Don't Don't Stop It With the RPGs
There lives a young boy, spritely yet untrained in the ways of the world, who attempted—I will grant him that it was an attempt—to rebut my most recent and, therefore, most famous famous blog post—a post which, by the way, is currently a front runner for both the 2026 Bloggies and Gloggies.
The rub is this alone: any amount of camaraderie in RPGs, whether via cuck or honest to God peers and equals, creates a sort of Sphere of Delusion, and within that Sphere the mental energies of participants only serve to feed the other; in ignorance, the participants develop a set of writing practices divorced from the whole of literature, as if from Gygax's bones sprung the impetus of writing, and thus pursue a kind of novelty in form best called futile.
"Tradition," T. S. Eliot writes, "is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour." RPG hobbyists, in seeing themselves as severed from broader traditions of literature—bear in mind, writing and reading are the main acts involved in the creation and distribution of RPG content—kill themselves at the root. The hobbyist whose love for RPGs is virtuous must turn away from them, reject all cuckoldry, and commit to a kind of retention—not of bodily fluids—but of the consummation of the act of RPG production in favour of the development of more fundamental skills; they must not spew early, but build and study: so it will be that after a decade of efforts the former RPG writer will have developed a great familiarity of Homer through Cervantes, will have written two magnum opera—one of which will be adapted into a Netflix special starring Walton Goggins—, and will see RPGs as what they are: a trifle, a past-time, a school boy's game. And when this hobbyist happens to run into their cuck out and about on the streets of New York they will greet each other with a twinge of ironical shame for their past pursuits, and their affection will grow all the deeper for the joy taken in a shared shameful nostalgia.
Jean-Claude Van Damme once said "the lunch is about fun" in reference to filming Welcome to the Jungle, a truly terrible film from 2013. While he may have enjoyed the film making process what was the value of that fun? The sum of it all was mere detritus, a kind of kipple made only to grace the DVD racks of convenience stores: so is your life, and so unto dust. Mark me: all merit in RPG writing is the merit of other forms, of prose and verse; to take this knowledge—which I have given you freely, me a serpent—and to continue to commit to a diluted form, one whose strength lies solely in antecedents, is to commit oneself to mediocrity alone. Your paradise has been destroyed, go unto the world and from dirt raise thyself to man.
My humblest appreciations for your undivided focus on this theme.