Narrative Warfare: Full Copyleft! How The Hobbyist Seizes Control Of The Hobby (Step 3B: BattleTech Strats)

You Don't Need The Phone Company To Stop This Invasion

Despite recent events, things are rather encouraging with regard to BattleTech because most of the Hobbyist resistance elements already exist.

First, because memories are too short, the Razorfist video from over four months ago explaining that the Hobbyists here have been successful for decades to date. This is nothing new to the audience here.

And now his Sidescrollers appearance explaining the present problem.

Razor's final statement to the Lore Channels in that Sidescrollers video there is one I will get back to below.

The Enemy's (Mistaken) Perspective

The Death Cultists at Catalyst share the perspective of their fellow travelers at Stupid British Toy Company: they believe that, via Cult of Officialdom, they can wield social pressure on vulnerable people and compel them via cult psychology to submit to the Poz.

Catalyst is trying to turn BattleTech into the Warhammer model without having the elements necessary to make it work. That's collosally incompetent, and that was before the recent cult takeover.

This explains why Catalyst is in such deep shit financially, a financial difficulty that this episode only made worse.

The Hobby's Strategy

We have a strong foundation of effective practices to work with. There are plenty of rules manuals available already on the market; it's just a matter of curation. Physical copies are plentiful in the used market, and piracy of the digital versions is a long-standing practice. Catalyst doesn't have the means to enforce Edition Church or any other form of Officialdom upon the Hobby.

As Razor notes, BattleTech explicitly disclaims the need for miniatures to play the game. Sure, there's plenty of independent offerings anyway, but if you really want to you can just dice as unit markers. (One game I played had books used as hills, Solo cups as oil tanks or grain silos (different colors for each), and the guy fielding Savannah Masters used M&Ms as unit markers- he's eat one when it got taken out.)

In short, Publisher attempts to use Officialdom as a cudgel to compel compliance is already a failure.

The lore channels are going to get pressured, but one (Mage Leader) is already refusing while the others are ignoring Catalyst entirely at this time.

And, bothersome as it is to have fan disccusion forums taken over, that would not have happened if the owners were not massive pussies. That's a fuckup that only happens once; the replacements will be run by far harder folks, and now that the playbook is known they'll be kept out with much greater ease.

"But the lore-"

I want to remind you that the atrocious TV series got retro-actively changed into risible Inner Sphere anti-Clan (specifically anti-Jade Falcon) propaganda. That's a former Publisher surrendering to the Hobbyists due to a previous revolt.

What does this tell you?

The Hobbyists have had a far easier time diluting the legitimacy of the Publisher's claim to the Brand here than anywhere else. Social pressure killed the TV series. Social pressure, combined with memetic warfare, made the UrbanMech LAM a thing. Social pressure, combined with memetic warfare, have turned Stephan Amaris into a joke and turned the Blackwatch into a unit of 'Mech-piloting Chuck Norris types. Hobbyist-driven social pressure and memetic warfare did this, along with plenty of traffic in used bookstores and rampant piracy.

All that needs to be done here, on this front, is to do all of this in a more deliberate and coordinated manner.

An Easy Victory

Use other manuals; collect a master Forever Edition online, incorporating Sarna's stuff as needed. Keep Sarna (the wiki) in the hot seat; don't let them bend so much as a toenail to the Publisher- and have a mirror on hand to go live if they do so there is a clean fork available immediately. Refer all curious people to these resources, and not to Catalyst products.

The memetic warfare front here should still be one that dabs on the haters, but the overall frame to affect is that Death Cultists Can't Even Mechwarrior. Make them look like the sort of people Stephan Amaris would use as disposable street snitches, but cynically execute when their usefulness (which was short) ended- usually by lumping them in with the targets of a bigger op and executing them all en masse.

That's right, frame these people as being so useless that all they're good for is getting taken out for snitching by those they snitch to- much like we're seeing in real life as of this post throughout the Western world, but especially in Academia.

By framing Catalyst and its supporters as parasitic predatory losers that tend to Circular Firing Squad themselves, such that even Capellans seem like geniuses by comparison, the Hobbyist frames the Enemy as low class, low status, and low agency impotent losers that hate fun, hate life, and hate themselves. Again, "Stop Having Fun!" is a potent Rhetorical frame to use.

No one wants to associate with loser killjoys that nag, nag, nag about shit they clearly have no idea about- and that opens the observer to joining the Hobbyist's reframe of being high-energy, high-fun, high-excitement, pro-social people that are out to have a good time with stompy robots. They'll want to know more, and you had best be ready to answer them.

Spread the word about Megamek and Mechwarrior Living Legends as replacements for Harebrained's PC game and Mechwarrior 5/Mechwarrior Online- the latter two as contingencies Just In Case.

Find, curate, and spread the links to any and all fan-created lore that is clean and not pozzed. Go hard, use the old FASA trade dress, and publish new stories and artwork using that old dress; make it clear that the Hobbyists are the ones loyal and true to the Brand, not the Death Cult skinsuit front group. Tex and the BPL hire artists for all that cool artwork; you can do that too, and you should.

Mirror everything to guard against shutdowns, takedowns, etc. and have those live links on hand to hand out to the curious wanting to join the hobby.

BattleTech is already a Brand dominated by its Hobbyists, and has already kicked offending Publishers to the curb more than once, so doing this to Catalyist is nothing more than Tuesday to them. Others should learn from this part of the greater Hobby scene, because what has been done here can be replicated everywhere.

Tomorrow we'll run down some problem sectors that could stand to learn from these two case studies.

Narrative Warfare: Full Copyleft! How The Hobbyist Seizes Control Of The Hobby (Step 3A: Warhammer Strats)

Not A Quixotic Quest

As I said yesterday, we're taking today and tomorrow to look at specific cases and devising strategies to make the most of them. Today it's Warhammer

First, some good news. Turns out that the changes are so badly received that officers in the corporation are panic selling their shares.

I tell you this because it is a visible reminder that victory is not impossible. It bleeds.

So let's talk strategy.

How The Stupid Toy Company Works

Stupid British Toy Campaign's core business objective is to push miniatures, paints, and related tools.

The game and tie-in media is secondary and exists to provide a reason to purchase, collect, and paint those miniatures. Bad rules design, piss-poor procedures, and other errors with the game (be it in its operations or in its presenation) are deliberate decisions by the corporation to compel compliance with the core business objective.. This should have shifted into a pure Brand Management business, but that has not happened yet.

Let me reframe this: the games and the media are customer acquisition funnels to dump prospects into becoming obsessive purchasers of miniatures, paints, and tools. Every else is there to drive these sales.

The company's business model has been explicit about Planned Obsolescene and rapid Edition Churn meant to snare boys 12-14 and suck their parents' wallets dry for about three years or so at a go. This has been the case since the 1980s, and it has more-or-less worked, especially for 40K. The corporation does this through indoctrination into "The Hobby" (i.e. a hardcore Brand Loyalty corpo cult) with a con-commitant hardcore Cult of Officialdom and a lot of Organized Play to justify that cult.

The Publisher claim to legitimacy relies on this Cult of Officialdom. You are expect to use their miniatures, their paints, their tools, and play their game exactly as they demand that you do or you get cast out. It's a very watered down version of the brainfuckery that goes on with Amway or (especially) Scientology, but it has worked to date.

The Enemy's Strategy

The Enemy seeks to leverage that Cult of Officialdom to turn their Pop Cult into a front for the Death Cult, using the massive Social Pressure that a cult-like environment puts upon those who submit to it to conform to the Poz and become Pozzed themselves. For those heavily invested emotionally and socially into this business cult, that's not a trivial thing to cope with.

They are going to use the purloined Publisher position of presumed legitimacy to accomplish this, but as the above good news shows this won't go so easily for them.

And it is because they are failing to accomplish this objective that I see victory as being viable and practical.

The Hobbyists' Strategy

Organization, Organization, Organization!

This is the key to victory. Why? Because most of the elements necessary to win are already here.

There are already plenty of (far cheaper) alternatives to Official Minis that are just as good, if not better, at a fraction of the price. The same is true for paints, tools, etc. that comprise the core of the Publisher's business. There are also plenty of suitable substitutes (2D Stands, 2D counters, etc.) that are also far easier to get, use, and replace if damaged or lost.

There are already older editions of the core game, as well as alternatives to that game, for which using these miniatures are welcome. There is also a lot of talk about the game and how to unfuck it. Combined, that's fertile ground for a Forever Edition rules manual that can be published online for free (or at cost for Print On Demand) to be made and used- and, with active promotion, soon to be used widely.

And then there's the tie-in media.

We have plenty of people already memeing the hell out of this matter, and there's already plenty of fan channels talking about it; give them something to use as a cudgel and an alternative for audiences seeking such and you'll soon have receptive folks asking for more.

So let's get deliberate about this.

The memers and fan channels reframe the Pozzed Publisher as a Chaos incursion, a Heresy that struck at the root of the Imperium- call it the High Lords of Terra itself.

Put the Heretics in the mode of Slanessh first and foremost (because man does Excess rule this Death Cult, a Excess fueled cult born of Daddy Issues). Take a page from that South Park episode, make a caricature of the key parties responsible, and make their dialog say explicitly what has been buried under bullshit by them to date.

See that? Do that, but in the 40K context. Feel ambitious? Do it for that pozzed dame in the Totally Not Fantasy reboot too. Make them out to be Chaos Karens with Daddy Issues (easy to do in 40K, as Big E is Big Daddy) and now they come off as lame killjoys having Stop Having Fun tantrums.

And this is where the lore channels--Arch, Luetin, etc. I am talking to you--come into the strategy. Tell the tales where this is the plot. You already have massive Social Proof; you can turn that against the Publisher and wield Social Pressure against them and undermine their claim of legitimacy over the Brand.

This should not stop with lore videos or wiki articles. It should not stop with shitposting memes and webcomics. Write this prompt as a novel or series of novelss, put on the trade dress, and publish it online for free in all ebook formats. Then make videos about those books, do audio adaptations of those books, and enjoy the reaction of a put-upon audience when the Emperor's Faithful clown on these Heretics as they deserve.

Cease Your Heresy Warhammer40k GIFfrom Cease Your Heresy GIFs

"That's hilarious!"

"Like that? Here's a link to the book, and if you want to play the game here's the link to the game. They're free. Have fun, guys!

The Side That Dabs On The Haters Always Defeats The Lame Killjoy Fags

Deploy the memes first. That's a defacto A/B test to see which variation of the meme attack works best. Once you dial it in, take that iteration and build the novel and lore videos around that. Have free download links on hand to spread around, and plenty of mirrors to ensure that folks who want it get it. Use the attention garnered to direct people to Hobbyist alternatives to Publisher offerings. This cultimates in a wholesale game replacement for Publisher's game, because without that there is no demand for any of the minis, paints, tools, etc.

You could, with just one or two people keeping their head on a swivel for openings, create a massive Hobbyist-driven campaign that cuts the Publisher out of the hobby within one edition of Publisher's game- if not sooner. Putting out a Forever Edition is the final blow that kills the Publisher's business model, and having it available for free kills the threat of social ostracism that the Cult of Officialdom uses to get people to buy and stay like abused children for more.

Reframe this as a reassertion of Dignity and Loyalty, and reframe the Publisher as the skeezy predatory operation that it is, and the Hobbyist side could win in rapid time.

And it would be fun to do this. Who doesn't want to have fun dabbing on creepy pervs scamming kids and their parents?

Narrative Warfare: Full Copyleft! How The Hobbyist Seizes Control Of The Hobby (Step Two: Order Of Operations)

One Force To Fix The Enemy Into Place

This is the more immediate front. It's more friendly to shitposter sorts. It's where the memes flow and the bantz barrage the blowhards.

This is the Meme War Front.

The purpose of this front is to degrade enemy morale, improve friendly morale, and begin undermining the legitimacy of the Publisher's claim over the Brand. It is a more organized and deliberate effort than what is already going on, and has gone on, to date.

By itself, this force cannot win. Neither can be ignored; effective memetic warfare can, and has, won major elections. Its value is in the ability to compel the enemy to engage with it and thus to spend time and resources dealing with it because if the enemy does not do so it risks ceding the Narrative Frame to us.

That's right, this front is all about breaking the enemy's Narrative Framework and replacing it with our own.

It has more to do with Rhetoric than Dialectic. Once the enemy's Frame is broken, those within it become open to persuasion and thus to be brought into our Frame. The 2016 Trump campaign is the big scale example of how this is done; the small-scale example is how the #BROSR successfully confronts Conventional Play in the tabletop adventure game hobby.

It is the easiest to do, so this is the force that goes first.

It is the easiest to enjoy, so this is also the force that is best for those that have to cycling in and out of active engagement for various reasons.

It is the easiest to sustain, so this is also the force that exists to buy time for the other force.

It is the easiest to make entertaining for onlookers, which is the Rhetorical element of persuasion at work here, and because the attackers come off as cooler, higher-status, and far more interesting and alluring than whom they target the audience gets interested in our side and start asking about alternatives.

Since we're all thrown together side by side on a handful of websites, there's no real way to gatekeep any online group.

For most people, all this is just a form of maybe slightly dangerous entertainment, and they are going to listen to whoever amuses them (the etymology of the word amuse means causing someone to stare stupidly).

As such, you can never really shut anyone else up, all you do can do is let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works.

If you want someone else to be quiet, you have to be louder, brighter, better. You have to mog them.

Shouting at people in the cloud might demoralize them for a moment, but ultimately it only increases their influence and makes them stronger

--Zero HP Lovecraft.

If you want to know what a devastating Memetic Attack looks like, here you go- the attack that broke Kulty Kathy's glamor.

What did this do? It made her look lame. It made her look cringy. It make her look like the unlikeable and insufferable striver bitch she is.

That one South Park episode accomplished what years of YouTube outrage failed to do. It broke her Narrative Framework and brought in the one that makes her and her cause look low-status and undesirable, something that the trades in Hollywood noticed and set off a Preference Cascade that coincided with the ESG/DEI money drying up and now there's all this freaking out about "Diversity Going Backwards" in Hollywood and elsewhere because the US Supreme Court just shitcanned the DIE Regime there.

That, gamer, is the power of Memetic Warfare. Do this deliberately and you--some shitposter operating out of Nowhere--can end a multi-national media empire overnight.

The Other Force To Hammer The Enemy Into Pieces

This is what the memetic warfare is there to buy time for and prepare the battlefield for as it is this force that creates, curates, and promotes the alternatives to what the Publisher offers for the Brand.

Even at its fastest, making rules manuals, play accessories, and tie-in media takes far more time than what waging memetic warfare entails. Refer back to that wholesale replacement for Mouse Wars RPG. Even using the existing d6 RPG as a basis you still needed to spend time (re)writing rules procedures, layout the manuscript, procuring and setting artwork, editing copy, and ensuring that trade dress and other elements conformed to standard.

"Alternatives?"

Yeah, like Stupid British Toy Company once encouraged- and also confessed forking and remixing themselves in the process.

Even if you are blatantly copying an existing minature, you still need to take the time to sculpt the unit and get it up to standard so that when you offer it as an alternative to the Publisher's highway robbery it's a no-brainer decision. Yes, even if you are doing cardboard stands or counters this is the case.

The substitute rules manual needs to be a Forever Edition that does not change. BattleTech, try as Catalyst might, is already there. So is Car Wars (not that SJ Games isn't trying hard to change that), and yes that means that Warhammer (both Fantasy and 40K) are open to the same treatment. This is where the bulk of the work needs to go at first.

Minis, maps, counters, etc. are already abundant in offerings; it's more the effort to sort and curate for specific Brands that needs to be done.

What follows after this is the Lore Media replacement. In conjunction with the Memetic Warriors, the alternative lore breaks the Publisher's frame on the lore and replaces it with one that exclude the offensive changes that the Pozzed put into it- "Take the chick out and make it cool and awesome!"

Put your replacement rules up first as a mobile-friendly Wiki or something similar so that it's easily found and used. Do not allow anyone that you do not know to edit or moderate, and host it someplace where it is not easily fucked with by bad actors- you can ask Joshua Moon all about that. Then put it into ebook formats (PDF first, then epub, then MOBI; use Calibre for this purpose), and worry about POD listings last.

All of these alternatives need to be collected, sorted, curated, and put into a convenient place for Normies to find and follow. That's work unto itself, of the promotional sort, and it is contingent on the creatives being on the ball and getting things out there to use. Those links to those alternatives are to be furnished to the memetic warriors to deploy on request to those curious about the alternatives.

Seeming And Substance

It is not enough to be right. It is not enough to be seen to be right. Both of those are secondary to being seen to be high-status, to be seen to be fun to do and fun to be around, to be seen to be exciting and engaging- in short, to be cool, aspirational, and attainable.

You'd think that the Publisher would have this on lock. Gamer, have you SEEN the state of Marketing and Public Relations in this hobby? Fuck no, they don't. They don't have a clue, and they are very likely to have never had a clue- and when they do hit upon something that works they become very uncomfortable with how or why that is so.

Once this is put together, the memer mogging on the Publisher will be able to direct those piqued by the entertaining exchange to the alternatives and get them on board with the Cool Kids Club that smack around the Shrill Harpy Publisher That Wants You To Stop Having Fun.

Tomorrow we'll examine the case for Warhammer, then the next day BattleTech, and finally look at a few other IPs worthy of this treatment before wrapping up over the weekend.

Narrative Warfare: Full Copyleft! How The Hobbyist Seizes Control Of The Hobby (Step One: Show How It's Been Done)

The Point of Contention

As noted yesterday, the objective is to unshackle the Brand from the Publisher. It is to take a specific term and to genericize it, like what happened to "Xerox" and "Kleenex"; these are now (try as the corporations concerned might, and do) generic terms taken popularly to mean "photocopy" and "tissue paper"- a thing nearly accomplished with "Dungeons & Dragons" as it is to mean "Tabletop RPG".

We are going to genericize "Warhammer" to mean "Fantasy/SF Wargaming" in the minds of the general public, as "BattleTech" is already on the way to mean "Mecha Wargaming".

To that end, the plan is to dilute all association between the Publisher and the Brand to the point of irrelevance.

The Method of Contention

First, a recap of the usual responses to such matters.

• Buy Used: Proven effective for BattleTech. For Warhammer, and some other Brands, less so due to the nature of the business model.
• Clone: Proven effective, but for a limited purpose, for D&D and other tabletop adventure games; the clones lost their utility once what they cloned became readily available again and only those that took the extra step of becoming full and complete products on their own remained relevant. We'll come back to this later.
• Pirate: Very effective, regardless of the couch-fainting going on from time to time, and impossible to stop.

That works well enough for the games themselves, even some of the tie-in media, but what about Muh Lore?

Gamer, please! That's ripe and fertile ground for memetic conquest- conquest that has already proven itself viable and effective WITHOUT INTENDING TO DO SO.

All of this, to date, has had some retarding effect on the Convergence process. Some. Not much, but enough to be noticable.

Recall that I said on Twitter and elsewhere that IPs are not cars, but instead are Open Source software, open to forking at any time.

Recall that I said that we are going with the Informal Fork route where we conduct an insurgency against the party that did the dumb.

What do you think a forking process is going to look like?

We are, quite literally, going to do the meme.

"But that can't be done!"

I have cited several examples of Prior Art to date. Did you think I wouldn't have one for this? Not only do I have one, I have previously posted it MULTIPLE TIMES!

There it is, gamer. That, right there, is PROOF OF CONCEPT.

Now expand on that. Make Star Wars videos, comics, audiobooks, videogames, novels complete with all of the trade dress, trademarks, etc. but carefully selected to show that you do not adhere to the Pozzed Fork.

This means selecting carefullly what specific iteration of the trade dress you use, curating your presentation to match, and--and this is the critical part--doing a better job than the Publisher. Don't think so? Go ahead, take your time reading REUP; it exactly mimics the West End version of the game, trade dress and all.

This is better than a retroclone. This is better than buying used. This seizes the Brand in a vice grip, yanks it out of the Publisher's hands, and puts it back into the hands of the Hobbyists.

And you not only don't give money to people who hate you, you also deny them your time and attention- and that's where the Fabian Strategy element comes into it.

With every single creation, you take that energy--that time, that attention, that money--away from the Publisher and undermine its claims of legitimacy over the Brand. You put that energy back directly into the hobby itself, and you call what you do and enjoy by that Brand so that they associate your good works and the good times you had (and create) with that instead of the Publisher. The legitimacy goes to the Hobby scene, and not to the Publisher.

Done correctly, this creates a virtuous positive feedback loop where hobbyists enjoy the hobby for what it is and thus create more stuff to have fun with it over time.

Now that you have the idea that it has been done, and therefore it can be done, we'll spend the rest of the week on more specific details.

Narrative Warfare: Full Copyleft! How The Hobbyist Seizes Control Of The Hobby (Introduction)

What We Face

Politically motivated religious zealots, grunt-level adherants of the Death Cult, have spent most of the last few decades worming their way into various businesses that deal in entertainment media.

The Death Cult's smarter cohorts, using the language of Communism to disguise what they're doing, see all media as a vector for their control over the Narrative and thus the culture of a people.

They do this using instititutional power, justified by their religious dogma. They believe, with justification, that if they attain a monopoly on what is thought (via control over what is said) then they can control reality itself. (Don't ask them to jump off a building and fly unassisted, or let you run them over with a tank.)

They do not care about profits, or market forces, or anything that ordinarily would be a corrective and mitigative power upon their actions. They use their Patronage Network as a parallel shadow government, rewarding friends and punishing enemies, and through this network they exercise the institutional power that they usurp from the enemy nations they target.

The specifics of this are explained in three books: SJWs Always Lie,SJWs Always Double-Down, and Corporate Cancer. The latter is the most important for dealing with it if you are on the inside of a targeted institution or organization.

As this is a fanatical Death Cult, a group of religious zealots, appealing to self-interest or using market-based solutions DOES NOT WORK. As the case with Disney and its subsidiaries show, even when a Converged organization is in a death spiral leading to inevitable destruction with no survivors they will not relent.

They do not believe in the rules you think are normal and treat as if they were Natural Law. They work solely off Friend/Enemy Distinction; everything else is just a tool to use to get their way.

If you want to win, you must abandon all of the rules and tools that they used against you.

The Fictions You Must Shed To Win

Tabletop gaming, as a business and as a social scene, relies entirely upon the Network Effect to achieve its results.

However, there is a difference between the social scene where the hobbyists are and the business side where the problems are coming from.

The Death Cult is using a set of tools originally intended for a moral people, which we known collectively as "Intellectual Property", to execute its cultural hijacking ops upon the hobby scene and attempt to bring it into compliance like a fake, gay, and retarded LARP version of the Necromongers as done by people whose elders thought that Count Dante was a legit Dim Mak master.

They rely on you, fellow hobbyist, abiding by the same rules that they ignore, break, defect from, etc. every single chance that they get if it means punishing you.

If you insist on abiding by rules that your enemies do not, YOU WILL LOSE AND YOU DESERVE TO LOSE EVERY SINGLE TIME!

Seriously, gamer, learn what the real rules of this game are.

The objective is to seize control of the hobby, hold it, and safeguard it for posterity thereafter. To that end the business end must be destroyed. To achieve this end, Muh Intellectual Property--the rules that they weaponize against us, but violate without care--are to be recognized as no longer fit for purpose and thus surplus to requirements.

This is the justification:

The Publisher exists in a Compact with the Hobbyists.

The Publisher is allowed to conduct business operations on behalf of the Hobby and the Hobbyists, for which he shall be granted an honorable living performing the honorable labor of stewardship and caretaking of the core assets of the Hobby.

The Hobbyist is the Principal. The Publisher is the Agent. Agents that turn on their Principals are no longer owned any loyalty or support, but instead are to be destroyed with all due haste.

This is a textbook Principal-Agent Problem. Converged Publishers are Traitorous Agents. Therefore taking all of the assets under their stewardship, up to and including the Brands, and distributing them freely (both as in Speech and as in Beer) among the Hobbyists in perpetuity, is entirely justified and warranted.

The Objective

This is not the route of the Formal Fork Strategy. That cedes ground to the enemy. That's the route for losers and Cuckservatives.

We are going with the Informal Fork, and we're going Full Fabian Strategy. The Converged cannot be saved; the merciful route is to accelerate their demise. To cut off their revenues, their attention flows, and their claims to legitmacy and redistribute it back to the Hobby Scene is the objective. Thanks to the technology now extant, not only is this possible (as there's already mass-scaling versions done as Foreign Intelligence operations of Unrestricted Warfare by rival Imperial powers), but it is available now to ordinary people and it can be a fun side hobby to itself.

Go ahead, compete with Free stuff done by people as skilled (or moreso, given that Planned Obsolesce won't be a thing; no need to nickel-and-dime here) as Muh Professionals, easily and readily available without the garbage that the Converged (and those nearly so, but otherwise in thrall to Mammon) do on the regular.

But Why?

Again, Network Effects. This is about who controls the Network. That Network is tied to a Brand. The Hobbyist objective is to dissociate the Brand from a specific Product by the Publisher, and restore its association with the Hobby Activity in general.

This can be done. The BattleTech example is a Proof Of Concept that, despite Razorfist's doubts, can be repeated elsewhere; Catalyst already whines that there is so much extant material (including rules manuals) that it's impossible for the Cultists in Catalyst to achieve control of the Brand.

You can see where I intend to go just by reviewing this example, and no I have not forgotten about the tie-in media. That too can be contended with and beaten.

One need only remember that "D&D" is synonymose with "RPG" in most peoples' minds to recognize this fact and thus the possibility.

Yes, I am aiming to turn this into the equivalent of going into a diner in the American South, saying "I want a Coke" and then being asked to specify which one because "Coke" is synonymous with "soft drink".

That's the objective and it is an achievable one.

Tomorrow we start talking about how to win.

Narrative Warfare: Full Copyleft! How The Hobbyist Seizes Control Of The Hobby (Prelude)

This week's been a harsh one for hobbyists. Stupid British Toy Company did a dumb, and Magic-Users replaced the Head Wizard, both of which were not good for the hobby.

Yes, I have a response. Beige Shiba beat me to the summary, so I'll use his.

Before GW kiboshed it, EmperorTTS was literally putting out better lore than the official stuff.

— Mr Beige Shiba (@MrBeigeShiba) April 20, 2024

This is a lot more than what I can put into a single blog post.

This will be my subject all next week, as each element requires a post to itself.

Tomorrow is the Introduction, where I take that thing Shiba says above about this being a broken compact between the Publisher (who is superfluous to a healthy hobby scene) and the Hobby (which is a User Network, a Network Effect to itself, and thus the source of the value that the Publisher taps into).

But you're going to ask "How do we do this?"

I will answer you with another quote:

"THE INTERNET PERCEIVES CENSORSHIP AS DAMAGE AND ROUTES AROUND IT"- John Gilmore, 1993

There is a catch: the network a human--a social--entity, one enhanced and empowered by technology but not replaced by it. The core nodes of the network need to actively get out there and hook people up into it, but this is not a hard sell because a hobbyist network is not a profit-seeking entity so it has "free" and "dirt cheap" as strong selling points to along with "not funding people who hate you".

The rest is all addressable, and with all of the tools and resources now available, readily defeated by a few driven hobbyists acting as if centrally directed.

There's folks saying that this can't be done. They are wrong. They are wrong because they adhere to rules and presupposition that no longer apply, rules and suppositions that have been weaponized against the hobbyists and thus the wider culture for political--for religious--ends by a hostile party. If you want to win, you must do what it takes; that includes discarding anything and everything that's been turned against you.

We're in Samizdat territory now, publishing under occupation, so the game is different now. You can cry about if when they're dead and gone, and no sooner.

Welcome to the real Cyberpunk dystopia, chummer.

The Culture: The Bros Proven Correct Again By Independent Actors

Jeffro noticed something again.

Turns out that proper campaign play is proper campaign play no matter what.

Summarized: "This stuff works. Across tables. Across systems. Oh...and it looks like 1:1 Time leads to Zero Prep in about 8 to 10 weeks."

We have proof that #JeffroIsRight, and that the Bros have indeed recovered the Best Practices for this hobby as proven by several years of receipts at this point.

Ankle-biters and naysayers can't gainsay that and not come off as liars, frauds, and overall bad people who should be shunned.

You too can be a winner. Get your copy today, and then go read the Bros' blogs/podcasts for Session Reports and other receipts.

Jeffro has his own take, which you can find here.