The Alt-Right DM

Things are quiet around Chateau d’Wright these days.  You know how it is.  Summer has drawn to a close, but the leaves are yet to fall.  The kids have returned to school.  The scratching on the stones at the bottom of the dry well in my basement have ceased to echo.  Worse still, the house lacks the crunch of Doritos, the hiss of newly opened Mountain Dew 2-liters, the clatter of dice across the table, and the snorts of fat nerd laughter.

I feel a little bad that the blog has been light on actual D&D content lately.  It’s starting to feel like the offices of WotC around here – Hey-O!  All my grumbling about the pop kult is even getting on my nerves, and my nerves are as steely as Dan.

But all that’s about to change.

Old Autarch himself has been kind enough to keep me personally informed with updates via his Kickstarter page that he’ll be getting my backer copy of Secrets of the Nethermost City into my palsied hands forthwith. Then we’ll really have something to talk about. I’m going to review this thing so hard you won’t even believe it.  I’m going to talk about binding and page quality and typesetting and all of the most important parts of a gaming supplement.  Or maybe, and stick with me here, because this is going to get a little nutty, but maybe I’ll talk about the actual content of the adventure.  You know, usability, creativity, and all the things that really matter.

Don’t make me “DAB” on ou “HATERZ” or I’ll drop another 1970’s music reference, bucko.

I’m a wild man, I know.

Now, I’ve been kicked out of one of the local game stores for not being diverse in the exact same manner as everyone else.  I also lack the social skills to find players that I’d actually be willing to invite into my home.  Which means I can either trick another mafia family into playing through this campaign, or run it at the local shop that doesn’t know what my real name is.  (I tell them all my real name is John Scalzi so that if they google me, they’ll think I’m a run of the mill basic bitch writer with delusions of grandeur instead of the magnificent son of a bitch that I really am.)  We’re going to try to make a weekly thing out of this, which means a revolving cast at the table, but all you grognards know that the strength of the character is the party and the strength of the party is the characters.  The game continues even through TPKs, and player knowledge beats character knowledge, and meta-gaming is still real gaming.

And when I run this bad boy down to the local shop, you’ll be there, sitting right next to my emaciated cancer-ridden body.  I’ll be giving a session by session, blow by blow account of this monster IN PLAY – and not in LARPing play like you see on those YouTube shows, but an actual gaming session where everything is made up and the rules actually matter, and you’re highly unlikely to see a single broad there to demand that we rearrange the furniture to suit her math-hating tastes.

You’re going to love it or you’ll get twice your money back.

Apparently WorldCon was last week or something.

Whatever.  They all still suck.

This is all the energy I can muster to throw my usual hot takes and clever zingers at that increasingly irrelevant crowd.

Where’s my Rob Kroese fantasy novel series already?

‘member when we adopted Tay Tay as a symbol of all we hold dear?  You know who didn’t appreciate at it.  You can can tell from the still image of her latest video.  They must have threatened her with a one-way trip on the Real Lolita Express airplane – not Epstein’s – the one they threw to us wolves to distract us so that they could keep it hidden.

Look what they’ve done to our Tay Tay!

That’s really going to cost her.  My second ex-wife’s income from her porn hobby got cut in half the day after she crossed that Rubicon.  This must be the new hurdle for impending wall-crashers to straddle to buy those last two years of pop music relevancy or something.

You see!  I told you that RPG.net was the canary in the cultural coal mine.  When the grotesqueries the RPG.net crowd calls moderators banned two of my three alt-accounts there solely due to their support for the Tarnished God Emperor of America, I told you it was only the first sign of the impending nerdageddon.  Now the fatties and the blue haired cultists over at Ravelry.com are following suit in cutting the pretty noses of the hobby off their bloated corpuscular faces.  They’re doing it in the exact same manner, and they are using the success of the Cheeto-huffers at RPG.net as covering fire to do it.

Don’t believe it?  Sounds too ridiculous even for the Babylon Bee to publish as satire?  Well, doubting Tom-ASS, check out this archive of a Vox article which says:

We are banning support of Donald Trump and his administration on Ravelry.

…

The policy also notes that Ravelry is following the lead of the longtime gaming forum RPG.net, which banned Trump support in October 2018.

We nerds are the dank, fetid manure from which the roses of normie culture bloom.  Our thankless task is to create the stories and memes and tech that make the world a better place for all mankind.  What happens down here in my mother’s basement may take decades to trickle up into the popular zeitgeist, but it’ll get there sooner or later.  The normies know this, and they fear it, which is why they are moving to colonize our spaces faster than ever.  They are a diabetic and syphilitic harbinger of worse things to come.

You laugh, but no hobby built by losers and for losers is immune.  They are all in the process of being commandeered by the unemployable and the Medicaid scammers who have all day to sit at home ‘moderating’ quality content like what you find on this fine blog, right down the memory hole.  Craft brewing.  Hiking.  Rock climbing.  Mongolian throat singing.  Even wargames – check out the broo-haha over a planned game about the forcible improvement of Africa that got shivved by the cult of the perpetually aggrieved.  There’s a bunch of mouth-diarrhea foamed all over about the shock and horror of conflict games where one player can actually play the Germanic hordes trying to take over the world and not the good Merkellian ones but the bad Hitlerian ones omigoshwecannothavethatnowcanwe!  (There’s a whole blog post in there, but I’m really more of an RPG guy than a wargame guy, so somebody else will have to do it.)  All of it, I tells ya!  They are coming for all them!

It’s time for a decolonization.  It’s time for us to retreat further into our hovels.  It’s time to use a lot more math, memorization, and formulas in our gaming to stave off the presence of the cunning word-smiths and savage political headgames of the Mean Girl circuit.

It’s time to retreat…

To AD&D, as handed to us by the sacred pen of Saint Gygax.  Those three arcane tomes contain the secret to staving off enstupidations.  I refer of course to the twin pillars of weapon speed and against armor type.  Those rules are rough to decode, tough to understand, and enough to put into practice.  Many a ship of reformers has crashed on the shoals of understanding how those rules plug into the game.  They’ve saved us before, they can save us again.

Save us THACO, you’re our only hope!