The UK has since made some changes to their laws to downgrade them from "completely batshit draconian fuckery" to "mildly batshit draconian fuckery", but it remains batshit draconian fuckery that has a significant chilling effect, particularly on calling a raging bigot a raging bigot.

13. Tantalising Doom Arch Of The Horticultural Elfwomen.

10. Idyllic Death Bridge Of The Acid Troll.

3. Cave Of The Mercurial Salt Witch.

2. J.R.R. Tolkein's psychedelic lime kiln.

i behold :>

And if that community of people who like your work *really* connect with you, they talk to other people about it. You’re never gonna get viral word-of-mouth engagement for AI slop. Rich assholes have tried to make it happen. It just doesn’t happen because so much else happens around the work.

And then you’re in a community of peers, oftentimes talking to each other about the work. You’ll have panels, Q&As, meet and greets, all that. And the people who like your work will find themselves in community with each other, discussing your work and how it hits them.

There’s lot to be said about how little AI shills know about art, but not enough is said about how little they think of fandom, of community, of all the people who bring the art to each other. That’s why it’s never gonna happen like they want. They’ll never have the adulation they crave.

Also in the mix, Cindy Thornburg’s wildly popular “How to Host a Mystery” series starting in 1983, which arguably builds more directly on the earlier parlor role playing games of the 15-1800s than D&D does.

So: *yes* there is a direct line we draw from chess variants to Kriegsspiel to wargaming & D&D.

But also *yes* women cross-dressing as satyrs, or applying complex rules to dance games (as in 19th C. shtetls), were also engaged in story-and-rule-based role-play worthy of our analysis.

Artifacts such as the Brontës' Angria merge child's play with the seriousness of sub-creation and fictive histories. The girls + Branwell were able to toy with new imaginative horizons post-Napoleonic era. But of course women had been "building worlds" since Beatriz Bernal in 1545.

Parlor games with role-play elements were part of French aristocratic culture already in the 1500s. Such evening entertainments would spread as leisure time & literacy spread, with many such game outlines in publication by the 1800s when the Prussians "invented" the masculine preserve of wargaming.