You can also throw Postmortem Studios here too. Well, that and GrimJim produces thoroughly amateur stuff. Even Wightchester, probably his greatest work, wasn't entirely written by him and was a 3/4 assed production as there aren't any interior maps and the city isn't presented in a logical order for play. The entry point to the city is on page 234, for example. But this is an odd place to have a tangential aside, I haven't even started the post yet. I'm done with Jim Desborough, I'll talk about the other Jim now.
So the title is all about one thing - shocking content doesn't mean good content. It's ostensibly the same issue as wokeness. Woke products substitute wokeness for quality. The titular producers substitute shocking content for quality. Jim Raggi has written maybe five good products in his life, one of which was a ref book in the original LotFP boxed set that he won't reprint or reproduce in any worthwhile way.
The best LotFP products were otherwise made by others - Zak S, Jeff Rients, Jobe Bittman, Ken Hite, Zzarchov Kowolski, Glynn Seal, Gord Sellar, etc. Jim himself had maybe 3 good adventures in him and he wrote all of those over a decade ago. The God That Crawls was his magnum opus, he was done after that. To his credit he kind of knows this, probably one of the reasons the Ref book will never be produced and he's been pushing for talent outside himself to carry his company. A new Ref book penned by him won't meaningfully add anything to the 48 page book from almost two decades ago that he wrote. It'll just be a big book of useless excess if it ever materialized past the theoretical stage. It's kind of a pity because Jim frankly needs a boss.
That's one of the problems with all these "companies". You know what, I'll just say it's a problem with these four guys. They really need someone to tell them when a project simply isn't worth the effort. Derrick kickstarts 300 copies of Cha'alt, uses the money to print 1000, and then complains when he can't sell the other 700 copies. Even worse he goes ahead and does this shit two more times. So he gives up on the industry when he should have reinvested properly and moved on. You can't live off 300 people buying your stuff. You have to produce something that's worth being produced.
This is why I respect Kevin Crawford and Chubby Funster's game. The one slowly built a massive following and kept rolling it forward, the other has latched his brand onto the big thing out now and produced better product for that big thing than the creator or any of the other 3pp publishers. These are the good strats. Quality first, messaging second.
