Alone with My Principles

Sometimes a comment is written that sincerely wants to help me see the world in a light that will give me strength and hope to change my perspective, and possibly cease to be less bitter and therefore make the kind of money others are making doing what I'm doing. That, I think, is the sentiment with Icosa's comment here. It references my biathlon post of last January as if to say, "See, you could live some of this dream." It encourages me to open my mind and learn something from a successful designer. It argues that there's a "good game" in me, arguing that it could plausibly be of the size and scope of AD&D. It even states that the commentor would buy this game from me.

When I was in high school, I had a good friend Rob who wavered between becoming a performing electronic musician in the vein of Throbbing Gristle, or possibly an electrical engineer. Alas, his brilliant musical career ended and he became the latter. But during those younger, heady days, whenever the subject of selling out came up, he would raise his hand and say, "Me. I'm ready to sell out. Tell me what line to get into."

He didn't mean it, because he didn't sell out. But he did recognise that was the only chance of his music (see above) having any commercial success. Which it did not.

Selling out describes the act of compromising one's personal values, artistic integrity or principles in order to achieve financial gain, popularity and mainstream success. Not everyone who has these things achieved them by "selling out." Sometimes, if I were to pick a band I once personally knew, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, they don't have any of those things to sell. Rather, they had a willingness to get on stage a lot, to keep practicing together and, as chance would have it, a sound that worked well in the 90s (once an engineer worked on it, that is. If you had ever heard the Chilis at the National here in Calgary in the late 80s, there's no way in hell you'd have ever believed they'd get a record contract.

Artistic integrity describes an individual's commitment that the art they are producing — which I'll widen to include any creative work — remains true to the vision, value or creative principle by which they make that art. Integrity reflects an individual's genuine ideas, the emotion they connect with those ideas and the style in which those ideals are rendered, in my case in text, in the case of others, in visual or audial measure. Essentially, it's about maintaining authenticicy in one's art, prioritising personal expression over external approval or material gain.

When I created yet another wiki, I considered a number of names to call it, finally landing on "Authentic" as the best possible expression for what I was trying to accomplish. The wiki doesn't represent "a" set of rules about role-playing, it represents what I think are best possible game tested rules that can be made... that are subject to change when, like science or design, something is better understood, or might be more effectively constructed.

As such, I don't run "a" role-playing game, I run the one that best expresses everything I've learned about role-playing games these last almost 47 years... in which I've watched many, many, many role-playing games rise, become popular for a while and then fade away, to be played by a small dedicated following until they cease to be mentioned even on the internet. Once upon a time, in the 1980s, when a new game would emerge, I'd anxious rush to look at it, to see how the designer constructed their metrics, to see if there was something I could steal and import into my own game... but by the time Steve Jackson churned out GURPS, I was constantly disappointed. It was all rehashes from there... endless, awful, even sometimes painful rehashes of old rules in some way made worse and repackaged as a game that would "supersede D&D at last!" Only to, of course, not happen. The last game mechanic that I lifted from a designed game originated with 3rd edition; I can't even remember what the original mechanic was called, and it needed a lot of work to make it function. I used it to construct my action point rules.

After 18 years of writing this blog, and 47 years of playing D&D, the most inauthentic thing I could possibly do would be to suddenly declare D&D secondary in my opinion to my own game system, and then take the much more rational constrution of presenting game rules on a 21st century wiki and compiling them into a 15th century technology that would, obviously, be less valuable to the user. Further, the construction of said book would involve my giving money to a third party, so I could charge people I've authentically and freely provided a system for, as a means of literally betraying my own choices in order to, yes, sell out. 

Without much chance of succeeding, mind, because I have allowed myself to be an honest, outspoken, resilient, vicious pitbull about the game I love these last 18 years on this blog. To succeed in business, one must have business friends. Those willing to talk up one's kickstarter, or talk up one's business. I don't have those things. I have never priortised those things.

Further, for my own soul, I would find it grossly inauthentic to copy the game construction of ANOTHER GAME produced 50 years before my own, and sell it as something I "created," when clearly I did not. That is something that apparently people in the OSR can do, without much compunction, flat out ignoring that the mechanics, referencing, concepts and dimensions of their games are cheap "Gocci" knockoffs of legitimately designed originals. I may hate Gygax and his logic, but he didn't rip off a game exactly like his own that was published in 1925, and played for nearly fifty years, then pretending he hadn't done that.

So yeah. I have a few issues with that life choice.

Until just a few weeks ago this blog had the tag line, "I Love the Game of D&D."  Some have expressed their surprise and approval that I was willing to come right out and say that, without reservation. Some have recently expressed their dissatisfaction that it's gone, in favour of something that "sells" my story as a means of getting to know me better, thus enabling some to get up to speed with my approach to the game without having to read through 4,000 posts. I am not making money from this change and yet the disapproval is there. Others also love D&D. I like that. And I like that I'm enabling them to find better ways to play the game.

And I would rather have this experience than the money that Kelsey Dionne has made doing what she's doing.

That can be confusing for some people. In fact, on occasion, I had those, off-line, in real life, before the existence of the internet, call me a "loser" for having these principles. So this is hardly new.

Perhaps I can explain it this way. My father was an engineer. He was a good engineer. He graduated with honours from the Colorado School of Mines and he worked for Gulf Canada as a practicing engineer, never opting for management, until 1995. He used to talk about the difficulties of keeping up with technology changes in a heavily technological field, when the half-life of his engineering degree ceased to be, as he would have described it, relevant by 1965. That means he spent 30 years keeping up with technology changes on his own. At any time, he could have done what his peers did. He could have accepted a promotion as a manager and gotten more money. But he didn't want to be a manager. He wanted to be an engineer, because he loved being an engineer. It's what he'd wanted to be when he was 14 and for him, being one all his adult life, was living the dream.

In 1978, he was picked as one of two people to investigate the practical value of a concept called "enhanced recovery."  Now, I've talked about this on the blog before, but what the hell, let's just do it again. I'm an old man. Old men tell stories more than once.

No one at the time believed in this concept. It was in fact cutting edge oil recovery technology, involving the injection of gas, oil or water, and later other materials, into an existing pool in order to increase the pressure within that pool in order to force more oil out of a pool that had ceased producing.

See, when drilling came into existence, there was no solution for the problem that when you drilled down to get the oil from the ground, the condition that enabled that oil's extraction was underground pressure. But as you removed oil from the well, the pressure would drop, and drop, until finally, there wasn't enough pressure left to force the oil up the pipe. It meant that the field would "run dry"... except, in fact, it didn't. Everyone knew there was as much as 40% of the oil still down there, but it was wholly unreachable. And by the 1970s, areas that had once been major oil producing centres were now suffering from this problem.

When this boondoggle, which is what the company thought of it at the time, landed on my father's desk, no one else wanted it. There were small teams in companies all over the world working on the same problem, without any certainty of how it might be solved. The joke at my father's office was that he and the other fellow, I believe his name was John H., last name withheld, were working in "enchanted recovery." That gives a sense of the faith most had in the project.

Enhanced recovery didn't just become my father's field for the rest of his life, it resuscitated the world's oil industry. In the 1990s my father took a month long trip to Russia to explain the concept to Russian engineers. He did likewise take a trip to Indonesia. When he retired, at an age younger than what I am now, he had spoken with engineers about the technology all over the world.

Did he make more money on account of that? No. He never spoke to me about getting any special raise from the company he worked for, though to be truthful, even my mother never knew how much money he actually earned, because he was very 1950s that way. Did he start his own oil company? Did he become a freelance consultant instead of going on working for Gulf? Could he have? Of course. But he didn't. Because, in reality, he was never in it for the money. He was in it for the science.

Over the course of my father's life, doing a few calculations based on his probable income over the years of his being an engineer in the five decades that he worked, I'd estimate he made about ten million dollars. He didn't make it in one place, he made it steadily over the years... but the speed at which money is made isn't the issue, is it?

If I measure my own success in dollars against that, counting what I've earned from various sources, including writing, cooking, office work... I'm not in my father's league. I'd call it about three quarters of a million. Course, I don't have that money now. It went to cost of living and buying stuff that wore out and had to be replaced with other stuff. But I'm throwing these numbers around to stress that point that I don't think like a 20-year-old with regards to money any more. I don't see $3,148,567 in the way that a young person does. I see money that comes in and then goes right out again. I see money that floods a system and then retreats, forcing one to return to one's old way of just working for it. I see 8 persons on the title page who are not Kelsey, plus The Arcane Library, and Boda Games, and recognise that a lot of that Kickstarter money is not flowing wildly into one person's pocket. I don't view business like a child. I see it like it is: a thing that makes a lot of money, and spends a lot of money.

So I'm not all agog at these things. I see the world in terms of what authentically matters to me, and my goals, and things I'd like to design, create and give time to.

And none of those are a new, derivative role-playing game with a title that doesn't, in fact, mean anything. Is there a shadow that isn't technically darker than the space around it?

A Lot to Be Learned

Yesterday I was advised by a reader that there was "a lot to be learned" from Kelsey Dionne's Shadowdark. So I looked further into it. Shown is a screenshot of page 9, demonstrating the depth, difficulty and text size of the Shadowdark product. By typing "Shadowdark pdf" into the Google search engine, it's possible for anyone to read the entire document with patience and a willingness to skip ads.

I'll begin by pointing out that this is quite obviously not an independently designed role-playing game. It depends heavily on D&D, which is a nice way of saying it outright stole D&D's mechanics, dumbed them down and removed everything of nuance. On a design level, this is more or less the equivalent of rewriting Shakespeare's plays as a book of short stories. It helps a LOT with creativity when the goal is, first, let someone else do the work, and second, dumb it down to a grade school level of comprehension.

Doesn't terribly impress me.

I was never a supporter of the Old School Renaissance. I want to make that perfectly clear. I wrote yesterday that "The Old School Renaissance emerged as a reaction to what many players saw as the increasing complexity of newer editions of D&D." My philosophy about gaming differs from this premise in two important ways.

First of all, I don't think newer editions of D&D are very fucking complex. In fact, I think they're extremely stupified in design and mechanics, infantile in their reward systems and egregiously "non-game" in structure. Without hesitation, I automatically rank people who think 3rd, 4th or 5th edition D&D is "complex" as people not ready to for a grown-up career. Compared with what university educated professionals do every day, the "complexity" of D&D fits the status of learning how to Halloween as a kid. That is, not complex. We're not removing game resistance, we're not removing density... when someone carps about the need for D&D to return to the simplification of "The OSR", they're talking about removing adulthood.

People talk about AD&D and later editions as though they're equivalent to climbing K2. I'll remind the reader that I learned how to play the game at fifteen. My daughter did at nine. What are we to do with a bunch of adults who whine that D&D is so hard, they can't manage on the level of a nine-year-old?

My other reason for disliking the OSR comes from my having been playing this whole time, albeit with dark periods. By the summer of 1980, nine months after learning the game, I was so dissatisfied with the simplicity of AD&D that I began rewriting parts of the game to make it more complex, not less.  And mind you, I'm no superbrain. I do not have a PhD, I'm not an engineer or a doctor, or a lawyer; I've never had a technical job (I don't count writing). I've never worked in research or design or manufacturing. As a writer, I comment on things. This is not a superbrain activity. So when I say, "AD&D wasn't complex enough," I'm not writing as Steven Hawkings. I'm saying, the game was so egregiously simple, it wasn't sufficient to provide what I needed my game system to provide. That is millions (plural) of miles away from Shadowdark, 43 years before the launch of the latter.

I have continued to make the game more complex in the years since. As such, I have very little reason to embrace the OSR's ideology, and even less reason to consider the dumbification of AD&D as something I can "learn" from. If AD&D felt insufficient for me in 1980, before internet discourse, before "narrative gaming," before Critical Role, before modern bloat, before corporate overproduction, long before the presence of another edition or even the simplistic splatbooks of original AD&D, then my point of view could not have been in 2010 that D&D had "lost its way" through excess complexity. I thought the idea ridiculous at the time and I continue to think it's ridiculous. Moreover, I don't want to play with people who think the OSR idea has any validity. If that's you, for the love of all things sacred, stop playing D&D and go get a real fucking job, one with consequences attached to your actions. You need more life experience, not a dumber game.

Let me see if I can explain where a simple system utterly fails my perceived structure of player agency and opportunity. If you don't know me, you might want to read this, this and then this post.

If you're following along with the Discord Campaign, then you know that my party has recently been offered logistical support from a group of ethnic Hungarians seeking to destabilise the Ottoman Regime from the inside... an idea the party has embraced because they see it as a way of enriching themselves. Parties are, after all, always parties.

But now that the players have decided to onboard themselves (they were not required to do so; if they had not, I'd have simply given them some other opportunity), then the system they play in has to be robust enough to answer their intentions honestly and intelligently. A simplified system cannot hope to sustain deep agency in a setting that lacks the procedural density needed to answer the player's meaningful questions. Before Ottoman logistics in Hungary can be destabilised, they have to be comprehended, they need a logic. The players will need to know, ahead of time, what the blockhouse ought to contain, fairly, without that being strictly an arbitrary number of gold. They need to know which trade routes matter and why, what support the blockhouse has from the immediate area, how authority functions both in the blockhouse and in the surrounding region under Ottoman control. To make decisions on how to attack the blockhouse, they must have information on residents in the area, the probable consequence of the attack, what the next target might logically be, what an end-point of their engagement might be, where they feel they have a right to draw the line before getting in deeper... all with a legitimate agency that says "the players are in charge of what the players do," not me, not a story, not a convenient "adventure midway ride," nothing whatsoever that forces them, beyond the pure logic of the setting, to keep going in a setting large enough that if they walk two hundred miles west, they can escape Ottoman influence entirely and set up shop elsewhere with a clean slate.

Shadowdark's mechanics simply aren't good enough to provide this.

This is the real divide between the D&D I'm teaching and the D&D being sold, under various cheap-minded rubrics. The OSR often talks about "player freedom," but what that usually means is freedom inside a vacuum. The players may choose any direction, but the world lacks enough internal structure for those directions to materially differ from the players' perspective in any meaningful way. They can choose the left door vs. the right one. They can choose whether to enter the dungeon or not. They can choose whether or not this is the right time to return to town and resupply. The decisions are isolated, trivial and ultimately meaningless in a broader context. Players can make a choice, but they cannot engage their strategic reasoning because there is no rule structure and no complex setting against which to test their understanding of potential consequences. They can't have agency because there's nothing to have agency about. Without a detailed framework, the setting simply cannot respond to player choice.

Thus, complexity in the mechanics and the world is the medium through which player agency becomes functional. Detailed systems allow players to make deliberate choices, anticipate outcomes and respond to evolving circumstances. Without that depth, what appears to be freedom is in fact constrained and superficial. The richness of the system and the world is what allows agency to exist in a functional sense. In essence, the world’s complexity and the rules' granularity are inseparable from the player's capacity to act deliberately and with impact.

But as I said in the attached posts, DMs don't want that. They want controlled, managed, contained players who do as they're told, so they can move from points A to B to C in succession in a curated, Candyland-like structured game setting, where cardboard baddies are knocked down with dice, or fudging, since if the baddie doesn't fall then it has to be pushed over. This is what OSR celebrates as the "ideal model" for D&D, and I think that's gawdawful.

Finally, with regard to yesterday's post, one thing I did not comment upon was the lack of actual game discussion among the participants. I did not learn anything about Shadowdark from Dionne's own mouth, the matter of "State of OSR in 2026" was not in fact discussed because, in fact, OSR itself was not discussed. What was discussed was an hour of "engagement" in the least valuable, socially awkward manner imaginable.

To which I'd like to respond, can the reader see me on this panel?

It's a two-part question. First, is there any universe in which these people could imaginatively look at this blog or my content or my work and want to have me present? I think not.

And secondly, since I would talk about the subject, the State of OSR in 2026, which would be to say, it will be exactly what it was in 2025. "Advancement" is not being made in any sort of science or game play manner. It is just people churning out more product of the exact same kind. I would not be welcome with my comments. I would make everyone at the table extremely uncomfortable because I would not be there to sell anything. And where it comes to table sales, the purpose of this kind of video is to make sure no one looks incompetent, since we're giving everyone lip service in order to sell themselves as "real, authentic people" while needing to do nothing to perform that model except to sit in chairs and speak in vaguely conversational patterns. The panel does not exist to investigate anything, or talk about anything, or present a viewpoint that might damage their potential sales.

That is why, for me, I'd as soon be a member of a panel of real estate agents talking about "the housing market in 2026"... since, obviously, for real estate agents, the only answer to that question is, "It's going to be amazeballs!"

Thank you, no.

Can you imagine the seller of an OSR product addressing the question, the State of the OSR in 2026 with the answer, "This design trend, actually, has reached a dead end in these last fifteen years. I think we need to reconsider whether or not this OSR thing has actually run its course."

Nancy Duarte: How to Tell a Story

Or, how to say exactly nothing for three minutes, and make it sound like you know what you're talking about.

Note how she starts by invoking the traditional presence of the story, as though to say that we've not listened to stories because they're interesting or enlightening, but merely because they are stories; that being a story is sufficient, not the quality of that story. Then she begins to hammer how stories are "powerful," which is a watchword for those who want power, co-opted with the word "transformation," a word she proceeds to repeat three times in the next eight seconds: at 0:21, 0:24 and 0:28. She also repeats "hard-wired" twice between 0:20 and 0:30, pressing that you have no choice but to accept what she's saying because, damn, it's true through the repetition of the words. She uses "transformation" again at 0:35. Thereafter she launches into an argument that because stories have been around so long, YOUR story can be also, that you need to find a way to give YOUR story the resilence of other stories... as though your story compares with Gilgamesh or Beowulf or any of the stories that have actually survived more than the five minutes of your telling.

She says "great story" at 1:01, then again at 1:05, because once is not enough; this is followed by her arguing that your body chemistry physically changes when you hear a story, followed by the words "power of a great story" (1:15) being how we root for a "hero" (1:25) followed by "transforming" (1:26), followed by "changed by the process" (1:29). She says change again at 1:33 and then transformed again at (1:38), by the "power" (1:39) of story. 

The third part employs the words "authentic," "transparent," "personal"... stressing how "real" a story makes you as a person. Between 1:55 and 2:01 she mocks people who aren't properly engaged, literally then a metaphor to explain how ants form connections that build loyalty, "not only to you" (2:21) but also "to the brand" (2:23). It's a bit clumsy, she loses her way a bit, but that's the message. Turn people into ants and make them obey you and your brand, because "you get so much more done"... that is, power again, translated as "emotional connections." (2:29) "and using story to make those connections make it even more powerful (2:33), strengthening you as a leader (power again). She then ends this with a statement that when she's with people who "get me" makes her "superhappy." Yeah.

It's propaganda. It's hammering specific words, specific sentiments, employing a nostalgic tool (storytelling) to seek power, control and personal gratification through the motivation of other people for your own interests.  This is precisely what the WOTC does every time it writes anything about the use of "story" in their splatbooks and on their website.

Bakeries to D&D

Let's look at a business model to get into the right headspace. I want to run a bakery. There's too much work for me to do on my own, and much of the work must be done between 1 AM and 9 the next morning, while much of the interactive trade with my suppliers must be done between 9 and 5. That creates a 16 hour continuous work window, which I cannot be awake for beginning to end, especially because the bakery is likely to be open another three hours, until 8 pm. Plus, to manage my suppliers, and other business issues like advertising and quality assurance, not to mention legalistic problems having to do with a very hot oven operating in a locale that must be easily accessible, most of the time I just cannot even oversee the day to day sales of product.

Therefore, I need at least three persons that I want to hire: a baker, and probably a helper for the baker, but let's call this one person for now. A day person, someone who can arrive at noon and leave at 8, because this person must be able to do the cashout, and therefore must be responsible, and a person who can cover the last of the baker's shift and the day person's... and here is the real big issue with a bakery: the busiest part of the day is between 7 AM and 11 AM... where the third person, the one not doing the cashout and not cooking the product, IS hard pressed. And my business really relies on this person, because this person's attitude to that busy period is going to make or break me.

So, three critical persons, all of whom are doing work that could easily end my business, and I can't practically oversee them, due to my other responsibilities as a business owner. This is why running a bakery is next to impossible... because if you hire a fourth or fifth person to make SURE the business runs well, the cost of labour can easily break me.

It is for reasons like this that authority of any kind isn't about comfort or vague self-expression.  Try to go into business as a bakery owner to "find yourself" and you will very quickly find that you're not a bakery owner.  There's no room to romanticise your work or your staff, or hedge your expectations... you have to calculate precisely, daily, what needs to happen and enforce structures that ensure it.

This principle, as it happens, does not apply to DMing a game.  But funnily enough, DMing a game DOES apply to this principle.

To continue with the model discussed.  As a bakery owner, and really any sort of authority we may ever embrace, the more we know about the business we're in, the better. A bakery is always strengthened if the owner is a baker, and knows how to bake if the baker doesn't show up... but all too often, a baker is often terrible with those issues of managing the local authorities, regulations, business associations or providers as they go.  If I've worked in a flour mill, I'll see things in the flour I'm given that another baker would never see, assuming that all flour is always the same, given that it's only "flour." The more we know, the more we can see, and the more we see, the more we can adjust for it, plan for it, and fix the problem when it arises.

Yet, of course, people get into business knowing nothing except what money looks like. They start restaurants without knowing how to cook, or start clothing companies without knowing how the wider industry works, or publishing books supposing that when a printer tells them what to do, then that's obviously right. After all, the printer must know what do to.

Except that the printer's concern is the printer, no the buyer; just as the cooks who do know how to cook also know how to steal food from the owner, just as the bartender knows how to water drinks for tips, or the cloth merchant knows how to swindle a rube with third-rate cloth.  One reason why that bakery run by eastern Europeans seems never to close or go broke is because those who run it began in a host of industries, when they were young, that supported bakeries.  They worked in sugar or flour mills, they carried sacks by the hundreds every day, they made their contacts and they kept them... and they continue to do that, silently, patiently, never trying to open another location, because getting rich isn't their goal.  Baking bread is.

So, what does any of this have to do with D&D?

Our attention to detail matters, not in the game world, but in the real one. That said, however, the decision to bend ourselves to rules that we perhaps do not understand at first glance, or commit ourselves to a difficult game structure that we feel certain we can get better at it helps impress skill-sets that repeatedly come to serve us later, often in ways we can't imagine.  We might not think that opening a module, reading through it and then presenting it to players is a "skill-set," but we do precisely the same thing when we're given a company policy that we're to present to employees, who must accept the policy as we provide it.  Knowing how to present the module in a way that encourages the players to sign on helps with teaching employees that they, too, have to onboard themselves if they want to continue working here.

Of course, all that's ruined when present-moment Hasbro D&D tells the DM to be a dancing monkey. But we can leave that discussion for another day.

Traditionally, DMing has been an authority based role, one in which we manage people. Moreover, apart from the process of answering questions, filling in details, staying one step ahead of the clever player, not letting ourselves get manipulated by a player (in the same way as the baker above not being tricked into thinking a poor employee is indespensible), DMing also builds confidence, a work ethic and a sense of responsibility.

One thing that is rarely discussed in all the questions and answers about how to get players to show up to games is this:  the DM always attends.  It seems to go without saying, but it does get to the heart of the issue.  The players may or may not be turning up because of what the DM says, does or fails to do, but we can at least assume that if the DM is there, and ready to run, then the DM is committed. It wouldn't be the first role in our lives we'll engage in where we're show up ready to run the place, only to find the employees haven't.

DMing, even bad DMing, requires a discipline that players usually don't have. Prep of some kind has to be done, competence of some kind has to be gained, a willingness to adopt authority with one's friends or acquaintances, and in many cases, with total strangers, has to be assumed. Doing so requires grit, tenacity, a vision in what ought or what ought not to be accepted from players and a resolve that, however difficult it may be, we're going to keep at it because we like this game that much.  All these traits translate very, very well to the real world, when we're put in a position of authority.

Not that the world knows this.

I have "dungeon master" on my CV because I'm at a point in my life and my career that I'm not interested in working for someone who doesn't know what D&D involves, and I don't have to. It's a luxury I didn't have once.  For those who know, it's an eyebrow-raiser... and for those who stare at it, wondering why this person is including a "game" in their resume, it's a fast way of identifying employers I'd never want to work for. But for the employer who knows what that is — well, these past few years, that employer has proved to be a good fit for me.

Point in fact. In 2017, I worked briefly, four months, in a bakery, as a four-hour a day employee, four days a week, which did involve me doing the cash-out. I was trusted not because I was a D&D player (oh, how I was in bad straits those days), but because of my university degree.  Point in fact... I learned more as a DM than I ever did in university. Unless you want me to explain at length why the Roman Empire was inevitable.

I can tell you how a bakery functions because I worked in about a dozen restaurants off and on for 25 years, going back to when I was a kid. And I pay attention. That is really it. Paying attention. Effective DMing isn't about listening, it's hearing the phrases behind what's being said... the subtle clues that indicate the player wants to hedge or effectively "steal from the till" when we're not looking. Because just like employees, players will. They can be your very best friends, but where some personal gain is at hand, and you turn out to be a softie, concerned that they're having a good time, they will quietly and consciously manipulate and make you feel that they're presence is completely indespensible to your campaign. And many DMs, knowing they're doing this, will let them, thinking, "Well, it's social, right? It's a game. And I don't really care if they earn what they get."

Sigh.

Well, there are DMs and there are DMs.  And while the above describes my experience, it has to be said... there are a great many dungeon masters who should never manage anything.  Just like there are many, many people who seem to have money to start businesses they should never be allowed to start.

But of course karma pays this. Because such persons never learn anything, while their money is better in my pocket than theirs.

The advanced-copy September issue of the Lantern will be available tomorrow.

Tonight at the Sentry Box

I would be posting the next segment of Finding D&D in the Dark, except that I'm gearing up today to sell my menu and book at The Sentry Box.

This shop has been in business the whole time that I've been playing D&D, though in this interation I'm guessing about the last 25 years.  The upper deck will be full of players tonight, while I'll have a table somewhere on the lower deck, I suppose.  Gordon, the owner and I, have been acquaintances since I was 15, so he was graciously considerate in giving this opportunity.

I know it means little to anyone not actually in Calgary, which is why I haven't been harping about this for weeks, but if anyone reading this is in the area, drop in and see me.

Guesses

So, where is D&D going?

I stumbled across some rumours about Tencent Holdings Inc. acquiring Wizards of the Coast, something that's arises primarily from financial analyses and reports highlighting Hasbro's financial difficulties. Hasbro's significant financial losses, including layoffs and reduced revenue from its toy business, have spurred speculation that it might sell off profitable divisions like WOTC to stabilize its finances. Tencent is a publicly traded company listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange; it's also a Chinese multinational conglomerate founded in 1998, with shareholders that include investment firms and funds. It's one of the world's largest technology companies, with a market cap of 400 to 500 billion, USD. Hasbro's market cap is around 10 to 15 billion.

Hasbro has absolutely denied that any such acquisition is going to take place, saying, "We don’t make a habit of commenting on internet rumours, but to be clear: we are not looking to sell our D&D IP." Still, a report by the Chinese news outlet Speed Daily, which suggested that Hasbro was considering selling, published on Jan 31, 2024 and was thence translated and disseminated by platforms like Pandaily.

Here's where the story gets interesting. Balder's Gate 3 officially released on Aug 3, 2023. Larian Studios, which developed and released the game, was not the original developer of the Baldur's Gate series. The original Baldur's Gate games, Baldur's Gate (1998) and Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn (2000), were developed by BioWare and published by Interplay Entertainment. As such, Larian had to approach the WOTC with the proposal to develop Baldur's Gate 3, and after discussions, WOTC granted Larian the necessary rights to use the Baldur's Gate name and the Dungeons & Dragons mechanics and lore.

BUT ... Larian had wanted to do on developing further works based on that property. In December 2023, Larian Studios' CEO Swen Vincke expressed frustration and sadness publicly when he learned that much of the company's D&D team were sacked ... these being the same persons who, essentially, had given Larian "carte blanche" to further develop Balder's Gate. This story, published by PCGamesN on December 15, 2023. According to the article, these layoffs were part of a broader reduction in workforce by Hasbro, which had announced substantial job cuts due to financial difficulties.

So, let's review the timeline. Balder's Gate comes out in August '23; four months later, in December, Hasbro fires all the people that Larian had worked with. In January, Tencent is "rumoured" to be in line to buy the WOTC.

Oh. Nearly forgot. Tencent holds a minority stake in Larian Studios, which has facilitated collaboration and support, particularly visible with the success of Baldur's Gate 3. Essentially, Tencent is Larian's monster big buddy, who this last year made a whack of money from Balder's Gate, unquestionably the game of the year.

So, as I was saying, this "rumour" suddenly appears. Hasbro absolutely denies it, which makes sense, since it's common for companies to withhold information about potential mergers or acquisitions until deals are finalized to prevent market instability. It's also common to throw rumours out there, knowing that they're false, in a bid to cause market instability. A huge Chinese company, seeing a successful product line threatened, which has control over a lot of Chinese media, invents a rumour, gets the rumour passed around various outlets and ... instability results.

In March, 2024, with the rumours in the water, Vincke announced that Larian wouldn't be continuing with any future Baldur's Gate projects after Baldur's Gate 3. And now, since March, Hasbro's stock has risen approximately 23%. Arguments have been made that Hasbro has been able to strengthen it's digital capabilities and supply chain productivity, and that it's riding the wave of a positive momentum in the market. But, Hasbro's recent layoffs at Wizards of the Coast (WOTC) appear paradoxical given the division's strong performance. Despite substantial layoffs, including key personnel involved in Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering, WOTC has continued to thrive.

Any investigation into why dredges up the standard company boilerplate answers, that a broader strategy by Hasbro to cut costs and focus on "fewer, bigger brands" amid challenging market conditions has steadied the company's financial health. That new appointments like Tim Kilpin as President of Toy, Licensing & Entertainment, and Gina Goetter as Chief Financial Officer are part of ... get ready for this ... Hasbro's "Blueprint 2.0 strategy" aimed at enhancing the value of its brands and improving operational efficiency.

I have a theory. It could be evidence of a proxy fight. If Tencent is steadily acquiring Hasbro's stock, that could account for the irrational jump, after years of the stock performing badly. Tencent might see strategic value in influencing Hasbro, particularly due to the lucrative Wizards of the Coast division. Acquiring control, or at least significant influence, over Hasbro could provide Tencent with substantial leverage in the gaming and entertainment industry. By circulating rumours of a potential acquisition, Tencent might aim to create uncertainty or pressure on Hasbro’s current management. This tactic could be designed to lower the stock price initially, making a takeover more feasible, or to rally shareholder support for changes in leadership or strategy that align with Tencent’s interests.

Hasbro has been circling the drain for a while now. It could be ripe ... and it apparently has poked a bear large enough to smack it down once and for all. None of this, obviously, has anything to do with the WOTC's design problems, but I stumbled upon this and I thought the reader might be interested. It's a bit more like the writing I do for my day job, so it's going to look odd here.

Saturday Q&A (jan 13)

Mark from Missouri writes:
[in regards to 4d6]

Try a virtual machine? Oracle VirtualBox is free, for example, and you can create a machine with better RAM than you had on the original, load Windows 7 on it (gaining a Win7 ISO file is left as a exercise for the reader) and Publisher 7 and stick with what works.

The VM can "mount" folders on the actual computer to get picked up by various backup software, if you're the type that does that, and the VM file itself is generally portable for the remainder of your time using x86-based computers.

Answer: It's a good idea, though I'm unfamiliar with the concept. I'll bring it up with my IT guy, see what he says on the subject.

 _____

Thank you.

Not much of a post this week, obviously, and I'm late.  I've overcome the road blocks I'd encountered with the Streetvendor's Guide and I've been putting my energies towards that, as it's the priority. I think most here would agree.  Readers can keep track of my progress through Patreon posts, which I'll be adding regularly, as well as two page previews every Friday, for those donating better than $10.

Patreon also offers a service wherein I can provide a coffee cup for any supporter who gives a set donation three months running.  Patreon mails the cup to the reader directly.  We're talking of setting the tier at $12, $13 or $15 a month, with the understanding that the emphasis is on supporting me, not paying the cost of a cup.

The cup image would be this:

And the cup's appearance thus:

I hate for this to sound like a cash grab, but I'm getting a little desperate to raise money for the Streetvendor's Guide art and other up front costs, when the time comes.  I wouldn't mind hearing from a few people on the subject.

If readers would like to reply to the above, or wish to ask a question or submit observations like those above, please submit  to my email, alexiss1@telus.net.  If you could, please give the region where you're located (state, province, department, county, whatever) as it humanises your comment.

Feel free to address material on the authentic wiki, my books or any subject related to dungeons & dragons.  I encourage you to initiate subject material of your own, and to address your comment to others writing in this space.  

And Still, There's Money

Good morning.  It's June 1st and the contest is officially over.  No entries, which should come as a shock to no one since I didn't promote it to the general public.  There's nothing left to be said about that; readers can disparage me as they please.

The greater point is that I have $1,050, which I'm still perfectly desirous to give away.  I can even kick the total up a little higher.  I'm looking for ideas.  I have a few of my own, which I'll list:

Run a lottery.  Limit it to regular users.  I have no idea how I'd pick the winner.

Give a rebate to my Patreon supporters.  Spread the money around.

Pay editors for my wiki.  Support on the wiki has been there, but not exactly in a way that I really need.  This could be a motivator for one or two contributors over a short time.  Not sure how I'd scale the work.

Use the money to buy air fare to a place in Canada, the United States or Europe.  Meet a Patreon supporter.  Again, not sure how I'd pick the winner, but total support on Patreon might be a measure.  Depending on the destination, it may be possible to meet more than one supporter.

Buy a designer's module and publish it.  I have the means to lay out and publish items for free, so I could use the money to promote other designers and artists that way, giving them an up front fee and splitting publication sales.

Any other ideas?

Enough

I'm so tired of D&D.

Seriously.  It's gotten very boring for me.  I just ... can't do another go-round discussion of what's a subclass of what, or yet one more nitpicking argument about encumbrance or the viability of 1979's bard character.  I don't care what Gygax said or wrote or believed, and I don't care what anyone else related to D&D has said or wrote or argued either.  I'm very tired of it.  I just want to put the whole thing down, turn my back on it and never talk about D&D again.  May I never hear the appellations "weapons speed," "2nd edition" or "game module" again.

42 and a half years of this.  It was very cute when I was sixteen and arguing around a high school cafeteria table, but this idiocy has gone on way to fucking long.  Sorry.  Sorry, I don't want to rant.  I just want to break from D&D once and for all.

Mapmaking I'm down with.  The chairs I bought in November were finally delivered yesterday, nearly six months later.  I should be in a position to start running my roleplaying game (of no fixed moniker) in a month; my last actual running was eight months ago.  I haven't run a consistent in-person campaign since before covid.  Everyone I know except me and my partner have had covid, so on that front we're good to go.  The woman and I are, according to our doctor, in the "safe" category, should we get it.

With "the game" starting again, my direction for creativity and focus will change to those things the players need ... and in any case, I enjoy working on my wiki.  It reminds me of how and why I got into game design in the first place — not as a means to teach worldbuilding to readers, but to establish rules for my game world.  Not to reinvent the wheel, but to build a role-playing game that I'd love to play with people I love.  That's where my focus always needs to be.

I write because I love to write.  And I intend to write this blog.  But, alas, blogs are dying.  I've got to look for another means to reach people, since this one is getting thinner on the ground month by month.

I can't remember if I said so; I applied for a space at the Edmonton Expo, September 16-18, which I've visited twice before.  I'm looking forward to putting my menu for sale, and hopefully another project I'll have ready in the next two months.  My daughter is pushing me to read aloud some of my oldest blog posts, and then provide a retrospective as to whether or not I believe the same things I wrote 14 years ago.  I'm letting her pick the samples.  She hopes we'll have a bunch of these before September, so that we can tag them to a printed QR-code at the table when we talk to gamers at the con.  Seems like a good idea.  I'm even looking around for a cosplay designer to make me a monk's costume, so I can better get into the spirit of the con's culture.  Dressing up for a play is old hat, but this'll be the first time I've dressed up for a con.

Still working on the character generation page.  It rates at 127,355 bytes and there's still a long way to go.  To give a sense on that, the longest wikipedia page is, as I write this, 580,594 bytes.  I tried to see where my would rank, but the list provided only goes to the top 10,000 articles — no. 10,000 is 156,736.  I should meet that length in a week or two.

I know, strange things to talk about.  My head is going in so many places just now, as I puzzle out what I still care about and what I'm willing to consign my time towards creating.  I've thought about turning off the comments on this blog altogether; my daughter says not to do it.  I don't know.  I'm so tired of debate.  I don't want to talk about D&D any more.  Not the substanceless metagame, anyway.  It doesn't resolve anything, it doesn't convince anyone of anything, it doesn't make my game world or my players' experience better.

It doesn't belong here.  I've gotta write about other things.  I've just gotta.  To keep from going out of my mind.

Sorry if this makes this blog more boring for some.  I think there are enough people here to celebrate it.  In fact, I think I can hear the wind saying, "oh thank gawd ..."

Projects

For those who might be wondering, yes, I'm still running a contest.  And yes, I'm still selling a menu.  If it seems I don't care about these things, because I haven't spent the last three-four months hammering away, marketing the products, even putting them on the site's sidebar, it's because I don't care.  Not really.  The menu is brilliant.  Everyone who's had it in their hands says so.  And the money for the contest sits comfortably waiting.  The contest reaches its deadline in 56 days, with the end of May 31.  There have been no entries yet.

Am I worried?  No.  Why should I be?  I'm not entering the contest, so the deadline means nothing to me.  And as I've explained, I can do far better with the menus selling them in person than I can do online.  In person, at a game con, I can easily get $70 a copy free and clear.  Online, I have to pay a third of that to mail it, with it being impractical to sell it for more than the $45 I'm asking.

This blog isn't about contests.  And even as I work on possible products to sell at a con, this blog isn't about products, either.  I am eternally grateful to those who committed to my kickstarter.  Thanks to you, I have menus I can move when I'm ready, I have excellent terms with a menu folder provider and I'm in great shape just as soon as we can move on from Covid.  Thanks to people who support my Patreon, I've been able to turn my offline writing job into a sustainable part of my life, so that every day I can get up, sit at my computer and work.  Of course, this means that some days I work for other people, but I can do it here.  I can drink my own coffee, I can monitor emails and comments, and I have no one physically looking over my shoulder.  I'm probably living in the best circumstances of my life right now, which is pretty amazing for someone who was living in the worst circumstances 3 years ago ... and with me transforming that circumstance, I must stress, during Covid.

This blog is about content.  Those who support me deserve to see that content as many days of the week that I can produce it.  I write as much as I can think to write, covering as many topics as I can think to cover.  I've come to see this blog as a "get my feet wet" process of book writing.  So far, it hasn't actually spawned any books in that regard, but ... I think it's going to.

Once upon a time, I lived my life way in the future.  Two, three years hence.  What I did today was a part of what I would have written in completion years from now.  Somehow, I've lost touch with that.  Oh, it's still here.  I've just forgotten ... exactly ... how to do it.  Too much living day-to-day, hand-to-mouth.

These last four months, writing about worldbuilding, feels like a dry run ... and at the same time, it also feels like a disconnected collection of thoughts stumbling in the dark, looking for a structure.  I keep thinking one's going to emerge, like Topsy ... but so far, not yet.

The contest, the menu ... these are things behind me.  They're done — though there were two pages I owed to the menu that didn't manifest, and that eats at me a little.  I do have to get on those.  Did some preliminary work.  Just ... got a little sick of writing menu items.  Anyway, it's in the back of my head.  I was saying, I'm thinking mostly right now of things in front of me.  Despite feeling good, being on my feet, unworried for a change, I'm not sure just now what I want to work on in the big picture.

If anything feels like it needs attention, it's committing myself to a game con that would present sometime post-October.  Something I'd need to sign up for in April.  Something in Canada would be easier, but I think with Patreon's support to date, I could do Chicago, Seattle, Denver ... maybe San Francisco.  I have to look into it.  If anyone has any idea of a con in your town, or near your town, that can boast at least 60,000 guests, let me know.  Not worth the travel time to go somewhere smaller.

Oh.  I've been working on that Romania map.  Anyone want to see how far I'm getting?  Or are we all bored with that now?

One other thing.  I haven't worked seriously on the wiki for a few months now.  I gotta pick that up again.

For Sale; Will Sacrifice

Today is December 1st.  I'm ready to officially put my menu up for sale.

The approximate mailing time is between 8 and 12 days; and I've learned the approximate cost for mailing the product both to the United States and overseas.  I've had one package go to Scotland and one to Holland; I think I've learned from those that we need a wee bit more padding than the post-package provides.  In any case, I have a clear idea of what the postage has to be, so I'm ready to define a price.

$15 for shipping is low-balling the cost considerably; frankly, this means I'll be eating some of the shipping cost, so I'm naming the price for the product itself at $50.  As it happens, in the next little while I'll be formally obtaining a business licence that will enable me to bring down the price of shipping for myself, whereupon $15 will about cover it.  Basically, I don't want to charge more up front for shipping now, when I know that later on I'll be paying less.  In other words, I don't want to punish my early purchases with a high shipping price, so that later on I can offer a lower shipping price to others.

I'm happy with the rate, I'm comfortably sure I can fix it for myself through Canada Post and in general I can feel good about myself as a seller.

I've no interest in selling the product through Patreon.  If I do, I'll be charged an American sales tax, which is ridiculous as I'm not American.  I believe there's a way of negotiating that with Patreon, but it involves giving them the money first and then canvassing to get it back.  Um, no.  Soooo ...

HOW TO BUY THE MENU

Please make a donation of $65 to the donate button on the links bar on the right hand side of this blog.  Then send your mailing address to alexiss1@telus.net.  If you'll use "Address for Menu" as your subject line, this will make it easier for me to identify you.  Please use the email to connect your mailing address on my email to your donate to paypal nick or avatar, if these are different.

Mailouts will be Tuesdays and Fridays, or any day I'm going near a mailbox.  If you get aboard right now, I should be able to easily get you the product before Christmas.  It only took 9 days for me to mail both packages to Europe.  By that reasoning, everyone I've mailed a menu to at this point should already have one ... though I've only heard from two Americans so far.  That could be the Louis DeJoy effect.  I don't know.

Monetizing a Craft

On the subject of "creativity," and living a life of being creative, I feel there's a discussion I'd like to have in this year of late 2021.  And since it's Thanksgiving in America, there's no one reading my blog anyway ... especially with it being Friday.  This is one reason I was throwing up a caption on Fridays instead of writing a post: (a) it shows people I'm still alive; and (b) I felt an odd need to stretch myself in a different direction creatively.  I recognize that it annoyed some people and amused others ... but that can be said about anything I create, all the time.  Some will like it, some won't.  For that reason, if for no other, there's little percentage in creating things exclusively for other people.

On the subject of "being creative," I'm in the camp that believes the everyone has the potential to be creative.  I don't say they are, because they're not.  But if they sought education, if they trained their minds to think creatively, if they put in the time it takes to do this, I believe that a non-creative person can become creative.

Occasionally I hear some voice on the internet who says, "That's wrong.  You have to be pretty damn smart to be creative.  Otherwise, you're not going to invent anything new."  This is nonsense.  Creativity appears to be full of remarkable leaps and "divergent thinking capabilities," as a psychologist might put it, but from a lifetime of being creative and spending thousands of hours talking about creativity with other creative people, the truth is that these things come from being grossly familiar with something.  And when I say "grossly familiar," I don't mean a kid who works as a restaurant cook and pumps out thousands of club sandwiches while waiting for the next opportunity to go home and smoke weed.  I mean someone who pays attention to the sandwiches as they're made, to the quality of cheese, to the texture of the bread, to the thickness in which the turkey was sliced, to the smell and the colour and the day it was shipped in and cut and packaged.  Paying attention to these things is not "being smart."  These are matters of pure sensory observation coupled with mindfulness, which we can define as caring about your job, paying attention to what you're doing and mentally comparing something from day to day.

People care about their job when they're given reason.  If they speak out loud about an observation they make, and they're attacked or shamed for making it; or if they're surrounded by people who themselves don't care enough to explain the nuance of making food, or any other creative thing we might happen to be doing from day to day, then it sends a message that you shouldn't care either.  Constant abusive apathy and constant abuse for being interested in things will cause people to conclude that it's wrong to be mindful of what you're doing; that it's better to think constantly of escape, instead.  And this makes the person who does care, who cares in spite of others not caring, appear to be strangely weird and remarkable.  Such a person is granted special imagined superpowers, like being fabulously smart and really fantastically divergent ... which really just means different from a general population of drones who have been taught to hate being drones, who believe the only escape from being a drone is the seven hours a day one spends away from drone-land.

I've said it many times, however.  Caring and becoming good at something cannot be done just because one wants to be.  Many of the creative people I've known seemed to possess a "natural" creative ability ... such as being able to pick up a guitar and play it competently within a few hours.  Some of these people have chosen to be creative, but I've met just as many who did nothing of consequence with their guitar-playing ability.  A guitar is just a tool.  The tool's not intrinsically important to creativity.  It is a vessel through which we express something creative, but it's not creative of itself.  Playing guitar instantly doesn't confer mindfulness; it doesn't provide the practice that's needed to observe, investigate, deconstruct, become aware of what the tool can do and then take it to creative places.

We have so many wrong suppositions we make about creativity.  The guitar-thing is just one of them.  I've heard it said hundreds of time that some people just "are" creative and some are not.  And this appears to be so, when some psychologist takes a sampling of the population and asks a hundred questions about what we feel and what we might create and how we might go about creating that thing.  But such samplings are restricted to very brief moments of time.  Becoming creative takes many, many years; and ceasing to be creative can happen after a horrific trauma within a few hours.  Someone who is uncreative today, for whatever reasons, may be that because of the life they've lived up to this time — but this says nothing of the life they could have lived, or might live in the future.  Any creative person we interview can, at any time, decide they've had enough; they can't make it pay, they're tired of the shame and the attacks of their friends, they're tired of the scene and the hatred of outsiders.  And any non-creative person might find themselves attending a class, discovering they like a thing, that they care about it, that they want to go on caring about it and, what do you know, five years from now that non-creative person is "creative."  The whole dog-and-pony show we're sold on who's creative and who isn't is an enormous pile of horse-pucky, limited by terms that were never designed to explain change, but instead to describe what is at the moment when the questioning is done.

Furthermore, we must concede and recognize that most people who set forth to define who can and cannot be creative, or who is and is not, are themselves people who decided to care about something else.  Creative people do not sit about and debate who's creative and who isn't.  They talk about who's going to "make it" and who isn't ... in the sense of, who's going to make something important and valuable, and who's blowing smoke up their own ass.  Because a lot of creative people are.  Pretense is an effective and self-destructive strategy for managing the attacks and shame perpetrated by people who feel we shouldn't care too much about things, that caring "too much" is an unhealthy habit, and that specifically we shouldn't care too much about things that don't include a steady paycheque.

It's generally accepted by those who do earn steady paycheques, who chose to care about non-creative things, like psychologists and doctors and political scientists, that it's not such a great thing to be creative.  It's not something that you, O non-creative person, should wish for.  Life really sucks for creative people.  You work a lot for something that doesn't pan out; you spend a lot of time that you could be spending earning money NOT earning money, pursuing a "risky" vocation that may never, ever pay out in any degree that will satisfy you or anyone else.  As my father said back in 1980, when I told him I wanted to be a writer, "You're never going to make a living at it."  There's the shame, right there.  Out of the gate, at 16, a young creative person is warned, "You've made the wrong choice about the life you haven't lived yet.  Smarten up and make the right choice."

It continues to interest me that half the population argues that being creative is something smart people do, while the other half argues that being creative is something only stupid people try.

It's here that we get to the meat of this post; all that's come forward to now is just setting the tone.  In a lot of ways, when talking about being creative, or "an artist" as it were, we are still wrapped up in sentiments that were — extreme emphasis on "were" — realities about being creative.  For example, and thinking of many situations where the argument was made to me by other artists, and where I made the argument myself until I knew better, creative people used to argue that "If I make an amazing thing, the world will be a path to my door."  There are still many people who believe this.  There are many who believe this is the ONLY way to succeed as an artist ... in part, because most of the visible artists we see are those who became famous for making some amazing thing.

The whole idea, however, isn't based on a "creative" model, but upon a business model.  In business, we're producing a "product."  This product then needs to be manufactured, and distributed, and this requires paying a lot of people to create numerous copies of the thing and then store the thing, and in turn physically sell the thing face-to-face to customers, all of which requires enormous amounts of capital and expenditure ... and if you're an ordinary person, who has no access to these manufacturers, distributors, retailers or money-lenders, then creating an "amazing thing" won't do you much good.

And this might be true, if this was 1995.

But it is not 1995.

Let's take these things in turn.  Once upon a time, when speaking about an artistic venture, we spoke about making something.  I tried to write a book, my friends struggled with making an album, or painting artworks, or arranging space to put on a performance or filming a film.  And these were products that were difficult to achieve or create without money and expensive equipment.  This is because if a book were written, an album or film made, a performance given and so on, these things had to be done in the real world, with real physical objects that had to be physically made.  The number of people we could expect to view these physical objects was minimal ... especially without the money to distribute or the money to knock on the doors of Guardians who were there to make sure that only approved films, albums, books, performances and what not would be allowed mass distribution to the masses.

There are a great many people whose businesses and industries depend upon the general population continuing to believe that it's still 1995.  The entire television industry, for example, in which the best rated-TV show today gets ratings so low that it would be cancelled if this were the early 1980s.  Television sells to a smaller market each year; a market that resists getting a computer; a market that gets older and therefore which is actuarially shrinking; a market that is less and less consciously aware of the real world, and can therefore invent whatever bullshit it wishes to sell as reality because most people in the world are not watching.  Other businesses include the publishing industry, the food industry, the film industry and the trucking industry ... and so on.  There are still billions of dollars associated with these shrinking, crippled behemoths, and so long as there is, there's going to be much effort to convince everyone that they're still strong, they're still making the rules, they still deserve our attention and respect, everything is in fact bigger and better than it ever was before and no, they would never, ever lie to you.  After all, they didn't lie in 1995, right?  So I'm sure they're just as honest about their expectations and future today as they were then.

Thus you will still find many pundits who will tell you, "Marketing is HARD."  It was.  It isn't now.  Marketing is still unpleasant, it's still unforgiving, it's still tedious and unfulfilling, but one thing it isn't is "hard."  Marketing is easy.  Create a space — channel, blog, webpage, whatever — and then create content for that space every day.  Or as many days as possible.  Be genuine.  You must be genuine.  Give a lot of time.  A lot of time.  Talk about anything and everything.  Be generous.  Be thankful.  Care.  That's it.  That's the formula.

This has always been the formula.  But while in 1995, the "formula" had to be pushed through grubbing executives and justified with market research and submitted with humility in front of sacred poobahs before it's being discussed by non-creative persons whose interest was money and not creativity, all that shit is gone now.  The channel is free.  The blog is free.  Webpages are not, but they're really soooo 2001.  Choose a free page on social media.  Discuss your creative agenda with no one.  Explain your creative agenda to no one except your audience.

In today's market, if you're manufacturing something, you're creating the wrong product.  I say this as someone who's just manufactured something; who has manufactured a few books.  There's a means to making things, and some cachet in having tactile products, but these are not the 2021 product you need to make.

I can do these things because I'm the design department; I'm the sales department; the internet is the customer support department.  I'm not making a gadget that can break.  Or cause serious harm to people.  I make books.  People have rarely been accidentally killed by a book.  If I were making knives, that would be a whole other thing — but if I were making knives, macrame flower-holders, metal armour or car parts, selling these things through the internet would be a bad, 1995-based marketing plan.  And as I said, it's not 1995 any more.

If I write a book and rely on how things were in 1995, then I'd have to get the book approved by an agent, who would have to get the book approved by a publisher, who would insist on my rewriting the book so it would conceivably be approved by the publisher journalism, who are necessary for selling the book to people who have never heard of the book and can't know for sure they'd ever want to read it without being first told by "experts" that they want to read it.  Of course, there might be someone who pays no attention to experts, but we have to print thousands of these things physically and then move them out to stores and draw attention to them and that's an outlay of money and blah blah blah, that's how things went.  I'd be put in a car and driven around to talk about the book everywhere, because there's no internet and television only talks to bookwriters who write specific kinds of books, so face-to-face meetings were important.  On these face-to-face junkets, I have to prove I'm really enthusiastic about going to them as long as it's expected, however much I might miss my family or children or former life, because now I'm a slave in a car pretending to care about my 55th junket three days before Christmas I won't be allowed to go home for, because the book's not selling as well as the publisher expected and that's my fault or at least my responsibility to fix.

But it's 2021, and almost 2022, and there is no publisher but me.  There is no outlay and immense stock of books because on-demand marketing blew the hell out of the publishing industry like Uber destroyed the taxi business.  I can print a bunch and get a table at a game con, which is enormous fun because I'm working for myself and I get to talk directly to my people — and not the people the publisher thinks should be my people.   My people are the only ones I'm answerable to ... and they're my people because I care, I write a lot, about anything and everything, I'm thankful, I'm genuine — even if that means being a genuine bastard — and I've built this space over a lot of time.  I've followed the formula.  And though I have a few products, what matters more is what I write here, not what products I make.

Once you have a space, and work at it, and earn the respect that people in fact want to give to those who work hard, you can make terrific imaginative creative things out of whole cloth.  You don't have to go through a tremendous guantlet to explain what this new thing is.  A traditional marketer will ask, "If people don't know what a thing is, how can they search for it on Google?  How are they going to find something they don't know exists?"

Traditional marketing presupposes that "finding" is the key to selling.  And that used to be true.  But when all the rest of the marketing, distributing, manufacturing and so on departments are dispensed with, there is much less overhead.  It takes much, much less for the creative person to, how did my father put it?  "Make a living of it."  The internet doesn't need to find me, or my product.  I don't need the whole internet.  I only need to be sure that those who have already found me have reason to keep doing so.  I need only be honest and authentic and to care enough to convince them to help me continue to keep whatever I'm doing going.

It's become spectacularly easy to create a product and then monetise it ... so long as you're making the right kind of product.  Most who get started, thinking they're going to do well, choose the wrong product.  They think they have to make a "thing" ... but let's hope that's dispensed with.  Next, they think they need a lot of equipment and glitz, and of course money to pay for it all.  I won't argue that money and glitz are nice.  People argued that my Kickstarter should be flashier, that it needed to get more attention, that the product wasn't highlighted strongly enough; and of course all those people are convinced that my kickstarter would have done better if I'd done those things, even though it succeeded at raising the money asked for.

Equipment and glitz are not, however, "content."  They're tools.  They won't make something creative more creative.  They won't give substance to something that hasn't any substance.  Something really expensive and really flashy might get attention for a while ... but it won't last and the creator won't learn anything about creating.  And to be clear on the subject, doing something successful for six years, that afterwards crashes and burns, won't sustain the creator's creative impetus for the rest of his or her life.  No matter how great one is when one's riding the crest, the shame of not being on the crest any more feels like being crucified over and over.  Creative success is about being creative, not being famous.

Feel free to disagree.  Eventually, you'll see where I'm coming from.

So what do we sell?

Not an idea.  Ideas are fleeting.  J.D. Salinger had a great idea for a book that he wrote in his 20s and had published when he was 31.  Catcher in the Rye has been considered one of the greatest works of literature ever produced since its first publication in 1951.  Salinger spent the rest of his life wrestling with his inability to repeat his success, escaping public exposure, struggling with his spiritual beliefs and, on the whole, remained an apparently unhappy person for most of his life.  Who knows what the truth is about that, but we know he was hounded relentlessly by a publishing industry that held him to a standard to which he didn't want to be held.

A more common story follows virtually any artist who created a series of works for a decade or so, did well, became famous ... and then simply ran out of ideas.  After a string of successful albums, books or films, one fails, then another, then another.  And as the specific industry turns its back on the artist, the artist grows increasingly obscure, until several generations of children are asking the question, "Who's Paul McCartney?"

Not saying it isn't great having a good idea, or that we can't seriously enjoy that idea when it comes or even build on it for the future.  But we shouldn't count on one great idea to sustain us and it's not necessary in any case.

Where once the goal was to become creative and effective with a given tool that channels that creativity, there's something more important that we can sell today.  As a product it's highly in demand and it's inexhaustible.

Teach.

You can do it; now, teach someone else to do it.  You can renovate a bathroom?  Great!  Film yourself doing it, explain what you're doing, be detailed, take your time, admit your mistakes, have fun ... and then do it again.  Each time you renovate a bathroom, there will be different problems, different things to explain, different gadgets and pieces to buy and install, different jokes to make, different things that YOU will learn and then TEACH, in the same breath.

Where once you created a piece of music and then sold it to someone so they could buy your music and listen to it ... today you can film yourself creating music, explain the process of creating music, teach others how to do it, help them along, communicate with them directly through numerous channels and help them create their own music and enjoy making it.

I write about D&D.  Yes, it's interesting that I have this huge, phenomenal world, but that's not because I'm smarter or more creative or because I possess divergent whateverisms.  It's because I cared, I loved it, I did it constantly, I was mindful of what I was doing, I listened to my players and I trusted my motives to just keep going, to create the next thing, to try something different, to explore possibilities and to ignore people who told me to stop creating and start buying someone else's product.

We're moving into some interesting times.  For two decades we've been told that the internet offers an information revolution.  What manufacturers and marketers don't want us to realize is that the revolution is learning to do things ourselves, teaching others and recognizing that a truly individual thing is not something we buy, but something we learn to make while enjoying the process of making.  Part of that process is teaching others ... and building a new economy through teaching and small-scale personal, authentic-based exchanges.  The 1995ers are worried; they don't know what they're going to do with a worker/owner based economy of five billion self-driven labourers who don't need a job.  They don't need a minimum wage.  They don't need marketing.  And they don't need venture capitalists, marketing agents, retailers, angel investors, brick-and-mortar stores or, well, anybody.

These people are scared.  And they will do their best to obfuscate our choices, to shame our desire to be creative and individual, to push us to believe that we need them, that there's no future without them, and that if we don't kowtow to them, our future, our hopes and dreams, our freedoms and everything that matters will be put at a tremendous personal risk.

Without a doubt, count on them to lie.  As much as they have to.

Old Man River

A little more than 10 years ago I wrote that I hadn't had strega in years.  After an impromptu celebration  among friends, where we agreed we were all suitably safe from covid, and the numbers here in Alberta are low in terms of dire cases (though overall cases are distinctly up), I am a little the worse for wear of strega as I write this.  So I won't be writing long.  It was an excellent, generous Italian restaurant and I'm sure we helped the owners pay their bills somewhat this month.

The kickstarter is slightly hung up because to set one up, you must give supply the online bureaucrats with your bank account number and transit information.  I can't do this until I set up an account that has no contact whatsoever with my daily transactions, which has meant waiting until tomorrow to for an appointment to do so.  After that, I should be able to complete the requirements, but even then Kickstarter wants 8 business days before it goes active.

Having the Italian restaurant's posh menu in my hands this evening, I felt amused that my own menu is yet slightly upmarket.  I could scale the upfront cost to me downwards — purchasing a less expensive cover — but somehow, I feel disposed against it.  The providing company is in Massachusetts, near Fall River; it's rather whimsical that I'm buying the product from them not for a restaurant, but for a make-believe product that could, conceivably, continue to sell by the score for several years.  I imagine how the Fall River company might look on that: this strange fellow in Calgary buying a hundred covers, then another hundred, then another and another, as if I had a growing chain of high-class restaurants out here ... which obviously I haven't.

I can't wait for the company to ask about this and then to tell them the truth:  I've created a make-believe fantasy menu for a role-playing game.  What a lark.

There's a parallel, I think, to the restaurant my friends and I descended upon tonight.  Monday nights are notoriously quiet in the industry, but we made a reservation, then descended liberally upon the place and obviously gained the good will of the owners.  Much of the strega I drank tonight was free.  It was only a whim that I asked if they might have it; and the owner was both stunned and thrilled, exclaiming, "I haven't had anyone ask for it in years!"  She then proceeded to dust off a bottle (I don't think really, but makes a better story), which we polished off.  Except for myself, none of my friends had tasted it.

It's interesting how our decisions to do something nice for ourselves translates so plainly into the benefit it brings others.  Take this Fall River company.  I decide to invent something new; I need someone to provide the soft, faux-leather materials; I launch a kickstarter to help buy my first hundred, plus printing and shipping; and this company that knows nothing stands to gain every bit as much as my buyers will, as the "river" rolls from entity to entity.  Naturally it follows that the employees in Fall River will benefit as well, as their children will, and the local grocers and renters I suppose, and whoever else, because I decided, "Hm, I think I'll make something."

It's this "making something" that gets lost in the equation, where so much emphasis is put on selling it and buying it; or worse, on "trading" it; but let's not get into all of that.  Anyone can find it in Adam Smith and Marx, if they care to read.

Me, I'm merely sated, warmly happy, confident I'm on a good path and uncharacteristically optomistic.  It's a feeling I hope lasts well beyond tomorrow.

The Menu

As demonstrated here.  With this screenshot:

For some time, I've put down work on the poster (which will be picked up again) in order to produce this more accessible product, a functional menu for any medieval campaign using copper, silver and gold coins.  The items are arranged neatly, described, a price is provided and sufficient quality of design that a Dungeon Master can proudly announce that the players have arrived at the "Jousting Pig" and oh, here's the menu.  The background is rich and appropriate for the time period and the folder is comparable to what the reader might find in a quality restaurant.

As yet, as the video says, I don't have a price.  Just at the moment, we've calculated what it would cost to buy and print the materials in bulk; there is also the matter of packaging and shipping, not to mention that I'm on the North American continent and that many of my readers are in Europe, South Africa, Asia ... I'm not sure of details regarding shipping overseas at a reasonable price.  The combination of these things suggests a fund that would ensure reliability on our part regarding delivery.  Previously, I've not had these concerns, as selling my book through Lulu and Amazon puts those troubles on them.  This could not be done effectively that way, since we must purchase the binding ourselves before mailing it out.

Some months ago, a reader suggested "Make the product first, and then make a kickstarter for it."  As we've followed that advice (and by "we," I mean my daughter, my manager and myself), it would make sense to launch a kickstarter for, say, $3,000.  This would let us purchase the device that would enable us to provide and implement a design for the menu cover ourselves; it would let us buy the menu covers in larger numbers; we could make arrangements ahead of time to manage credit cards online; and all the other technical details.  One stretch goal above that amount could support the creation of additional menu pages, with other dishes and logos, that could be switched out with the Jousting Pig.  A further stretch goal would support the creation of another menu entirely, one that was based on a later time period and cuisine, say pre-Columbian North America, as none of the J.P.'s menu items feature foods that were acquired after the discovery of America (unless I've miscalculated somewhere).  In any case, a different menu that focused on beans, maize, sassafras and sasparilla, yerba mate and so on would definitely be doable.

As the video says, all these items on the menu above are REAL.  They were painstakingly researched, which my long cooking experience of 17 professional years was key.  Given the tools and the right arrangements (many of them require a walk-in fireplace) I could make every one myself ... and they would all be tasty, I'm sure.  If anyone wonders, haggis is not on the list.  It is too often rushed to for an example of old style cooking and so I did not include it.  I could add it to another, alternate menu page if requested.

Interestingly for some, all these menu items were priced according to my trade system ... which meant determining the cost of each part of the recipe to establish the Inn's "food cost"; table costs were then calculated accordingly.  All the items have been added to my trade tables, which are still under revisement, and so in my game at least, these items would have different prices depending on what part of my world the players find themselves in.  This is something I've done for myself, though it has nothing to do with the menu as a "product."  I mention it only to explain that there is a logic to the prices; I didn't invent them out of thin air.

At present, I'm not in a position to do any selling.  Please, as I said last week, DON'T send any money or make any special donations at this time.  If a kickstarter seems like the best idea, then it's best to save it for that time.  For the present, my supportive readers who contribute to my Patreon are doing enough to enable us to move forward on this project and on its sister project, the equipment poster ("A Streetvendor's Price Guide").

I cannot wait until we're able to arrange a table at a con and sell this direct to visitors.  Having it in my hand, I cannot express how good it feels, or how good it looks ... and from seeing the faces of others watching this project go through some iterations since its first printing on Wednesday, when it didn't look good enough.  Today, it looks ... well ...

I'm fairly certain nothing like this has ever been presented for D&D.