Quote from: Festus on March 17, 2023, 12:05:10 AM
Some of y'all are just living in fantasy land. It's going to be interesting to see how you're feeling in a couple of years when the liberals still aren't starving, Disney still isn't bankrupt, and WotC D&D is still outselling everything else. 

I was reading some of my old Savage Sword of Conan issues from the 70s earlier today. Loved every second of it. Doesn't mean I have to be delusional about the times we live in.

BTW for something that feels like old school Conan, the Xoth stuff is great - https://xoth.net/publishing/
I was just looking over the free 5e Player's Guide - https://xoth.net/publishing/freebies/world_of_xoth_players_guide_5e.pdf - 72 pages of Politically Incorrect goodness. 

  Sounds a bit try-hard edgelord for it to be worthwhile.  Cool should be effortless excellence. Try for that instead.

I started a blog page with plenty of inspirational S&S art - I love Brocahl especially! 

https://simonyrpgs.blogspot.com/2023/03/sword-sorcery-cultures-for-dragonbane.html

Quote from: honeydipperdavid on March 16, 2023, 10:33:41 PM

Quote from: VisionStorm on March 16, 2023, 10:02:03 PM

Quote from: honeydipperdavid on March 16, 2023, 09:24:49 PMListing your content as being fun and enhanced aluding to the fact your content is normie and not woke will sell and sell quite well.

Except that none of the evidence bears this out and none of the other stuff that you mention means that "and therefore we have to make our stuff explicitly anti-woke and then it will sell (somehow)".

If being not woke was such a hot selling point on its own—specially in the TTRPG industry—then woke games wouldn't sell better than ones from openly anti-woke authors, and people wouldn't be trying to haunt and defame any designer that steps out of line and get their crowdsourced stuff cancelled. Yet that's precisely what happens, none of the anti-woke authors are actually making it big, other than maybe Pundit, and he ain't exactly huge. Plus none of his stuff is explicitly anti-woke or marketed as such, and he only uses anti-wokeness as outrage advertising in his own channel, but not his books.

The only people that have used anti-wokeness in their marketing with any significant success have been ComicsGate, and that's a completely different industry, plus none of the really big ones uses politics in their actual products. The only exception being Trump's Space Force, and that book was extremely niche and not part of the main CC crowd.

I eagerly await your next attempt to push the same points, though. 

Here why don't you steel man my point and show how its wrong?  I'm talking culturally and financially.  Now if you want to look at trends, the first to get woke was video games then the cancer spread to the media and table top had elements of it present but it didn't take of at D&D fully till the BLM Murder riots of 2020 that murder 25 people and did $2B damage to the inner cities.  At that point, that was when the leftards at WotC took control, put up their virtue signal about how evil Gary and content was for DM's guild.  TT was lagging from being absorbed.

Taking a look at it now, woke is failing left and right. Woke Video game companies are shutting down studios, look at Bioware shutting down its woke Canadian studio.  Look at Embracer CEO stating he has to do a different direction for Saint's Row and saying a lot of fans "not happy with the new direction of the game".  Look at EA chief creative officer Patrick Söderlund for Battlefield V either buy it or don't, well they didn't and he's gone.  Look at Hogwarts, the left sold it for free and their boycott failed.  Those video game companies that put wokeness in are failing and ESG funding is going dead.  The DIE departments are being cleared out in the silicon valley layoffs because they build nothing, they slow production, they spread nothing by hatred and discontent and the ESG funding that made the viable is going away very very quickly.  The funding kept failing video game studios afloat but now that the economy is going to shit, there is no funding.  Video Games are going back to profitable and fun, the edutainment is being removed.  Video Games were the first to get the woke cancer and they are the first moving away from it to maintain profitability.  Media was being pushed hard woke by Disney and Disney is losing money on wokeness, Solo and Antman lost money.  Disney is trying everything possible to put woke politics and not go bankrupt and it isn't working out well for them.  Tabletop is the next area to lose the wokeness.  The content D&D keeps putting out is not being received well at all.  TT will most likely follow the trend and be one of the last refuges to lose the woke cancer because it has the cheapest input cost compared to video games and media.  No one is going to spend $50 on a woke book to virtue signal when hamburger costs $10/lb.  They will only buy content that benefits their game and most of D&D content for the last 4 years has been as useful as tits on a bulls.

There's nothing to steelman. You're so desperate to try to push this point you're not addressing one single point anyone else makes and keep repeating these asinine points absolutely NO ONE is arguing against. Nobody—and I mean absofuckinglutely NOBODY—is arguing that Get Woke Go Broke (which is what everything you keep repeating ad nauseam ultimately comes down to) isn't a thing. But none of that shit means that anti-woke marketing specifically will work. And I provided specific examples of EVIDENCE why it wouldn't—concrete fucking evidence of shit that's actually gone down in the direction of what you're proposing, not just leaps of logic and wild speculation that ignore anything that contradicts them. And rather than address them or refute them you keep desperately trying to push the same points, like everything rests on other people trying out this innovative anti-woke marketing you keep harping on about.

Like Bruwulf said, people are SICK of "everything is political", not just the woke shit. And like Geekybugle mentioned, you don't actually have to try hard to piss off the woke if that's what you're going for. You just have to do normal shit, like including "Sex" instead of "Gender" in your character sheet and that will set them off. But injecting your game with crap about the current political zeitgeist is only going to make it dated ten years from now, when all the woke shit is nothing but a bad memory, and it's only gonna limit your reach to the edgelords at the other side of the political shitfest rather than make anything of lasting value.

Short version - the pendulum in entertainment has swung so far that just unironically presenting what was normal a quarter century ago is radically counter-culture. No need for stupid labels on the cover.

Hell, you don't even really need Conan and chainmail bikinis. THIS for a cover would be enough to send the Woke REEIng...

My favorite part about all the cheesecake art is that woke morons seem to think normal women don't appreciate the beefcake stuff...then again, most of them have never met a normal woman before, so that might have something to do with it.

Quote from: Brad on March 17, 2023, 06:57:29 AM
My favorite part about all the cheesecake art is that woke morons seem to think normal women don't appreciate the beefcake stuff...then again, most of them have never met a normal woman before, so that might have something to do with it.

IME a lot of normal women appreciate the cheesecake art too.
Sees Red Sonja cutting bloody swathe - "I want to be her!"
Sees naked damsel at hero's feet - "I want one of those!"

Still getting used to the latter reaction. 

Quote from: FF_Ninja on March 16, 2023, 10:39:20 PM
Hmm. This all begs the question: What's the best way to piss off the blue-haired woke crowd without sabotaging your product? You know - keep it based, but also retail-friendly.

Use race as a term instead of ancestry.

Have orcs be evil.

Have art featuring attractive women, and only attractive women.

Have white men as the classic heroes, where they would be expected instead of the expected subversion. So Fighter/Paladin/Wizard.

If you want to go detailed and can roll up your character's family, only have one mother and one father as an option.

Simple stuff that a sane well adjusted person wouldn't notice or bat an eye at, but would immediately piss off SJWs.

Quote from: honeydipperdavid on March 16, 2023, 11:48:24 PMOK, so tell me how a sticker that says "Now with 10% more Demons"

"10% more demons" wouldn't annoy me, although it seems... dumb. It's a meaningless statement. As well to say you have "10% more elf". And I don't think the woke crowd is anti-demon.

Now, "100% more dwarf" might tempt me...

Quote from: honeydipperdavid on March 16, 2023, 11:48:24 PMa sticker stating "No insensitivity readers were hurt in the making of this module" is going to cost you sales. It shows the content is fun, non-woke and normie.

No, it doesn't. All it shows me is that it's "anti-woke". That doesn't automatically mean "fun". It doesn't even mean "normie". Even if the average normie is getting burned out of the constant woke agenda, that doesn't mean they want "anti-woke" stuff. They just want off the bus, not to switch to a different seat.

Quote from: migo on March 17, 2023, 10:21:59 AM
Have art featuring attractive women, and only attractive women.

If you mean "only attractive women" as in none of that awful cal-art inspired "every-character-looks-quirkily-ugly-as-fuck" style that a lot of the woke crowd use, like in TSL? Yeah, I'm all for that.

But throw the women and gay men a bone, we like some cheesecake too now and then.

Quote from: Chris24601 on March 17, 2023, 06:55:34 AM
Hell, you don't even really need Conan and chainmail bikinis. THIS for a cover would be enough to send the Woke REEIng...

The more I look at it, the more that picture goes from awesome to cringey to me, but not for any woke reason. Something is very wrong with the knight's arm.

Quote from: Bruwulf on March 17, 2023, 10:28:03 AM

Quote from: migo on March 17, 2023, 10:21:59 AM
Have art featuring attractive women, and only attractive women.

If you mean "only attractive women" as in none of that awful cal-art inspired "every-character-looks-quirkily-ugly-as-fuck" style that a lot of the woke crowd use, like in TSL? Yeah, I'm all for that.

But throw the women and gay men a bone, we like some cheesecake too now and then.

I meant that all the women are attractive, not that there aren't any men. In fact my next line was white men as classical heroes.

So yeah, having a totally ripped barbarian in the art is a part of it.

Quote from: Bruwulf on March 17, 2023, 10:30:03 AM

Quote from: Chris24601 on March 17, 2023, 06:55:34 AM
Hell, you don't even really need Conan and chainmail bikinis. THIS for a cover would be enough to send the Woke REEIng...

The more I look at it, the more that picture goes from awesome to cringey to me, but not for any woke reason. Something is very wrong with the knight's arm.

Yeah, it looks like he's going to throw his sword like a discus. Capturing action does seem to be challenging. That shows how good Larry Elmore was as an artist.

Quote from: migo on March 17, 2023, 10:35:39 AM

Quote from: Bruwulf on March 17, 2023, 10:30:03 AM

Quote from: Chris24601 on March 17, 2023, 06:55:34 AM
Hell, you don't even really need Conan and chainmail bikinis. THIS for a cover would be enough to send the Woke REEIng...

The more I look at it, the more that picture goes from awesome to cringey to me, but not for any woke reason. Something is very wrong with the knight's arm.

Yeah, it looks like he's going to throw his sword like a discus. Capturing action does seem to be challenging. That shows how good Larry Elmore was as an artist.

My favorite part is how the guy is valiantly standing BEHIND the damsel in distress, rather than in front of her, leaving her in between himself and the dragon instead of actually protecting her. 

Quote from: Bruwulf on March 17, 2023, 10:30:03 AM

Quote from: Chris24601 on March 17, 2023, 06:55:34 AM
Hell, you don't even really need Conan and chainmail bikinis. THIS for a cover would be enough to send the Woke REEIng...

The more I look at it, the more that picture goes from awesome to cringey to me, but not for any woke reason. Something is very wrong with the knight's arm.

Upon further inspection, I think you're just bothered by the angular nature of the plate armor. The arm underneath it is extended, but the joints - while allowing for mobility still - are very rigid. I think it looks pretty fuckin' dope.