned OSR product into a bro campaign? Why? We already know from Trollopulous 2020 that players like doing whatever they want whenever they want with no planning. We know from Trollopulous 2023 that a couple of pages of one-page dungeons is easily enough to sustain ten or twelve 4-hour sessions. How do you look at all of that play experience and say, “man… what these campaigns need is some dude’s product dropped into it”? And didn’t we see earlier this year Dunder was talking about how he had made up all of these Settlers of Catan boards to represent kingdoms and [blah blah blah blah zzzzz] huh?! dude! what?!! Seriously, what is wrong with you?! If you are running D&D, then you need just enough of a scenario so that the players can be delighted that they have successfully stymied and thwarted whatever it was that you were trying to do. Any more than that is wasted effort. But wait. You drop this megadungeon product into the campaign because you are so taken with it. AND THEN YOU MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE TO GET TO IT. Okay, this alone is just awesomely funny. The BrOSR I remember would have teased Dunder relentlessly for this. Personally, I love this image of the plucky survivors running this massive gauntlet, dying in droves, players baffled and exasparated, everyone wondering just what in the heck is wrong with this campaign, and then finally… desperately… after ten or twelve or twenty sessions the players have arrived at the ENTRANCE of the adventure location and… a gigantic wolf eats half of them while they are vulnerable from breaking through the ice. The two surviving dudes get to the entrance somehow and realize that they can’t get in because someone sold the key. And the DM says that, yeah… well if you had all kept it you would have died from it because it was radioactive. Guys. That is a freaking masterpiece of game mastering awesome. IT SHOULD BE IN A MUSEUM. I mean, that is just deep meta-commentary on the nature of life, art and gaming. This is all going on in a backdrop of exploding frogs, some kind of wheelchair goblin charity benefit, and then something to do with an entire solo session with some random guy just because Dunder felt bad that he died pointlessly in the first session. But no, seriously. Here is what is so stupid. Dunder puts Fun Adventure Product™ into the campaign. Yeah, okay. Fine. Stupid. But whatever…. He then makes it practically impossible to get to the Fun™. Sotto voce: everyone has fun anyway because playing D&D is fun and stupid stuff happens no matter what you do Dunder then at every opportunity beats his breast, talks about how challenging it is to run a bro game, confesses to all in Evangelical fashion that “he has not arrived” and that he is still learning, still growing, still making mistakes. Dunder… one of the best Braunstein players in the world. He is just a babe, see?. A novice. An initiate. He has not yet attained to even a tithe of the gaming brilliance of the worst player from Trollopulous 2020. And on and on and on. He is putting out these session reports of all kinds of weird and crazy stuff. But it’s all wrapped in the framing of “something is not working. SOMETHING IS WRONG.” He has run what to the entire rest of the world is a “campaign”. And theme of the campaign was: *the players never got to the campaign.* Man that is amazing. Like I mean seriously, this is the zen koan of D&D campaigns. That is just such a deep comment on the life prospects of Gen Z right now. Incredible. Art imitates life! And that flushes out the other thing that is completely off about all of this. Let’s say Dunder made an intrinsically unplayable scenario. Let’s just agree that happened, because everybody seems to think this is the case. Even Dunder. But here’s Dunder… he has this stupid idea for a campaign which will never work. And then… all the players just dutifully feed themselves into the meat grinder week after week because, after all… that’s just what you do. You go to the table and you just do whatever it is that the DM his hinting that you are supposed to do. Because, I mean, there is just no way that you could play D&D any other way. I mean, that’s what D&D is. It is a game of pretend. The people who sell it pretend that it is a game. The DM pretends to create an adventure. And the players pretend to play it. Then the DM pretends the players won. Except you didn’t. The key was radioactive and there was a wolf at the doorway to fun. How is it that nobody involved ever thought for a moment that maybe deciding in advance what the campaign was supposed to be about was never going to work? Don’t you know by now that you just lay a few things out and then something will happen and then piece by piece, everything develops and fits together somehow and then something wild happens that is colored by things that were developed across a dozen sessions and OH MY GOSH THAT WAS JUST THE MOST AMAZING GAME. The idea that the players even went along with Dunder’s stupid idea for even a second is what really gets me. “This game is stupid and unfair,” said at least one ungrateful and unimaginative player. Maybe they won’t own up to it now, but SOMEBODY said it. And yet somehow none of those players ever attempted to take control of the game. “This game is not about getting into the Game Module of Fun™. This game is about me. This game is about finding a Troglodyte that looks like Steve Buscemi. We are going to use funds from a Goblin Charity front to create a gang of mutated freaks to take over level three of a dungeon that doesn’t exist yet. And Troglodyte Steve will be my henchman.” Or whatever. This is Meffridus 101. And no, Meffridus did not teach people to play AD&D RAW even the weird and dumb rules that the gross nerds never figured out. Meffridus taught players to take control of the game. The way Oghma did when he visited Trollopulous. That’s the craziest thing. None of these people washing up into a bro game ever thought to do that? Really? I don’t get it. If none of you can walk into an unfair game and then just make up your own victory conditions, then I don’t know what to tell you. You failed Bro 101. You all don’t need any of this #SuperAdvanced Braunstein theory. You need to go back to body builder memes and ridiculous hashtags that are weirdly inspiring. At any rate… thank you for running the bro campaign that proves we need bro campaigns. I guess it had to happen to someone. And honestly… that is just about the most Dunder thing I can imagine.

- Jeffro Johnson

Read on Substack

Don't think that the Bros don't criticize their own. That happens.

This is exactly that in action, and wiser heads will pick up what Jeffro laid down here.

"Wait. Why are we trying to do it all at once? Why didn't we secure the entrance to the Moon Pool first, set up a base camp there, and secure the road back to town? That would allow further pushes to start closer to the action, let parties react faster to developments, and allow for serendipitous opportunities to manifest that we could capitalize upon. Every time we get to another location like this, we move the base camp up and repeat the process until we're camped outside the target location and we have a secure logistics train all along the way."

Jeffro has a clear point here about seizing control of events: "Meffridus taught players to take control of the game. The way Oghma did when he visited Trollopulous."

What I wrote above is the most obvious form of doing just that.

At every point there is plenty of opportunity for player-driven action. Securing the route from town to the Moon Pool alone means beating a road down, clearing that route of bothers of all sorts, establishing and maintaining patrols, and then setting up the secure base camp--with supplies, Expert Hirelings, defenses, etc.--on the other end like any other serious expedition into dangerous territory.

Once that is done, action predictably goes two ways. One direction goes down into the Moon Pool as intended. The other goes out into the surrounding area, tracking down threats and resources- the former to kill, the latter to secure. Revenue from both forms of activity go into the maintenance of the camp and its garrison securing the route back to town.

Meanwhile, the Moon Pool needs to be swept and cleared of both threats and treasures while securing the route through it. Once secured, it must be occupied. The base camp slowly extends and expands into the Moon Pool in the wake of the expedition's sweeper teams. Meanwhile, the surface camp can now expand into a small armed town secured by a tower or motte as valuable resources extracted from below get used to build up the surface plant; maybe this becomes the seat of a rising adventurer's claim of dominion.

Does this slow the process? Sure.

Does this also make it something other than futile throwing of Polish mine detectors into the field? Also yes.

There is a considerable lack of a sense of agency at play here. A lack of currency does not mean a lack of economy; those prices become abstract Units of Account, used as a measure, but realized instead through non-coinage forms of exchange: oaths, contracts, in-kind barter, etc. as we see in a lot of tribal and clan-based societies.

This is a fantasy of agency- of being the Man in Command. Act like it.

The Culture: There Are Others On The Road That The Bros Blazed

I knew that others were similiarly dissatified with Cargo Cult norms.

Some of those others, with more experience with Vidya than Tabletop, used that Vidya experience to attempt to address the issue. This guy that gets paid to run Official Edition games went with that Vidya-informed approach and made a "MMO".

Project Aurora is literally the craziest undertaking I've done in my life. A Dungeons & Dragons online MMORPG the takes place on a VTT within a persistent living and breathing universe where its focus is not just the D&D game, but a full-fledged commitment to provide as much content inside the D&D game as well outside of the D&D game.

A Universe where the sheer number of people in a D&D game from where there is 6 players and 1 DM isn't just doubled or tripled, but significantly scaled more than 10 fold while keeping continuity, player agency, social interactions, professionalism, community, the ability to forge a legacy making a name for yourself being the forefront of everything that is Project Aurora.

Just, the Attempt alone to make something as vast in concept is mind-boggling to even think about as you've probably clicked on this video to learn more of what the heck this project is, what's it trying to accomplish, will it even succeed and is it worth getting invested in.

This is, for all intents and purposes, an Analog Private Official Edition Server. I took a look at the YT channel's catalog.

Yes, it runs out of a Discord server. Yes, it presumes Cargo Cult norms where it does not explicitly contradict them. Yes, it brushes up against concepts ajacent to--but surpassed by--Braunstein (specifically West Marches).

Yes, he's trying to get paid doing this. That's likely where he's going to run into problems once he gets big enough.

But he's got the incentive to come to where we are. Send that man a copy of Winning Secrets and direct him to BROZER and UMBROS. Then tell him about the Clubhouse.

The Culture: Observe Cargo Cult Cognitive Dissonance In Action

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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