One of the major reasons heavy-hitter OSR types hate @JohnsonJeffro and the #BROSR is that their message doesn't move products. Quite the contrary.
@JohnsonJeffro Take Tonisborg. It's a "lost" OD&D module that was "rediscovered" and "recreated" through notes from the 70s when Griff was pushing a conventional play narrative countersignaling Jeffro.
#TonisborgTruth
@JohnsonJeffro I believe Tonisborg itself was real and there was a DM who kept meticulous notes on his megadungeon, but I do not believe it was created with module play in mind as Grift insisted. Nor do I think it was ever actually meant to be a commercial product.
@JohnsonJeffro Heavily embedded in the pitch was the counternarrative of "buy product to make you a better DM" to Jeffro's "Play the rules, it's all there and will make you a better DM" narrative.
@JohnsonJeffro This is the same reason why Urbanski was constantly countersignaling Jeffro's work on Appendix N, which showed that you if you were literate and versed in the fiction that the game was designed to recreate at the table, you did not need to buy settings products.
@JohnsonJeffro Now, the notion that you and your friends can play a largescale Braunstein with nothing more than the AD&D core books and handful of dumb ideas poses an existential threat to boomers who may be trying to make buck repackaging and selling you the Lost Secrets of Braunsteins.
@JohnsonJeffro So, the next time someone calls Jeffro or the #BROSR grifters, look at what they're trying sell you and why the free ideas being explored by the bros might pose a threat to their wallets.
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One of Cirsova's goals was always to "regress harder." Not in the "we're not woke" sense, but people on the right always wanted to retvrn but to yesterday, when things were only a little less bad. Cirsova emerged as a reaction to the Sad Puppies and Brad Torgersen's Nutty Nuggets
"Where were the nuggets, Brad?" For all of the rah-rah, the Sad Puppies slates displayed a lack of the extremely sexist and racist tropes their enemies accused them of indulging in: Where were the strongjawed chads saving scantily clad space princesses from spear-chucking aliens?
Cirsova's original goal was to move the starting line back to old [actually middle-to late] pulp era, the 1920s-1940s, particularly indulging in the kind of storytelling found in Planet Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Startling Stories, and, obviously, Weird Tales.
Okay, so, a big part of the problem isn't so much that the big stores don't have the stuff [they often do], it's that there's a disconnect between how they organize their books and where people think the books should be+various surprises [like popular authors being out of print]
Big book stores don't have a general fiction section; they break up things along whatever lines the publishers tell them, even if it makes books harder to find. Recently, I tried to pick up some Dick Francis books for my mom. Is he in fiction? Mystery? Thriller & Suspense? No...
Dragonlance is trending because people are saying "we must retvrn (to the thing that sent D&D down this road in the first place)"
Look, I get it. I, too, loved the Dragonlance books when I was a little kid, but the modules sent the game down a very rigid story-driven path while the books and setting itself stripped out almost all of the weird kitchen-sink elements that were baked into 1e.
The result was worse gaming and a far blander fantasy genre in general due to its overwhelming popularity and influence.
Something I've observed and repeated is that most people's idea of "Tolkienian Fantasy" and the modern state of the fantasy genre is actually Warhammer filtered through the lens of Warcraft.
Warhammer had a lot of fantasy races that were surface-level Tolkien, but included a lot more weird fantasy and Sword & Sorcery elements + fantasy 30 Years War.
When Blizzard failed to secure the Warhammer IP, they stripped Warhammer down to "Humans, elves and dwarves fight orcs, trolls, goblins, and bad elves."