People who say "get politics out of entertainment" are misguided. They'll be the first to quote George Orwell, who wrote unabashedly about his political agenda, without a hint of irony. But people pretending complaints about politics in entertainment are about just making a statement or exploring political issues are being disingenuous. The complaints exist and are valid because for 10 years every cherished IP has been hijacked and destroyed by people whose social politics form the basis of creative choices that run counter to established lore and to good design. Some examples include - The softening of male characters (see Sony's "Wolverine") - The hardening of female characters (see the most recent "Halo"). - The arbitrary "Queering" of the narrative (see "The Last of Us Part II") - The desexualizing of sexy female characters ("Mortal Kombat" is my favorite: the women's breast sizes were deemed offensive, but not the graphic dismemberments and disembowlments the series is known for) These are creative choices made for the sake of social engineering, not compelling storytelling or innovative game design. They are choices made to please the developers and writers, NOT the majority actually buying and playing the games. The brilliance—and cowardice—of these choices is that ANY criticism of them can quickly be dismissed as "hate" from "toxic fans" who are "intimidated" by "diversity" in videogames. This is a ridiculous charge to anyone familiar with the hobby: For nearly 50 years, games have featured protagonists ranging from men and women to animals and aliens to robots and monsters and beyond and not a single person cared, nor bothered to check the demographics of who was developing the games. A deeper complaint is that the people sloppily hamfisting their sociopolitics into popular IPs is that they very openly discriminate against people who don't share their political vision. This not only means that great talent is shut out of these companies for ridiculous reasons, it also means the aforementioned bad choices are guaranteed to never be challenged, else it's unemployment and blacklisting for the suspected "Chud." This pattern has played out across multiple entertainment media, and it's contributed to tanking game studios, tanking comic book sales (compared to Manga), and tanking box office revenues. The complaints aren't about "politics in games." They're about how those politics translate into the work, and how the people developing these games use their politics as a weapon against the normal people they're employed to serve.

If everyone who works on a $300 million game is a Mamdani progressive, then the game is going to lose money because it is going to be alienating to a large segment of the audience. BioWare grossly underestimated how negatively the mainstream audience would respond to the nonbinary storyline and the pronoun discourse would be to a mainstream audience because everyone in their writers' room and all their creative leads were in the wokest 5% of the population. If they'd had one "loud and proud MAGA" in the room who was familiar with Asmongold, Critical Drinker or Fleekazoid, he might have warned them how YouTube and X were going to treat the game they were making. I think they were in such a bubble that they really thought all that shit was normal and were absolutely blindsided by how much gamers hate it, and that's a function of who they let into the room and who they excluded. Due to the push for gender and racial equity and LGBT representation over the past 10-15 years, game studios are extremely out of line with the tastes, values and norms of core gamers, who are mostly men and largely white. This demographic voted heavily for Trump. That audience is no longer buying the products these studios are making, and an audience that looks like the curated slice of the population that they have assembled in their offices has not materialized to replace the gamer chuds who won't buy this stuff. The restructuring and realignment of the games industry has got to fix the fact that the people who make games no longer have anything in common with the people who play them, and aren't making products the audience will buy.

A Scottish museum has removed its Egyptian mummy exhibition because it does not have “consent from the deceased individual”. Visitors to Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, in Glasgow, were left disappointed by signs explaining bosses had “removed human remains from this display as a mark of respect”🔗 telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/10…

My biggest takeaway with creating Corpse Kings and engaging with this amazing community is anything created for everybody is actually created for nobody. Trying to please everyone, impacts no one. Having standards, preferences and tastes is what makes something special. 🎲

🔥 🚒 The TTRPG table used to be sacred ground. It was the one place you could leave the exhausting, polarized grind of the real world at the door, sit down with a crew, and actually build something collaborative. But lately, there is a terminal rot creeping into the hobby, and it’s being dragged in by tourists who don’t want to play a game, they want a stage for their political theater. We have a strict, non- negotiable no politics rule at the club. You come to roll dice, to explore the world, and to survive the campaign. But the social atrophy of the last few years has bred a loud, hyper defensive segment of people who physically cannot function without forcing their ideological baggage into every single breath. They are locked in a perpetual state of bad faith combat. You can sit at the table and say, "I like waffles," and these folks will instantly slam their hands down and scream, "Oh, so you hate pancakes?!" It is completely exhausting, and I am entirely done accommodating it. Just recently, I had to bounce a guest from the table who simply refused to respect that basic boundary. And what happens when you tell these perpetually online actors "no"? They don't reflect. They don't apologize. They immediately resort to extreme character assassination. Because I enforced a rule of conduct to protect the peace of a space I built, I was suddenly branded an "evil Nazi" and targeted with threats to "do damage" to my venue. They spat the term "Old Guard" at me like it was the ultimate insult. Let me be crystal clear: I wear "Old Guard" as a badge of absolute honor. Since cracking open my first box set in the late 70s, I have poured decades of blood, sweat, and capital into this hobby. I’ve painted the terrain, organized the long running campaigns, and transitioned our operations into a private gaming sanctuary specifically to protect the game from this exact kind of invasion. This behavior is a direct symptom of the spectator era of tabletop gaming. The mainstreaming of the hobby didn't create a massive wave of new players, it created a wave of passive consumers. We are dealing with people who treat the game like a trendy lifestyle brand, wearing the logo like a fashion statement while expecting the table to cater to their personal performative fan fiction. They don’t want the grit of a real system or the camaraderie of a shared world. They want a captive audience. And when they realize the table isn't about them and their real world grievances, they lash out and try to burn the room down. Well, you aren't burning down my room. The spaces we've built are fortified against this nonsense. The table is a place for escapism, for rolling crits and suffering the consequences of the dice. If your primary goal in picking up a character sheet is to virtue signal, pick fights, and turn the game into your personal soapbox, find another venue. The tourists can keep their spectator sports and their outrage. The real gamers are busy playing. RANT OVER 🤘 #OldGuard #ProtectTheTable #TTRPG #OSR #OldSchoolRPG #NoPoliticsJustDice #DiceNotDrama #TabletopGaming #ActualPlay #GamingSanctuary #SpectatorFandom #SavageSorcery #TheNerdShed #SundayCrew #JustPlayTheGame 🧙‍♂️🪄⚡

CROM 2.0 is here! - Full backwards compatibility with characters created with earlier versions of CROM - Characteristics beyond 18 and bonuses per Deities & Demigods now factored - Classic AD&D Character sheet printing! - Multiple tabs: have many character sheets open at once! - Print to PDF! - Console mode with all new features still included! - Dark Mode coming! Still $25 via PayPal, and this is a FREE update if you already own CROM!

One of the things I find most frustrating about nearly all RPG's is that they make huge promises, but fail at emulating the source material. And when you point this pointed out, defenders will write reams to tell you how you're wrong for wanting that.

Ah yes, nothing like settling into a reprint of a classic Call of Cthuhlu adventure anthology and finding out the dumbest people in the world have edited it for my own good. 🙄 The rot started long before this whole Shub-Niggurath thing. Good job @Chaosium_Inc , you guys are complete and utter TRASH.