Distance and Vastness in Hexmaps

 

The world is extremely big. It's hard to appreciate how big it is without spending a lot of time of it on foot, and without making the effort to notice the bigness. But once one does, one cannot help but reflect on it. Landscapes contain, and conceal, great vastnesses of contents which the mind struggles to really grasp.

The photograph above was taken from the top of the highest hill in the town in which I live. It looks out over parts of the city of Newcastle upon Tyne, and to beyond. I would like you to notice two things about it.

The first is that the hills in the distance, the Cheviot Hills - where the red arrow is pointing - are about 40 miles away. The hill from which the picture was taken, Sheriff Hill, is only about 500 feet high. This is a simple but important thing to observe: from a mound of any sort of prominence, it is possible to see very far indeed across a roughly flat landscape. 

The second is that between the viewpoint in question and the hill pointed to by the red arrow there is a very great deal of content. There is an entire city in the way, for one thing, as well as one of the country's largest and longest rivers, not to mention a large number of villages, entire towns, many smaller hills that just look like low undulations from this distance, streams, ponds, lakes, marshes, forests, heaths, and fields. As well as this, there is a large number of ruins, castles, churches, monasteries, monoliths, caves, chasms, and other features which one might describe as 'interesting' in some way. The world is full of stuff to interact with, especially in a fairly crowded and historied place like England - to an almost self-parodying extent. It might not look like it, because so much of the contents of the world are coyly hidden when it is examined from a distance. But one need only roam around it to discover the extent to which this is true. 

I have written a lot about what you might call the DMing side of these phenomena - namely, the importance for a hexmap to have a proper density of contents. (See the loosely connected series here, here, here and here.) But it is also important for PCs to be given the sense that they are immersed in a landscape of the proper bigness - that, if they climb up a hill and take a look around they will see an awfully big world around them, and that they will also get the sense that it is filled with stuff to do and places to explore if only they are motivated to look. This - conjuring in the mind the awesome scale and fullness of what lies before them in confronting the abstraction of the hexmap - is of vital importance in conveying to the players the impression that a campaign setting is something that is going to be rewarding and exciting with which to interact. 

Authority at the Table

The start of an RPG campaign is always an interesting anthropological moment - particularly if, as is often the case with an online game, the players do not know each other very well or have never been in a campaign together before. Everybody starts out ostensibly as 'equals' in the sense that there is no pre-appointed hierarchy - the PCs do not arrive with a leader, second-in-command, quartermaster, etc. But gradually, in the first couple of sessions, a sort of hierarchy or assortment of roles develops. This is often left entirely implicit, but typically one PC will become the one who 'takes charge'; another will become the calm voice of reason; another will become the court jester; another will become the unpredictable nutjob; and so on. 

Intriguingly, this is one of those moments when what is happening both within the game and at the table coincides - it is a process that happens among the PCs 'in universe', as it were, and among the players themselves in the real world. Some strange alchemy of personality, context, and luck seems to determine it. 

I've been thinking about this issue a lot in the last month or so as a result of reading two books which, oddly, relate to the same theme. The first is The Lord of the Flies. I've embarked on a mission to read all of Golding's works (thanks in part to a long-ago recommendation from a commenter on here that I read The Inheritors) and have finally made my way to Flies after not having read it or thought much about it since I read it at school at the age of, I think, 12 or 13. I'm almost at the end, and I've found the experience surprisingly rewarding. Without having to read it for school, and without any pressure to discuss the contents in the light of the weary prodding of some jaded teacher, I've been able to simply enjoy its brilliance - and it is brilliant: a miracle of a book. 

As you may recall, authority and how it emerges is one of the main themes of The Lord of the Flies. The boys find themelves on an island in the absence of any pre-existing framework of authority - there are no adults, parents, teachers, policemen, and so on. They are thrust together as ostensible 'equals' (although some, the 'littluns', are exempt from this). And from that, a hierarchy emerges, as well as a set of vaguely defined but fairly fixed roles - the chief (Ralph), the head of the hunters (Jack), the voice of reason (Piggy), the visonary (Simon), the clown (Morris) and so on. It is an unstable structure, to be sure, but it remains in place for a long time - the narrative implies that the boys live in relative harmony for some months. 

What the book implies about the role of the leader is particularly interesting. At the beginning, indeed it is pretty much the first thing that happens, Piggy and Ralph find the conch, and Ralph uses it to summon the rest of the boys on the island. And he then provides them with a project: they are going to start a big fire and then be rescued. On this basis - the fact that he has a plan - he then becomes chief. Later - spoiler alert - the shift to the leadership of psychopathic Jack is accompanied by a similar assertion of a project: to hunt pigs and 'have fun'. 

This all makes visceral some remarks made by Alexandre Kojeve in The Notion of Authority. Here, Kojeve provides some brief notes of a theory of authority, and identifies a form of authority - that of the Leader - which emerges in this type of context. He puts before us the image of a group of children in a field. They are ostensibly in a position of atomised equality - each is a child the same as any other. But then one of them asserts a plan: he suggests going to raid the apple orchard next door to steal apples. Suddenly they are united - and he is the Leader.

He becomes the Leader, Kojeve elaborates, because he is the one who had a plan - he was able to envision a future (one in which the group gets the apples) and bring it into the present in the form of a project. He orients the group, as it were, towards the otherwise empty and contentless expanse of the future, and responds to it by imbuing it with content in the present. And everybody else goes along because of this claim to be able to see further; the others, recognising that they 'see less well and less for', willingly submit.

This obviously describes something of what goes on in the assertion of leadership by Ralph (and Jack) in The Lord of the Flies - and it is something that all of us remember from our playground days. The crudest and most immediate form of human authority is that in which a group of people are suddenly united (it can happen almost instantaneously) by one of them putting forward a project and orienting the others towards a future. And this is also something that all of us will recognise from playing RPGs, too. There, authority as such seems to emerge when one player (and one PC) shows himself willing to claim to see further than the others and lay out a project - and when the others, acccepting it, go along. It is not always necessarily the same person - authority in this context is very fluid - but it will tend to be the case that it most often is. There will be one person who the others tend to look towards for decisions. And this role will be taken on very early - usually in the first couple of sessions. In a brief moment, authority will be up for grabs, and seized, at the start.

What determines the identity of the person who will take on this role is mysterious - I earlier attributed it to an 'alchemy of personality, context, and luck' - and the process is, I think, inevitable. And it has its advantages and drawbacks. Without leaders, human beings are indecisive and vapid. But leaders can direct their charges into hideous mistakes. We will all be familiar with such scenarios. One way of shaking things up and experimenting in interesting ways might be to formalise roles and deliberately, before play starts, elect one person to be the leader - or even to circulate the leadership role each session. I would be curious to learn if anybody has ever tried such experiments, and what the results have been like. 

Repository of Incompletely Systematised Campaign Types

This post is a proposed Repository of Incompletely Systematised Campaign TYpes (or RISCTY - yes, I went there) for D&D and other fantasy tabletop RPGs. 

What is an incompletely systematised campaign type? In essence, it is a campaign type which OSR and wider nerd game blogosphere luminaries have not yet managed to exhaustively flesh-out through elucidating general principles, providing generalised or specific advice, coming up with iterative methods for generating content, producing substantive gameable material, and so on. In practice, it is probably best understood in opposition to the quintessential Completely Systematised Campaign Type - the megadungeon. Thanks to the hard work and applied wisdom of generations of deep and serious thinkers, nobody in 2024 who has access to the internet and knows what the acronym 'OSR' stands ought to have any difficulty setting up and running such a campaign, and will find a vast wealth of content that will help him to do so - indeed, scientists say that the number of blog entries dedicated to the matter of successful megadungeon campaigning would wrap around the Earth fifty-thousand times if printed out on postage stamps laid back to back.

Other more or less Completely Systematised Campaign Types would include the sandbox hexmap 'Western Marches' style campaign (even if I still think nobody has really come up with a way to make wilderness travel evocative and interesting) and perhaps the urban, city-based type. 

Incompletely Systematised Campaign Types that I think any sane person will at some point have entertained will include:

• The Lord of the Flies/Lost/Robinson Crusoe style campaign, in which the PCs are washed up ashore in some improbable spot without possessions of any kind.
• The underwater campaign, in which the PCs are inhabitants of an actual below-the-surface hexmapped region, or where most of the play takes place in such a setting.
• The saltbox campaign, in which sea travel, ship-to-ship combat, weather, trade, and so on are made the focus.
• The virtuous sandbox campaign, in which the PCs roam about doing good (although I have jotted down some ideas about this)
• The institutional campaign, in which the PCs have adventures in a narrowly-defined single location such as a monastery, university, cathedral, castle, etc.
• The murder-mystery investigation campaign, with bonus points if the mysteries involve the use of known D&D spells

Add your own in the comments!

Chaos: The Investigation Without End

Over the Christmas break, I caught up on a bit of reading for 'pleasure' with CHAOS, Tom O'Neill's account of his madcap 20-year effort to get to the heart of the Manson murders. I don't think this is a spoiler - the effort was fruitless. But the book does throw up a huge amount of fascinating speculation, and thereby succeeds in casting a lot of doubt on the 'official' story as to why the Tate-LaBianca killings happened. It may be the only book of its kind - devoted to debunking a widely accepted version of events and then, Rashomon-like, giving a smorgasbord of other options to believe in without itself committing to any of them. In the end, I don't think it quite works, but it is at least a riveting read. 

The experience of reading CHAOS, in any case, struck me as a good metaphor for a problem that has always made it difficult for me to conceive of running a genuine investigative 'mystery' game - namely, coming up with an Agatha Christie-level scenario that the players can solve, which doesn't feel too easy or too hard, and which doesn't rest on the tabletop RPG equivalent of pixel-bitching. That is to say, good mystery stories are like intricate faberge eggs in which every detail matters and the solution requires careful elucidation and focused awareness of all moving parts. And this isn't what tabletop RPGs excel at - RPG players are mainly good at causing, well, chaos, like a herd of bulls in a series of china shops. Coming up with a good, interconnected series of clues, NPCs, etc., in such a way that a group of players can figure out a way to the final mystery without getting sidetracked feels like a prohibitively difficult challenge.

RPG mysteries, in other words, strike me as being rather like O'Neill's frustrated attempts to uncover the truth about what really motivated Charles Manson. He starts off with a curious sequence of events - the murders themselves. And then he starts pulling at various threads which lead him to a haphazard collection of encounters with drug dealers, record producers, Beach Boys, former police officers, district attorneys, private investigators, washed up actors and has-beens, Hollywood stars and CIA spooks. He learns about elephants being dosed up with LSD, the infiltration of hippie-dom by the FBI, the corruption of the LA Sheriff's Office, possible murders incompetently disguised as suicides, free love gone wrong, torture and mayhem. It's very entertaining. But it goes nowhere.

It reads, in other words, rather like the 'Actual Play' from an RPG campaign (Unknown Armies, maybe?) in which the DM flung together an initial mysterious scenario and a big cast of NPCs, locations and events connected to it, without having a clear idea in his own mind what was really going on behind the scenes or what 'really happened' - and then just let the PCs have at it and see what they stumbled through. And whenever it seemed like they were about to exhaust a lead, he'd throw three more into the mix. It strikes me that somebody could easily run a campaign that way almost indefinitely, with the PCs going about ostensibly investigating something (a murder, a paranormal event, etc.) and from there simply uncovering yet more mysteries, going down rabbit hole after rabbit hole, having weird encounter after weird encounter, and never actually coming to an end. This would be a sort of open-ended investigation in which the journey was everything and the destination nonexistent.

This, I think, would at least be achievable and is, I suppose, what is really implied behind the classic idea of a Call of Cthulhu campaign - a sort of sandbox of plot hooks that the PCs pursue until death or insanity claims them. But would it be satisfactory to actually play? 

2024 in Review

Another year has been and gone - we are now four years past 2020 and I'm still waiting for Arasaka Corp to even be founded! - and another 12 months of Monsters & Manuals posts has accumulated.

It has been an odd year here at the blog. On the one hand, I reached a major milestone, which I know was widely celebrated throughout the continents of the world - my 2,000th published post. On the other, I have been distracted and sidetracked by other commitments (some RPG-related, but mostly to do with 'real life') and this has produced a regrettable slowdown. Yes, yes, I know, like Billy Holiday often reminds me, it's important not to explain, but I am in the sad and unfortunate position of not having independent wealth to support me and must - this is an outrage - work for a living. 

With all of that said, I had some fun with a lot of entries this year, for all that I think there was no particular structure or theme to much of my output. Here, are my favourite five, in no particular order:

1. Nostalgia, Hope, Wonder: The World of TSRan, and Feels like my soul is beginning to expand, look into my heart and you will sort of understand (okay, these are two entries together - I cheated)

2. Favourite Giant Poll and Forget Trump v Biden (okay - I cheated again) 

3. 17 Times the Incidental Illustrations in the 2nd Edition DMG Rocked

4. Gimme Shelter: Tolkien, Wodehouse, Gygax, and D&D

5. Thoughts on the Theory and Doctrine of Golems

In reviewing the list of entries, I was pleased to observe that there were fewer rants and broadsides, which is perhaps in a sense a byproduct of there being less intensity of focus. But then again it could just be because I am old now, and will soon diminish and go into the West.

As far as reading goes, I did manage to do a lot of that this year, and my favourite five things I read are probably (again, in no particular order):

1. Ricardo Pinto's The Masters (in the new, 'director's cut' version of the Stone Dance of the Chameleon series) - truly superior high fantasy fare in a fully-realised setting and with a taut, character-driven plot. From my Goodreads review: This is that rarest of treats: an original-feeling fantasy setting and series (though the debts owed to Gene Wolfe, Frank Herbert, and JRR Tolkien are obvious). I was impressed by the compactness of the prose, the viciousness of the brutality, the breadth of vision, and the way the volume gets gradually turned up to 11 as the action moves closer toward the city of the eponymous Masters. I look forward to the sequels - and hope Tain survives. 

2. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Simon Armitage (and wonderfully read by him on Audible). What can one add?

3. CS Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which I read to my eldest after not having picked it up for many years. The other Chronicles are hit-and-miss, but this is the real deal. From my Goodreads review: It is far from the first time I have read this book, but reading it to my 7 year old daughter (after perhaps 15 years since my last reading) allowed me to see it in an entirely fresh light. CS Lewis does not get enough credit for the perfect pacing of plot here, for the genius of his characterisation, and for the beautiful minimalism of his prose; as unfashionable as it may be to say, he was a writer of rare gifts. He was also deeply humane - a man who understood the meaning of redemption. Not many children's writers could pull off anything remotely as nuanced or complicated as the character arc of Edmund, but Lewis makes it look effortless. An almost perfect book.

4. Roger Zelazny's The Guns of Avalon. I re-read the entire Amber series over summer and liked it a little less than I can remember, but the second book is genuinely excellent. From my Goodreads review: This is a miracle of plotting: a powerfully condensed elixir of story injected into the mind on a narrative syringe. Zelazny's sheer verve papers over all the seams, so that one is simply carried along without bothering to ask questions - the result is not deep, but it is exceedingly enjoyable.

5. CJ Cherryh's Ealdwood omnibus. From my Goodreads review: CJ Cherryh is a brilliant prose stylist - there is neither a badly composed or placed sentence in the entire 420 pages of this omnibus - and a teller of riveting stories. And here she does something unique and profound with the fantasy concept of the 'elf' which truly builds on Tolkien's initial vision and puts the other, blandified versions of lesser authors to shame. The big flaw, such as it is, is the fast-and-loose way in which the plot moves along, such that at times the speed with which events unfold, and the way in which they do so, is simply too implausible to believe or too confusing to follow. It is a rung below the greats. But it is superior in every respect to run of the mill high fantasy fiction. 

I wish you a happy new year and a peaceful and productive 2025 - go wassailing and don't stint on the whisky. 

The Fiction Becomes the System for Advancement; Or, Something Needs to be Heavy

In the comments on a recent entry, the subject of rules-lite games and level advancement came up. It has always been my position that problems with rules-lite games arise when they become so rules-lite that they lack sufficient 'crunch' to be used in for a long-term, open-ended campaign. A long-term campaign needs advancement to give impetus to proceedings, and this is harder to achieve in direct proportion to how ephemeral the rules feel. The good thing about advancement in D&D, for instance, is that by going up in levels new possibilities are opened by virtue of the fact that the system incorporates many options and add-ons - there are new spells to learn, new magic items to find, new abilities to develop (depending on one's edition of choice). This is harder to achieve with a rules-lite system where all one really gets to do is fiddle around with a very limited number of stats or abilities. 

However, I am persuaded, as commenter diessa puts it in the post in question, there is a case to be made that one can - if only one is of a mind to - run a rules-lite campaign in which 'the fiction becomes the system for advancement'. The idea here is that the PCs have goals that are intrinsic to the 'fiction' itself rather than extrinsic ones to do with improving stats, hit points or whatever - solving murders, say, or social advancement, or earning lots of money, or realising some project or objective. And here it wouldn't matter that the rules are 'lite', so to speak, because they would only exist in order to provide a basic framework in which 'the fiction' can evolve.

I can buy this to a certain extent, but I think it misses something important, which is that in order to get to a point at which 'the fiction becomes the system for advancement', there still needs to be part of the campaign that is heavy in the sense of requiring lots of careful thought and probably a great deal of procedural moving parts (but which might be hidden from the players themselves). For instance, I can easily imagine a long-running campaign with a rules-lite system being successful if it chiefly involved investigation - a crime procedural, for instance, or an Unknown Armies or Call of Cthulhu-style paranormal mystery. But I can't really imagine either of those things working without the DM having to invest a lot of time in figuring out ways to systematise the distribution of clues, connections between NPCs, random events, flowcharts dictating what happens if the PCs do X and then Z rather than Y, and so on and so forth; there will still have to be weight, in this sense, but placed behind the scenes rather than being foregrounded in the player-facing rules.

Similarly, I can imagine a long-running campaign with a rules-lite system working if the PCs were, let's say, merchants or traders or businessmen or whatever. But, again, I can't really imagine it working without considerable weight being placed within the commercial or financial aspects of the game - without, say, a way of figuring out what is profitable, in what context, and where. 

In short, the argument that I think I am making is that in order for a long-running, open-ended campaign to be a success there is a requirement, even in the context of the rules as such being 'lite', for there to be an aspect of play which is heavy. There has to be something that has sufficient heft to bear the load of sufficient interest and intrigue in order to keep the campaign above water. I am not convinced that it is possible to sustain long-term gaming with mere 'fictional advancement' alone. 

My Shoe is Safe

Yesterday's quiz was a toughie. In it, to recap, commenters were encouraged to guess at what the following pieces of art, generated by Substack's own AI image generator, represented. Here, to begin with, are the answers: 

1. Minotaur 

2. Troll

3. Orc

4. Githyanki

5. Kuo-toa

6. Skeleton

7. Kobold

8. Tarrasque

9. Umber hulk

10. Pit fiend

11. Vampire

12. Lich (yeah, your guess is as good as mine as to how it came up with this)

13. Dragon

14. Ogre

15. Manticore

16. Hydra

17. Beholder

Ok, I confess the last one was a bit of a cheat (although a fascinating experiment, in its own way). 

What I find interesting about these kinds of exercises is that they reinforce the point that AI is not 'intelligent'. It doesn't actually 'know' things. It isn't capable of assessing whether what it produces actually looks like what it is supposed to look like, because it isn't capable of assessing anything. It does not see what it produces, because it does not 'see' at all. And it does not exercise judgment because it cannot judge. It has no taste in the most literal sense.

With that said, it does come up with curiosities and some images which are thought-provoking. These pictures are mostly dross - a kind of implausibly well-executed dross, the kind of dross that a human being would never produce (try to imagine a human artist creating a piece that is simultaneously as competently executed and as spectacularly misjudged as the kuo-toa or ogre images above). And the ones that are interesting are interesting mostly because they cause one to reflect on the nature of AI art itself and the way it works - note for instance that the 'minotaur' patently isn't a minotaur, but the programme nonetheless 'knew' that vaguely Grecian columns ought to be involved and it also incorporated what appear to be sheep (which I took to be some sort of mangled intrusion of the cyclops myth).

But there are one or two images which at least spur the imagination - observe, for example, the tiny figure that is standing on top of the 'umber hulk'. Who is that and what is he doing riding around on that thing? And who are those different entities in the 'lich' picture? What is that little homonculus next to the 'vampire' up to? What is that a 'skeleton' of?

I also have to confess I do rather like the 'githyanki'. It looks nothing like a githyanki, but Satan didn't do a bad job with it all the same. 

Satan Illustrated My Bestiary

I have spilt rather a lot of ink dealing with the subject of AI art. (Rather too much perhaps - see previous posts here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

Today I spent an idle moment nibbling at the forbidden fruit by typing some famous monster names into Substack's particular AI image generator. This was based on the theory that if you want to make some pictures of monsters, Satan is probably the ideal artist.

I had originally planned to write an extensive post on this subject, but rapidly discovered a fun way to run a quiz instead. So here goes. Below, I will post a series of numbered pictures as illustrated by Satan. Your job, in the comments, is to guess what they represent. Some are easy! Some are hard! Give it a go. The winner receives unending adulation and glory. The losers - level drain and half hp. Answers to be revealed on Friday.

First, though, I must share with you the great hilarity that ensued when I typed in the words 'Keir Starmer':

I don't know who that man is, but I can tell you that Kier Starmer very much wishes he looked like him. Who the hell is the guy lurking next to him, though?

Anyway, I digress. Here are the monsters. To repeat, put your guesses for each in the comments. 

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

If anybody guesses them all accurately I will, Werner Herzog style, eat my shoe.

What I Would Do If I Owned D&D

Since in my previous post I raised the question, it is only fair that I deliver my own thoughts on the important matter of what I would do if I owned D&D.

I find myself genuinely split. On the one hand, I think D&D occupies an important role as a sort of universal language, and that its middle-of-the-roadness and basic banality, as a Tolkienesque fantasy RPG denuded of all the things that made Tolkien interesting and worthwhile, is in its own way useful. There is a reason why McDonald's, M&S, Next, Disney princesses, Bond films, etc., exist - it is to provide an easy solution to the question of 'What shall we eat/wear/watch tonight?' The more eccentric and distinctive something is, the harder it will be to get buy-in from those who do not share the eccentricity in question. 

Hence, 'blandified, bowdlerized Tolkien with some bits and pieces stolen from pulp fantasy' is much more likely to appeal to a group of five random gamers who want to put a campaign together than is 'Egyptian/meosamerican style megadungeon inside a crocodile's brain' - while one or even two of the group will love the latter idea, the rest will be put off by it, whereas there is a good chance that all five will at least tolerate the former. 

There is therefore a space for doing blandified, bowdlerized Tolkien well, and in this respect I suppose it's actually quite difficult to improve on what WotC are already doing. They serve up RPG Big Macs and they do it in such a way as to satisfy the widest range of potential gamers they possibly can. It is not to my taste, but even I eat Big Macs sometimes when it's the easiest and most readily available thing on offer. So the very shot answer to what I would do if I owned D&D could be very straightforward: do what WotC currently do but a bit better. (Chiefly, I would change the art direction so as to be much more John Howe-style understated grandeur, and much less modern-video-game-illustration blandness.) 

That's a boring answer, though, and also doesn't really reflect the basic setup of the thought experiment, which is that I am supposed to be imaginging myself as possessing vast wealth and not particularly having any interest in turning a profit. Once you put things that way, all the bets are off and you can start entirely from scratch.

So I am strongly tempted, then, to say that if I owned D&D I would go in the opposite direction - I would be a fantasy maximalist. I would have a set of relatively simple core mechanics and I would commission a range of writers and artists to produce a properly compelling mixture of genuinely novel and fresh settings, and I would foreground procedural generation through random tables throughout. I would put the emphasis entirely on dungeoneering and sandbox exploration, and would eschew 'character' as a central element of play. And while I would not by any means cut down on things like bestiaries and spell lists, I would emphasise the toolkit element of the rules - I would make it very plain that the rules are there to facilitate DMs doing their own imaginative things (inventing monsters, spells, etc.) easily and quickly. 

But now that I re-read that paragraph I increasingly wonder whether I am not simply saying in the end that I would cannibalise existing D&D with an OSR mentality (since the OSR basically did all of the things I suggest) and, indeed, perhaps just in the end institutionalise and mainstream what the OSR was all about. This might not be as popular as D&D is now, but it would I think be better, and that's what counts.

What Would You Do If You Owned D&D?

What would you do if you owned D&D?

I ask because the question has taken on a very small amount of pertinence in the last couple of weeks, in the aftermath of Elon Musk's having expressed his views about the game. I don't wish to get into the ins and outs of those views here and I would like to leave politics entirely to one side. I would just like to raise for observation the interesting point that we now live in an age in which there are lots of very nerdy people who also have veritable bag of holding of billions of dollars in cash - and, that since nerds are much more likely to play D&D than the average person, this makes the purchase of D&D by an eccentric billionaire are not-entirely unthinkable proposition. 

Reel off the list: Elon Musk. Bill Gates. Mark Zuckerberg. Peter Thiel. Sundar Pichai. Sam Altman. And so on and so on; the question that is most appropriate to ask is not 'How many of these people have played D&D?' but 'How many of them haven't?' And who is to write off the possibility that one of these people may some day decide that they would actually quite like to be the one who gets to make his favourite role playing game his plaything? The thing about eccentric billionaires is that they do eccentric things with their money. Could we see emerging a future in which D&D, in the manner of a down-at-heel sport club bought by Hollywood Stars, becomes a trophy of of the super-rich? 

Elon Musk himself was openly musing in the aftermath of the recent farrago (one assumes jokingly, though possibly not) about buying Hasbro, whose market capitalisation is 'only' about $9 billion. What would you do vis-a-vis D&D if you had just bought Hasbro for $9 billion? Or, for that matter, if you had just prized the D&D IP from Wizards of the Coast, presumably for rather less than $9 billion, and made it your own?

To keep this organised and manageable, I recommend limiting yourself to decisions across up to three axes.

1 - What would you do with respect to the rules?

2 - What changes would you make to the default setting?

3 - What settings would you commission? Bear in mind you are an eccentric multi-billionaire. Probably any book or film franchise is achievable. Which would you pick?