The State of Mythic Mountains in 2026

A loving farewell to Indie and OSR

Hey everyone it’s Ross from Mythic Mountains.

It’s been close to 4 years now since we did a major update to the clubhouse. I think it’s about time that we revisited things.

In summary, I’m moving away from the stated goals of the club from 2022. I now focus on classical gaming and serious game design discussions.

That means that I’ll be covering no more indie games, or various tabletop game products. No heartbreakers. No more retro clones. Instead you’ll rarely see gameplay on the Youtube channel and you’ll see a lot more discussion of vintage gaming, the Braunstein school renaissance and deep, deep dives into game design. I’ve got lots of exciting interviews and chats coming up!

You’ll see me point to our other two clubhouses for gameplay, because that’s where it will be. If you liked our OSR actual plays we still have a ton and in fact we just had a fun dungeon dive in Original D&D in the same campaign setting from the Rappan Athuk series that is going stronger than ever.

If you like our Classic Traveller gameplay we have a new channel for that also.

We still have one campaign left to reveal here, which I’m very excited about, Dolmenwood, using James Spahn The Heroes Journey. That will be releasing immediately following the conclusion of the Dragon Town series.

So that’s what’s happening, let’s talk about how we got here.

The history of Mythic Mountains

2018 was established as a group in Berea called simply “Berea Kentucky D&D.”

In 2019 it became “Central Kentucky D&D” and games were played in Nicholasville, Lexington, Richmond, Berea, Mount Vernon and Independence KY.

In 2020 it went online and remained Central Ky D&D but just prior to 2021 became Mythic Mountains D&D, to reflect the global membership while making a loving nod to our roots. The focus at the time was a sprawling network of 5e west marches games which plugged into campaigns.

At the time Mythic Mountains play club was an international play club, we had multiple 5e campaigns all of which had a West Marches component, all 1:1 time, downtime orders and a campaign layer including high level play. That’s right! Proto-Braunstein from the very beginning.

Two major problems

One was cultural. After the death of George Floyd my immediate instinct was to try to understand, and to be welcoming. This was at the core DNA of Mythic Mountains from the beginning. Those efforts failed. I discovered I needed to protect the club if there was to be a club at all. The tabletop space online was violent, hateful, unsafe, and we were doxed. People accused us of things we didn’t do. It was madness. This was at the time far more common for me in 5e gaming.

The Brand Prison

The other problem was brand 5e. The entire ecosystem was a self centered phenomenon as if our network of Dungeon Masters and tables was some kind of free service to be abused and mistreated. Pickup 5E players in 2021 were awful for us. They were!

I discovered in 2020 the old school renaissance thanks to Questing Beast. People that played those games were more invested, the games were better. My hobby improved 10x and it kept me from walking away.

In late 2021 at the dawn of 2022 we declared independence and ended all 5e games. Many people connected were hateful and removed. We established ourselves as folk.

For the next year this idea of “Folk D&D” was fleshed out and based on the writings primarily of Johan Huizinga.

Homo Ludens - The Philosophy of games as primordial to Culture

Huizinga describes the role of games in terms of cultural significance rather than the science of games in his book “Homo Ludens.” For Huizinga, a game is a unique kind of ritual which is primordial to culture. We play first with each other, the culture arises. For play to happen it has to be set aside, like a sacred ritual. Play can never be a survival task. Play is something everyone does if they are human.

Huizinga was in the generation of thinkers related to people like Max Weber who were concerned with the dehumanization of people due to industrialization but also the 20^th century isms which treated human beings as parts of a machine. For Huizinga, play had been reduced to systems and utility by things like state controlled schools and games publishers. That is, they were exploitative and not free and then not actually play, and then they could not produce culture.

The Official Game License Scandal

I was also influenced by the OGL crisis and what preceded it, when Ben Milton from Questing Beast in his video “D&D doesn’t need WOTC anymore” described two paths for the hobby: the brand gamer who follows an IP as a lifestyle and the folk gamer, who is basically in charge of their own hobby and not reliant on a brand holder at all.

These uses of the term are still sufficient and I did a blog post and video where I explored how they applied to tabletop.

Folk Gaming Declares Victory

2023 for me was a turning point, and you can see my thoughts on this in my article on Shadowdark where I said “Folk gaming declares victory.” With the publication of Shadowdark, and their approach to how the game could be used by others, which bordered on open source, it seemed like we may have slain the leviathan.

People focus too much on mechanical system and personalities and that’s not the point. The point is how it was published, how successful it was for sheer numbers vs. what was put in, and how it expressed itself in players and culture. I try to explain this in the article.

Fast forward two years later and the Shadowark gaming conventions became a kind of convention oriented organized play. Their massive kickstarter still hasn’t come out. Third party companies are selling expensive kickstarters on the back of the game. Instead of one great evil WOTC, we now have hundreds of little WOTCs that all take the same approach to gaming which Huizinga would have decried.

I love Arcane Library, and Shadowdark actually, and that’s not the point. Taking one or the other I’d pick Troll Lord Games, or Goodman Games over WOTC any day!

It’s undeniable, that the indie game companies that I follow, many of them have become either closed ecosystems that drive you to their products, or slop factories. They have the same exploitative goal that WOTC does. They’re just not as successful.

Criticism of the OSR and Indie RPGs

Scathing. That’s harder for me because I actually like what they make mostly. “One size does not fit all” here, the indie world has some innovation. Experimenters like Jay Dragon and Rise Up Comus are doing wild stuff.

I have to be honest and say this isn’t something happening here or there. Retroclones no longer serve the purpose of accessing old rules and protecting legal frameworks to do so. Retrocolones, and in fact they are not clones, are designed to keep you buying from Necrotic Gnome, Mythmere, Tuesday Knight Games, OSR and so on.

Just like the enshitification of other industries, we are seeing the same thing on a small scale. I see the value in these games getting worse. Their quality is declining. Predatory practices and the use of AI are increasing.

There’s another problem with supposed “Folk D&D.” That is as soon as I started using the term, people latched on to it. They almost immediately misunderstood the assignment! They equated D&D with something like power-to-the-people, as if it had moral content. I don’t think Folk D&D has a moral quality, it can be good or bad. While I am definitely anti-brand, Folk tabletop games can be equally as destructive to the hobby.

And unfortunately I’ve seen a lot of this. The brand orthodoxy prevented growth, thinking, and even the game from being fun. It was a survival task, people had to play the brand game because it was a survival pathway in socialization. They did it because of FOMO, or other people, or wanting recognition. Now, I see, this is the same in “folk D&D.”

In some ways you can see my criticism as being a statement that the term itself has been captured by the thing it sought to defeat.

The new orthodoxy, which is anti-folk, which is held by most people carrying the label “folk” is that any authority, anything telling you what to do at all, in fact any truth outside yourself, is the enemy. This is anti-folk by my definition. I have always said, that there are objectively better expressions of D&D and objectively bad ones. I’ve always said that these can be observed, experimented with, measured, recorded and applied. To me, the Huizinga form of Folk gaming, requires a scientific mind.

So, I’m still much on the side of small games, old games, kit bashing etc. but I’m no longer going to promote indie games, heartbreakers, or non-clones. Just like how I said 5e can be a folk game, if those things are useful or well done I’ll use them. Getting you to buy things is just not my goal.

We are all sufficiently monetized.

The Culture is worse than I thought

Worse still is the culture which I’ve found hostile and threatening despite just wanting to play games and having an open mind. The problems with the 5e crowd are just as prevalent in indie gaming. Promoting violence, hatred, violating media TOS rules and federal laws. I have too much of a life outside this for that to be anywhere near me. This seems a nerd problem in general and I didn’t get relief from that by being “folk.”

The Near Future of Mythic Mountains

If you like our gameplay, check out those other channels.

If you like our discussion videos we’ve got way more to come! I’ll still be commenting on RPG culture and having my circles sometimes overlapping in spaces of indie design. I hope that the blog can be something useful and thought provoking for people. I’ll try to do the best I can to put work and research into each post and in the discussion videos.

That’s going to be the direction moving forward for a bit for the blog and the channel. My stats indicate for me that most people watching the youtube channel are white men in their 50’s from North America. Of those the majority are there because they like OSR actual plays. I don’t have stats on this blog. I’ve had a good experience with substack though and hope it continues in it’s quality. Usually people here are very thoughtful and are keen to go deep as a matter of personal pleasure and I find it challenging and rewarding.

If you are that Gen X gamer though, go check out Otherworld! If you like mowing the yard and listening to people play D&D or getting ideas or perspectives of people playing classical games, that’s where you’ll find it now.

Very few people watched our indie game videos anyway. I hope you’ve enjoyed what we’ve put out, stick around for Dolmenwood. And I hope we gave you some good material. Farewell for now I suppose.

And if you are new here and you came for the discussion videos, the Braunstein School Renaissance content or game design, welcome! I think we have some amazing things in store.

Either way, I’d like to know what you think. Are you one of the few people that enjoyed our indie content? Are you here mostly for the OSR actual plays? For those that follow our videos and blogs regularly and are subscribed or watch, tell me what was good here for you?

And God bless all of you, I have no enemies but the shadow of my own ego.

(Video format as well for those that prefer:)