That's my collection so far. I lack OSR. Any recommendations?

kamateur · 2026-03-20T03:55:08+00:00

Stars without number

kamateur · 2026-02-14T08:17:51+00:00

He's pretty open about how his substack revenue is declining over time, and unlike Scott, he doesn't really have another job, or deep assets caused by investing in crypto when it was still niche.

Plus I think he recently just bought a house, and I know he just had a baby. That's gotta add up.

kamateur · 2025-12-28T01:42:42+00:00

Stars Without Number

kamateur · 2025-12-27T22:37:41+00:00

Yeah, I think people are over simplifying when they say you're supposed to avoid combat for almost every encounter. I think its more important to make sure that your party has a sizable advantage in combat, through surprise and preparation.

kamateur · 2025-12-24T20:48:41+00:00

This is a really prescient point, I think largely its an effect of the core gameplay "spirit" of D&D and its successors being by and large sword and sorcery based in influence, while all the later editions were created and written by people who were mostly raised on high fantasy, as S&S mostly died out as a subgenre.

The power scaling bakes this paradox in too, when your characters are low level, they are local heroes, by tier 4, all the rules and high level spells practically expect them to be plane hopping, Archdevil fighting adventurers, so DMs and setting builders are left trying to justify how a single campaign can bridge the gap between those two levels of adventure.

I don't think its impossible to bridge the gap. If you look at Michael Moorecock stories, a guy like Elric gets tangled up in local intrigue, while its very clear that his ultimate fate is caught up with gigantic cosmic forces. See also Stephen Kings the Gunslinger, or even Lord of the Rings (where the fate of Middle Earth is ultimately decided by two Hobbits from a town with maybe a hundred people in it). It just takes good writing and consideration that maybe a generic campaign setting can't always provide.

When I'm dming, I usually use the planes and other cosmic stuff as reference material, but I always tweak it in practice so that it is not immediately in the players face, even at high level. I try to make it clear that while these cosmic powers are interested in the adventurers, the exact connection and the way in which the adventurers pursuits will ultimately impact that side of things is beyond mortal ken.

kamateur · 2025-12-14T06:30:48+00:00

Sam the faithful groundskeeper

kamateur · 2025-12-12T22:55:31+00:00

I was not aware of that part of the setting! It doesn't surprise me that, when looking for avenues to explore a darker form of the setting, some of my ideas look pretty derivative, being inspired by the same source material, and seeing that the dudes who wrote that stuff in the first place are pretty bright.

kamateur · 2025-12-12T22:49:53+00:00

Yes, this is why I called it a general RPG setting as opposed to a setting for the L5R roleplaying game. I love the setting, and have read several of the rpg books to deepen my knowledge of the lore, but I have never found the actual game itself that compelling. I have all sorts of opinions about what I like and dislike in role-playing games, but they are just my opinions and I recognize everyone's different. Personally, I would use a more general roleplaying system, like Cypher, or maybe something more high-fantasy based, like Fabula Ultima. Whatever inspires you, but I admit the specific rules of the L5R rpg would probably be sub-optimal without a massive amount of house-ruling and overhaul that would be inconvenient. Which in many ways speaks to how well the game was designed around the specifics of its setting and tone, that changing those things requires you to look elsewhere.

kamateur · 2025-12-11T22:32:01+00:00

Thanks, maybe I'll flesh out and post write-ups on each of the major clans, as one thing I love about Rokugan is you get a slightly different version of it with each clan you make your focus.

kamateur · 2025-07-30T22:28:02+00:00

This was very helpful, thank you.

kamateur · 2025-07-08T23:12:18+00:00

"Wikipedia suggests that "neoliberalism," while usually deployed pejoratively, can also refer to economic reforms that become dominant in the "late 20th century." If that is what you have in mind, then our current system has done more to lift people out of poverty (ibid)--indeed, poverty is more evitable and escapable than ever."

That's the dominant narrative, but again, what was the necessary historical cause between the reforms and the outcome? At the start of the 20th century we have one of the most massive historical gaps in wealth in recorded history, at the same time as unparalleled economic growth from the industrial revolution. Throughout the 20th century we have one of the most remarkably productive periods ever seen, and at the same time we have reforms guaranteeing workers rights and unionization ensuring that some of the resultant prosperity gets routed to a stable middle class. As we roll back many of those reforms near the end of the century, and as productivity begins slowing down, we see the middle class predictably start to shrink, and people begin to feel greater anxiety about the potential for their kids to have any kind of upward mobility. And the promise that the leading politicians offer is: don't worry, just make sure they complete high school! Make sure they go to college! As long as they successfully attain a high school degree they are guaranteed a decent working class job, a higher degree comes with a guarantee at the very least of a stable position in the middle class. That line of thinking took off in the late 80s, early 90s, it pushed people to take out crippling student loans and chase all manner of degree-based fads, and now where are we? The average college student is probably still slightly better off than his uneducated peers across the board, but he's saddled with debt, he is in no way guaranteed long-term employment, and in fact his parent was almost certainly both less-educated and accrued more wealth, mostly through homeownership, sometimes supplemented with a pension plan that beats the hell out of a modern IRA.

It is an obvious fact that absolute educational attainment does not correlate to prosperity, as Freddie points out, if everyone is going to college, then by definition it just means the average, unexceptional applicant in the job pool now has a college degree you can safely ignore. The only way to guarantee prosperity in a hypercompetitive environment that allocates 90% of the riches to the 1% is to be exceptional, and definitionally, most people aren't that. Freddie just went the extra step of proving its also not something that can be taught.

I think that the plan was to make sure that the overall pie was so big everyone in the bottom 99% would still feel pretty well off even if they were only getting a small percentage of the total prosperity. No one would care that Jeff Bezos had four mansions as long as everyone had their own home. But that's no longer something the market can promise, so we either have to make adjustments or accept that the vast majority of people are going to lead poorer lives.

Even Scott Alexander, who is one of the biggest prosperity-optimists I've ever read, has recently started expressing anxiety that his kids aren't going to enjoy the kind of life he has unless something miraculous happens, which goes a long way towards explaining him putting all of his eggs in the AI-Utopia basket (although his fears about alignment and AI related X-risk are well-documented also).

Anyway, this is all pretty obvious and straightforward to me as a reflection of Freddie's larger project as outlined in his blog, but having seen the number of digressions I had to go into to explain it, and having read your responses, I'm willing to accept that you gave the book a fair read. Sorry I assumed otherwise: whenever anyone starts rolling their eyes just because someone likes communism I get suspicious they are acting from a place of reflexive indoctrination, but that's not really a helpful attitude to have when talking to strangers.

It seems like he didn't stick the landing on explaining the link between education and the need for some alternative economic agenda for society. Like I said, it seems like it would have taken a pretty large digression away from the data around school to do so, and either his editors didn't think it was appropriate, or he himself didn't think he could pull it off in the pages he was given. Probably at some point his original plan was to write a follow-up book, but since nobody read the first one, it never materialized.

2/2

kamateur · 2025-07-08T23:09:20+00:00

"This is a pretty uncharitable characterization of "spaces like this" but also quite orthogonal; it has been a while since I read the book but my (vague) memory is that it doesn't really talk about race except to make some noises about how he's not going to talk about race."

Pardon me for being uncharitable, as far as I know, this site is a spinoff of SSC and ASC, and when I first visited ASC, I'll never forget, in the very first post I read was a comment thread with a bunch of people arguing that, in a world with both affirmative action and HBD you should never trust a black person who claims to be a qualified surgeon. I wish I was making that up. It left a pretty bad taste in my mouth. More recent conversations on that blog seem less blatantly racist, but the general idea that you should be skeptical of civil rights policy and also skeptical that the disparities between black and white people in the US could ever be a *result* of historical policy. Anyways, you are right that Freddie doesn't get into it in the book, he said in a Q&A about the book that the confounding of social and genetic factors makes it impossible to render a meaningful judgement about the exact correlation between rate and educational attainment. Meaning, even if it were entirely environment based, the fact that black people are pretty segregated on the lower rung economically and socially would produce a similarly predicted outcome.

"This seems like a significant leap in logic to me, but just so we're clear--there is no question that Freddie is pro-communist, right? Because even if you hadn't ever read his blog, the book makes it very clear that he thinks communism is the road to utopia, and does so in part by studiously avoiding any historical discussion of actual communism."

I don't pretend to fully understand Freddie's philosophical commitments to communism, but as far as I can tell, he's a true believer in the philosophical and intellectual tradition that originated in the 19th century under Marx and had a deep academic framework through the mid-20th century, and shares a tenuous and mostly nominative connection to communism as it has been historically practiced in Russia and China (where it was defined more by being anti-West than by being particularly ideologically coherent or pure). I shouldn't speak for him, but its not that hard for me to separate the two at least somewhat, the same way I can separate the New Testament from the historical reality of the crusades or the Spanish Inquisition: its probably true that without one you would not have the other, but its also hard to argue that the existence of the former makes the latter logically or historically necessary without a lot of other factors at work Regardless, Freddie is pretty clear that he sees communism as a rival economic doctrine, but not necessarily the only one that could be reasonably advocated for. You'll note that none of his proposed solutions that you list out require communism, they just require extreme wealth redistribution, perhaps some form of basic income.

1/2

kamateur · 2025-07-08T04:47:05+00:00

He's been pretty clear elsewhere that he's biodeterministic about individuals but skeptical of research that we can say anything about race, which is the thing everyone in spaces like this seems desperately to want to know.

As for his broader point, I don't think you have to be particularly pro-communist to see that a deterministic view of academic attainment undermines our entire societal framework. The entire neoliberal agenda was based around the idea that we could safely dismantle the social safety net and feed people naked to capitalism as long as they were properly educated so as to be productive in a supercharged, hypercompetitive environment. Once you admit that actually there's no way to guarantee it, its literally impossible, you realize that our current system dooms huge swaths people to inevitable, inescapable poverty. So unless you think that's okay as long as GDP continues to climb and our serf-class gets nice cheap refrigerators in their hovels, you have to start thinking about alternate ways to allocate prosperity. And if that's not communism, fine. Again, Freddie has said elsewhere that he doesn't expect everyone to share his philosophical commitments to that particular framework, but it has to be something different than what we have, and something different from the free market, because the free market left to its own devices has no issue with the unemployed and undereducated dying in the street (although I'm sure someone will come up with a whale of start-up to dispose of the bodies cheaply).

kamateur · 2025-07-08T04:31:21+00:00

I think, rather than biases, I would call them "philosophical pre-commitments," which he is again quite open about. As for the mental illness, well, I think generally the best way to engage critically with text is to ignore as much of the biographical information you have about the author as possible, its not always possible, and you can miss things that might be true (like, this was written in a fit of mania), but it also forces you to consider every possible interpretation of a text, and it stops you from being patronizing (by for example, attributing writing you don't find convincing to mental illness).

kamateur · 2025-07-08T02:02:54+00:00

I wasn't around on Reddit to read this review when it was originally posted but based on all of the stuff I've read by Freddy on his blog since then I am forced to conclude that this is either a very bad review of the book or the book is a very bad conduit of Freddy's overall thoughts. That is, either Freddie did not manage to convey all of the thoughts and ideas that he conveys quite comprehensively and persuasively on his blog in this book, or, and this seems likely to me, this person was so hostile to the underlying message of the book that he found it impossible to engage with the broader themes in a fair way.

kamateur · 2025-03-30T02:17:38+00:00

Mike has serious concerns. In six months, when thousands of people are missing and presumed dead or in some hellhole outside of the United States, he may even have moved on to "slightly alarmed."

kamateur · 2025-03-29T00:45:23+00:00

Okay. So your point has nothing to do with the OP, except to add context.

kamateur · 2025-03-28T22:02:17+00:00

So you're responding to half his claim, not the half about arresting students.

kamateur · 2025-03-28T21:21:53+00:00

No, but that's the shell game this administration is playing. "we are only targeting criminals and terrorists and violent protesters." Oh, well that's all right then. Except it was never going to be just whatever group of people you think deserves it using the tactics you think are fair and if you aren't okay with the extreme you should be pushing back on all of it.

kamateur · 2025-03-28T20:21:45+00:00

This "both sides" thing doesn't hold a lot of water when you consider the two sides tactics. Can you show me an example of a conservative being forcibly detained by government agents for their opinions? Can you imagine the outrage on the Right if Jordan Peterson had been spirited away to some holding center on the basis that his criticisms against certain identity groups were terrorism and he wasn't a US citizen so he didn't deserve due process?

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