Scott Ruggels

One High School seems to be a bit  light. How about 4 total?
 
Julius Robinson Public High School. This is the oldest High School in Coastal City, graduating it's first class in 1869. Originally named Central Coast High School, it was renamed after the death of Julius Robinson in 1935. Generally a Black Majority school, it has been fully integrated since the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Many trainee teachers from Frederick Douglas University try their hand with real students here. The school these days is weak on STEM Classes, but strong in English, and trade skills, and still has a 77% graduation rate. This is in spite of endless budget fights, and a weak tax base. Their Football team has taken the State Championships 4 times since 1925, and is always a formidable opponent. The School is located at 2750 10th St, near the "Western Star", a fully land locked star fort, topped with grass, that the Highschool occasionally uses as an athletic practice field. The Highschool Building was one of the original fort administration buildings, but was since expanded as needs arose. School hours are from 9:30 Am to 3:30PM, with Athletic facility open until 5PM.

General Lucien Truscott Military Prep. What is Virginia without a military school? This School, on the north edge of town, declares it is the birthplace of leaders. It is a Private Military academy that often feeds students to the higher Service academies, but also tends to  breed steely eyed business leaders and national level Politicians. Students can be identified by their Cadet Gray, or summer Khaki uniforms and Burgundy Berets. The Facilities are strong on STEM, education, but weak on Humanities, save Military History. The faculty consists mostly of current, and retired Military Officers from the U.S. Army, and Air Force. Their sports teams are formidable but subject to an "every other year" Curse. where in even numbered years they look like championship material, and odd number years, they crumble like a sand castle. Often they will provide marchers or color guard for various parades and official ceremonies. It is rumored that several Teen Heroes are associated with the school but of course, nothing is confirmed, and the staff has no comment.  The sprawling campus surrounds a parade ground. at 24 Union Street. School Hours are from 8:00am, until 2:00pm for classroom instruction, and until 5:30 for sports and field instruction.
 
New Horizons Magnet School (Formerly Abraham Lincoln High) The school was reformed into a Charter School in 1999, and the parents taken over many of the staffing positions. Being a member of New Horizons is a family commitment once the prospective student passes the entrance exam.  Parents volunteer to help teach, clean hallways and do clerical work. They do employ accredited teachers, but since the school does not recognize the teacher's union, they pay the teachers a higher salary to ignore the AFT, and follow the specialized curriculum the parents provide through the New Horizons Program. THe Curriculum is actually a modification of a very old curriculum, stressing the teaching of classical Greek, Latin, U.S. History, Orchestral Music,  and a very thorough math progression up through Calculus. With such a focus on academics, the school has withdrawn from it's former sports association, and no longer fields a football and Basketball teams. Principal Patricia Mae Wong, and Assistant Principal Don Nguyen make sure standards are kept high, and that operations run smoothly. Students from other schools tend to refer to it as "Nerd Horizons". Students from here always look a little tired or stressed.
 
Woodrow Wilson High School  See Above
 
Because children make the best hostages, Here are a list of other schools:
Middle Schools
 
Sojourner Truth Middle School 2671 8th St.
 
Neil Armstrong Middle School  3640 S. Cameron Ave
 
 Rappahannock Middle School  340 E. 2nd  St. (Near down town.)
 
Sacred Heart Elementary and Middle School associated with St. Christopher's Church.
 
Elementary Schools
 
There are 8 public elementary schools in Coastal City and tend to be names for the street they are on. Most are built to a similar "L" shaped plan, with the offices on the short leg, and 7 classrooms on the long leg, and a grass athletic field in the center. There are between 130, and 200 students, and 15 staff.
 

There will be more detail from the usual YouTube fans I post here, but for now, this is still an impressive achievement:
SpaceX successfully launches two rockets hours apart
https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2023/12/28/Second-SpaceX-launch-set-for-tonight/8731703818335/
 

Huh.  The Visitant must have been unusually hungry that night, it usually leaves more than just the skin. 
 
Probably had more of an appetite when it was still fairly young.
 
 
 
 

Thread necro! 
 
My group back in the 80's almost did a Bureau 13 DI game.  Sadly it never happened...
 
There's no reason you can't use DI as a supplement for the edition of your choice.  And I wrote my Low Heroic protocols for just this purpose. 
 
I ran a Robot Warriors short campaign in 2021 using 6th edition and essentially following RW/DI for my pregen characters, and it was every bit as fun as it was back then. 

The Mermaid Stories.

 During the Hurricane of October, 1897 witnesses reported  seeing a swimmer in the high surf near what would become Beach Boulevard. The swimmer dragged another figure ashore, and pulled them up beyond the surf lie and in the lee side of a brick beach cottage. Then the swimmer dove back into the surf. The witnesses then approached the seated figure. He was Dominick Mariani, a fisherman and crabber, who's boat had broken up in the heavy seas generated by the Hurricane. What he had been doing out there he would not say, and most fishermen, seeing the signs in the skies, beached their craft, and Stayed home for the week.  The Hurricane lasted 60 hours and pushed the water 8 feet about the high tide line at Norfolk. His friends joked about him getting rescued by a mermaid. Sightings of a female swimmer with Raven hair were reported by other boaters, often her waving to the passing boats, but her identity was never determined.  All sightings ceased after  October of 1903 when another tremendous Hurricane hit the Central Coast of Virginia. These stories were the source of the Coelho Mermaid Mascot, drawn by  Charles Dana Gibson, and used on the fish and crab cans of Coelho Foods, until a redesign in the late 1950's, whereupon they gained their current cartoon Mermaid Mascot, and Commercial spokes person.
 
The Bavinetsky Murders.
 
Lady Irina Bavinetskaya was a notable Medium, and Mystic, playing her trade from the salon's and halls of the rich and famous all up and down the Atlantic coast.  For a modest fee, she would schedule and conduct seances, and had a reputation for being quite accurate. regardless of what the  reader might think of "spiritual matters, there were some frightening irregularities in her last séance. 
 
The Sandringham-Alard family had purchased one of the islands just off the coast, that General Cameron turned into one of the defensive star forts during the Civil War, and in the center of it, built Sandringham Castle, a mediaeval fantasy castle of red brick stone and concrete that they used as their manor.  Staffed with servants, and a small number of Sailors for the various water craft they kept to travel to the mainland, or transport goods to the great house, the  Sandringham-Alards seemed to have it all. However Cynthia Sandringham-Allard was distraught as she had received word that her college aged Son, Michael had vanished in a hike in Germany's Black forest. She engaged the services of Madame Bavinetsky so as to determine the fate of Michael. With a guest list drawn up, including a few of Michael's local friends, the séance was scheduled for October 17th, 1898.  After dinner, and once the servants had cleared the table, and locked the doors, the ritual started. Servants reported strange voices, shouts, and other odd noises coming from the locked roo, until around 10:30 AM, when there was a collective scream, followed by a profound silence. The Servants unlocked the doors, and found Madam Bavinetsky unconscious and unable to be roused. However all the guests dead. their bones, organ, and blood removed, leaving a slightly browned, dry, skin hide, intact and still within their clothes, with every button and hook in place.  The police were called, and arrived hours later, but they were unable to rouse Madame Bavinetsky, who remained in a coma for 21 month, before passing away. Michael re-appeared in Europe just before Christmas, and took a Deutch-Amerika liner back to the U.S.  Inheriting the Sandringham-Alard fortune, he still sold the island and house to the U.S. Army's Coastal Artillery command in 1912.  This would not be the last time that such gruesome ends would strike someone in or around Coastal City.
 

 

Richard Tucholka, God rest his soul. He is gone, and we are the poorer for it. I worked on some Bureau 13 stuff, but Doug Blanchard defined the look of most of the Tri-Tac games. There was a definite gallows humor edge to that game, but having spoken to folks who played in Rich's games, as well as to Rich himself often at the old Milwaukee Gencons, that the games got pretty lethal to player characters if they weren't smart. The old Tri-Tac system itself was crunchy, and dangerous, in that post Gygaxian way. But often Bureau 13 adventures did have their moments of Laurel & Hardy events due to the die rolls.
 
The odd thing is that to me, Danger international, and Dark Champions have two separate "Feels" to me, with D.I having a grounded, real world flavor, with the occasional weirdness, whereas Dark Champions feels less grounded, with it's foot in the Superhero world. Doing SCP feels more like D.I. than D.C. with all the real world weapons, and many of the SCP items being otherwise mundane items being altered by the unexplainable. But  D.C will have to do, these days.

The Galaxy Trio left me with the very strong impression of the Fantastic Four in space. Their powers and personalities displayed a number of similarities. And yes, unlike the other H-B heroes with their junior sidekicks and pets, the Trio were a true superhero team, working together as equal partners to defeat their enemies.

There probably are some publicly-known aquatic civilizations nearby in the Atlantic.
 
One area high school girl, who is a skilled swimmer and prefers to swim mermaid-style but is not on the girls' swim team has been called a "mermaid living on land" by the "popular" girls.

The bedrock of the community are the churches, and there are three main ones. 
 
First A. M. E. Church. Presided over by Rev Alpheus Ward.  Son of the civil rights hero, the late Rev. Bertram Ward.  You can expect a raucous, and Musical service, topped off with Reverend Ward’s firey, though sometimes humorous service, delivered in a call and response format. The Reverend has an insurmountable presence, much as his father did, and serves the lord and community with a fierce joy. Often asked for comment by the local media, he’s not shy about offering his opinion on Current Events.  The Church hosts the Eastern Seaboard Gospel Music Festival, usually the weekend before Easter. This Church used to be associated with the university, until protests against the Vietnam War forced the state legislature to separate after Rev, Bertram Ward’s refusal to moderate his approach. 
 
St. Christopher’s Catholic Church. This church started as a small congregation of Portuguese Fishermen, who used the port facilities soon after the Confederate retreat in 1865, the church now represents the white working class locally.  Part of the archdiocese of Norfolk, services are conducted by father Rafael Almeida, a local boy with a very extensive Jesuit education. Starting in a converted boat house, the congregation has remodeled and added to the structure over the centuries to produce a solid and tastefully beautiful place of worship that will attract the occasional tourist. Bishop Franklin of Norfolk is a frequent guest there. The church is associated with the Holy Cross Medical center, down town, with Father Almeida’s classmate, Father Santos serving as Chaplain. 
 
East View Baptist Church started during the war as Where the Coastguard officers and their families worshipped. With the end of the war, more and more employees of Murchison Marine Engineering filled the pews of this modest building, during the shipping boom of the 1950s and 60s. Reverend Charles Pierce was often at odds with reverend B. Ward at First A. M. E., Reverend Pierce was very careful not to insult, embarrass or belittle Rev. Ward. Stepping down from the pulpit in 1982, there have been a rotation of Reverends, none serving for more than five years. This is a very conservative congregation, but generous in times of disaster, yearly collecting clothing and blankets for hurricane victims. 
 
The Coastguard diminished their facilities after WW2, slimming it down to two Helicopters, and a small cutter, berthed at Pier 5. The Helicopters are state of the art CH-70 Sea Serpent coaxial rotor helix. Once a month a fuel barge from The Norfolk Navy Yard comes to top off the tanks at the Coastguard station. 

Suggests there might have been some bootlegging going on during the Prohibition days.   By the 1930s that would have been winding down some, but organized crime being what it was something else probably started replacing the alcohol in smuggler's holds - one possibility being desperate refugees fleeing Europe (and Germany in particular) as the storm clouds gathered.  Prohibition ended as Hitler seized power, after all.  That all would have been put an end to once the Coast Guard took over during WW2 - or at least been forced to scatter elsewhere.  Doesn't rule out greatly exaggerated comic-book Nazi intelligence operations in the area for Golden Age heroes to contend with, perhaps with elements of the bootlegger gangs working in collusion and running agents and supplies ashore from submarines or "neutral" merchantmen.
 
Modern campaigns might have signs of the past in the form of former speakeasies as college bars or some rumrunner's disguised warehouse repurposed as an art gallery or theater venue, or even carved up into student housing.  And of course lairs for supervillains, or perhaps even hero HQ.     

We had surprise games like that back on the day, before everyone moved away after school.  Good times. 

May have been a Confederate Coastal Installation, and the HBCU acquired the land 20 years later to use the drained areas and existing buildings as a start. Currently has a very eclectic mix of architecture, but all in red brick, and white trim.  One of the few Universities with its own port. Curriculum centers on Marine Biology, Environmental Law, Architecture, Marine Law and commerce.  Ceased being a pure black university after a vote in 1970. Surrounding town expanded in the 1920s. And again after the war. During the war, the port facilities were taken over by The Coast Guard, for submarine chasing. University is governed by a council of 6 deans.  

(My mother’s parents lived along side the Charles River Estuary, where I was taught how to sail and handle small boats, and be driven to museums all over Virginia, so I am familiar if not fond of the area.) 

Never forget what happened one Christmas at Nakatomi Tower...
 

 

So yesterday was awesome and exhausting.
 
What with it being both Christmas Eve and Sunday, every player I have was off and, unfortunately, wanted to play.  I say unfortunately because those players are across three different groups.  The regularly-irregular Champions group wanted to do something-- so we did!  I had _nothing_ ready, so I recycled the Christmas Treant I used with the youth group last year.  A few on the fly mods to remove some of the humor and add some more overtly sinister, and done.  (yeah; this group is fifty/ fifty: half want to be noble heroes; the other half wants to be Batman)
 
The youth group wanted to do something so they could invite a couple of friends.  As before, I had _nothing_.  Honestly, no one has _ever_ wanted to play within three weeks of Christmas on either side!  It never _occurred_ to me to prep something, even just mentally.  I did have something rattling around in my head for a couple of months in case they ever did want to play again (they are _all_ in high school now, so I expect this fun thing they do with the old guy from church will fall by the wayside any second), so I launched into it for a couple of hours-- 
 
they are hot on the trail of the Good Guy.  After being totally unable to locate the Gotham-esque neighborhood known as "the Sty," they are growing more and more perplexed.  Finally, one of them suggests that all neighborhoods are hooked to utilities.  Perhaps they can split up and follow power lines and storm sewers to get where they need to go?  Two of them even call the garbage collection companies to see who runs to the Sty and when.  After a run-in with the homeless army in the sewers, they find themselves in the Sty, and explore for a couple of hours, looking for leads, and wondering where the police are.  We find a good spot to wrap up, and do so.
 
I had to.  Christmas Eve is also my amazingly-still-alive father's birthday.  (It gets better: my mother's birthday is New Year's Eve.)  I go see my folks (both of whom are the longest-lived people in their respective families.  I should be so lucky) where I thoroughly enjoy my mother and I honor my father.  (I hope you people can forgive me; if you cannot, I hope you can at least understand.  The more I improve myself-- no; obviously not financially.  The more I improve myself _as a human being_, the less I enjoy my father's company.  He has gone from a vibrant, intelligent man to the terrified, paranoid coward that a certain "news" channel creates in order to ensure votes for a unified party of paranoid cowards, and I find it.....   it's unpleasant.  Leave it there.)
 
After two bitter hours there, I start to head toward Brunswick, where my Traveller-on-Champions-wheels group wants to play, and then we get to the "quote of the week."
 
 
At this point, I have been running games for about twelve hours, and for three different groups, and almost all of this is off-the-cuff material that I am having to note just as hard as the players are so that I can work it into the stories properly when I have time (and before the next sessions).  I am frazzled.  I can _feel_ the overload sparks in my brain.  
 
NPC:  ...and that's when we found the ore.  Not dust and flakes like on the worlds in the green zone, but a pure vein of it.  Word got out-- I can't believe it was one of our guys; I just can't.  We've got our entire lives riding on this, all of us.  It had to be someone on the science team, researching it.  There's an Imperial science ship in the next orbit starward, trying to mask itself amongst the background radiation of the star.  It's here to study this stuff.  It may prove to be the next best material for creating Jump Grids.
 
PC1: Wait-- this is an unknown ore?
 
PC2: Are we safe this close to it?!
 
NPC: We are perfectly safe.  It's as inert as lead prior to refinement.
 
PC1: So this ore; what is it?
 
NPC: Joseph Rafiiki.
 
PC3:  Oh, Man!  I can't _wait_ to hear what _that_ stands for!

This is a recent real-science article suggesting that one could "look inside of", e.g., the Sun, by watching what happens to gravitational waves when the Sun moves in front of a source of those, like a compact neutron star binary.  The emphasis in the article is on the possibility of the technique and what you might learn from it.  It had never occurred to me before to think about gravity waves being "refracted" by astronomical objects but it could happen.  At the very least, it gives Star Hero GMs another kind of handwavium from which to make up detection systems.

This is Very Very Very Very True and the way it should be. I hate it in D&D where if you hold your action it changes you in the list of when you go, making it so that if you hold your action you are penalized for it.

NASA experiment beams cat 19 million miles through space

After laying off a bunch of staff a couple of weeks before Christmas (while their CEO nets a multimillion dollar bonus), WOTC is advertising for a digital retouching artist:
 
 
Absolutely none of this is code for "we are replacing our artists with Midjourney and need someone to fix weird hands."

You remind me of a wonderful session back about '88 or so that ended wonderfully and awfully at that same time, but it was ultimately a good thing:
 
When I took over as GM for my original Champiins group, one of the many things I inhereted was one of those little cheesy sand timers found packed in with various ouzzle games since time immemorial.  It was allegedly a sixty-second timer, but repeated testing (across a couple of _decades_)  had proven it to be a sixty-two sexond timer....  Yeah, not important, unless you were the guy who was waiting for your turn, in which case it was the thing you complained about most.   
 
Anyway, Jim (my predecessor) had a policy:  if you weren't ready when your turn came (everyone got a few seconds, of course, but if you werent ready after a quick "uuhhhhh....," then the timer hit the table, and you had until it ran out to complete and execute your actions.  (Newbies had exemption, of,course, for the first couple of hours of game time.)
 
The fact is (and it could have been simply the threat of it) no one ever actually needed all sixty-two seconds unless we were playing Starfleet Battles (not sure why we were all of so tediously cagey for that game).  But when the timer was put into play, whoever's turn was up suddenly became the poster child for efficiency: whatever wasn't done when the last of the sand flowed out of the top didn't get done.
 
 
And that policy had an inconsiderate corollary that bit us in the butt in the most amusing way....
 
One night, we had one player-  I don't know what her deal was: she was falling in and out of attention, constantly distracting herself with some internal thing--  I had asked after about an hour if she felt okay; if ahe wanted a break; if she would prefer her character moving onto a side-plot to be resolved later so ahe could bow out and go home--
 
It was confusing to me, because she was actually a few minutes earlier that usual, claiming she had blown off a party to come to the game.  Well, she wenr to the party, had some fun, ended up stuck talking to some creepy dude for fifteen minutes, got 'that vibe,' and left in an attempt to bail on him.  Instead, he walked her all the way to my place, said his good-byes, then beat feet back the way he came.
 
 
She kept insisting ahe was fine, and I figueed she was probably just shaking the creepy vibe off, so we kept playing.
 
We had never had to use the timer more than three or four times in any game, and frankly, it was a pretty rare game that saw it in use at all.  That night, it was used more than a dozen times, almost all of them on that same player (who was now distracted in-game; it was the only way to resolve all of this!).
 
And after waffling for a bit, the timer came out for the final time that session.  Her character had been hiding behind a column in a darkened maintenance room ( for what it's worth, we were playing Daredevils), pistol drawn (she was supposed to be covering another character as he advanced towars the villain, but had gotten distracted, etc.  Two other players were making the attempt, and were nearly,out of ammo.  Distraction Player was the only one who the villain had not yet been made aware of.
 
The timer came out, she hesitated, waffled, studied the map, asked questions that demonstrated she had lost focus about four rounds prior to now....
 
I put the timer on the table _again_.....
 
And it didn't help much.  I think it was half empty before she really registered its presence (in spite of the traditional "oh no!  It's the timer!" drama from the usual suspects).  As it got more and more empty, she just choked.
 
Then the timer did, too.
 
There was a tint bit of sand that had somehow managed to get lodged in the neck, and it just hung there.  Hoots and howls from around the table, but my Player remained... Off....
 
She turned to another player and started with "oh my God; I don't know what to do!  Do I shoot this guy?  Do I run away?  No matter what, he is going to see me, and my character isn't going to survive getting shot with his tommy gun--"
 
Helpfully, he suggested considering her motives, which degenerated into a group recap of the last four sessions-  the villain did this; the villain did that....  He framed your fiance and got him arrested, then stole his research;  
 
On and on.  "Guys...."  I started.  "She's out of time...."
 
"Oh, no!" This from my rules lawyer brother.  "She's out of time when the timer runs out!"  Everyone suddenly remembered the timer and burst out laughing again.
 
"I know it's stuck, but-"
 
"Nope!"  Quipped my brother John.  "It's in Flashback mode!"  More laughter, considering the recap underway.
 
"Yeah!" Agreed the Rules Lawyer.  "You know how it works-  every movie there's a pivotal moment where someone has like a twenty minute flashback and then we snap back to the moment and like, two seconds have gone by!  The Timer rule says (and it didn't, really; it was just an accepted interpretation, and this is how I learnes to be careful about letting that happen again) 'when the sand runs out,' which it hasn't--"
 
Distracted Player said "Okay, you're right- villain did this and this and this and this and this and it affected you this way and you that way and you this way, and it did this, this, and this to me, and he has always been this and that and the other to my fiance and his father-  this is it!
 
 
"Okay, Duke: I step out from behind the column and say "you will leave me and the French family (her fiance was Dr. Conrad French, scientist extrordinaire) alone!'  Then I shoot a couple of times to scare him back so the others can take him down."
 
Then she rolled a pretty sweet critical and he dropped, dead at her feet.
 
Howls from around the table.
 
Then she (the player) got incredibly sick on my floor, and we all freaked for a moment, and John and I loaded her into his car and we took her to the ER.
 
 
Turns out her vibe was right, and leaving was the best thing for her.  Someone had roofied her.  The only thing that saved her was her health (she was on swim team scholarship), and creepy guy not using enough to black her out, and the fact that she left.
 
We couldn't talk her in to preasing charges, but her coach did.  Creepy dude was caught with enough on him to knock out choir.
 
Sorry-  that last bit was to be left out, but in anticipation of the discussion about her 'shouldnt have shown up' or 'bad player' or whatever,  and I wanted to defend hee showing up: I suspect she felt safer in the company of her wierd friends than she would have in an empty dorm room.
 
 
We would learn later that another girl at the party had not been so fortunate.
 

A relevant Reddit posting:
 
https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/18ibj22/hasbros_struggle_with_monetization_and_the/
Hasbro's Struggle with Monetization and the Struggle for Stable Income in the RPG Industry
    Discussion We've been seeing reports coming out from Hasbro of their mass layoffs, but buried in all the financial data is the fact that Wizards of the Coast itself is seeing its revenue go up, but the revenue increases from Magic the Gathering (20%) are larger than the revenue increase from Wizards of the Coast as a whole (3%), suggesting that Dungeons and Dragons is, yet again, in a cycle of losing money.
Large layoffs have already happened and are occurring again.
It's long been a fact of life in the TTRPG industry that it is hard to make money as an independent TTRPG creator, but spoken less often is the fact that it is hard to make money in this industry period. The reason why Dungeons and Dragons belongs to WotC (and by extension, Hasbro) is because of their financial problems in the 1990s, and we seem to be seeing yet another cycle of financial problems today.
One obvious problem is that there is a poor model for recurring income in the industry - you sell your book or core books to people (a player's handbook for playing the game as a player, a gamemaster's guide for running the game as a GM, and maybe a bestiary or something similar to provide monsters to fight) and then... well, what else can you sell? Even amongst those core three, only the player's handbook is needed by most players, meaning that you're already looking at the situation where only maybe 1 in 4 people is buying 2/3rds of your "Core books".
Adding additional content is hit and miss, as not everyone is going to be interested in buying additional "splatbooks" - sure, a book expanding on magic casters is cool if you like playing casters, but if you are more of a martial leaning character, what are you getting? If you're playing a futuristic sci-fi game, maybe you have a book expanding on spaceships and space battles and whatnot - but how many people in a typical group needs that? One, probably (again, the GM most likely).
Selling adventures? Again, you're selling to GMs.
Selling books about new races? Not everyone feels the need to even have those, and even if they want it, again, you can generally get away with one person in the group buying the book.
And this is ignoring the fact that piracy is a common thing in the TTRPG fanbase, with people downloading books from the Internet rather than actually buying them, further dampening sales.
The result is that, after your initial set of sales, it becomes increasingly difficult to sustain your game, and selling to an ever larger audience is not really a plausible business model - sure, you can expand your audience (D&D has!) but there's a limit on how many people actually want to play these kinds of games.
So what is the solution for having some sort of stable income in this industry?
We've seen WotC try the subscription model in the past - Dungeons and Dragon 4th edition did the whole D&D insider thing where DUngeon and Dragon magazine were rolled in with a bunch of virtual tabletop tools - and it worked well enough (they had hundreds of thousands of subscribers) but it also required an insane amount of content (almost a book's worth of adventures + articles every month) and it also caused 4E to become progressively more bloated and complicated - playing a character out of just the core 4E PHB is way simpler than building a character is now, because there were far fewer options.
And not every game even works like D&D, with many more narrative-focused games not having very complex character creation rules, further stymying the ability to sell content to people.
So what's the solution to this problem? How is it that a company can set itself up to be a stable entity in the RPG ecosystem, without cycles of boom and bust? Is it simply having a small team that you can afford when times are tight, and not expanding it when times are good, so as to avoid having to fire everyone again in three years when sales are back down? Is there some way of getting people to buy into a subscription system that doesn't result in the necessary output stream corroding the game you're working on?

This is of course the dilemma all writers face: eventually everyone who wants to has bought your book.  Sure every year a few people age in that will be interested and maybe pick up a copy, but the initial flood tapers off rapidly.  So you write more books, and people buy them, but for a game company the hard truth is that you have an absolute limit of how many books will sell.
 
Hasbro's answer to that was to try the Microsoft model of renting books, thus ensuring ongoing profits, but absolutely everyone hates that and stomped all over it.  Their previous answer was to keep putting out books, even if they were pointless or damaging to the game, just to get sales.  And of course, new editions.  Hero has resisted this: they put out a new edition when a new edition is called for, not just to mine sales.  Game Designer's Workshop is based entirely around the "put out new versions" model.
 
But the truth is, if you're only after profits, gaming is a terrible way to go about it.  Put out stuff as a fan who wants to support the hobby, not as a businessman trying to make money.

Now I'm honestly glad I never really paid attention to it way back when.  That is some serious idiotic writing there.
 
The "use us as enslaved soldiers" thing is a moderately popular trope in scifi, and not always terminally stupid unto itself.  David Drake and some of his fellow military scifi peers wrote a pretty enjoyable set of stories about shady aliens coming to Earth throughout history and "acquiring" low-tech military formations (eg a defeated Roman Legion) for use as corporate slave troops on other primitive planets.  Their galactic civilization wouldn't let starfarers use superior tech to bully or outright conquer natives they wanted to trade with, and after some debacles with trying to train troops to fight without their usual tech the megacorps discovered it was cheaper to buy slaves, kidnap shiploads of people or "hire" mercs who became de facto slaves from other primitive cultures and use them to overthrow non-cooperative local rulers and install their own picked candidates.  If nothing else it was pleasantly cynical about how well the main government's well-intentioned anti-exploitation laws worked in practice.
 
Of course, humans being human those Romans (and in later stories others from different periods) wind up freeing themselves eventually and (in some of the expanded stuff by other authors) effectively conquering the galaxy and making Earth a stellar superpower, which is very silly but typical.  Turns the whole thing into Poul Anderson's High Crusade with an extra step in the process.

"Is that so? I would advise against listening to one of his 'tales', for they are treacherous; you are liable to slip and fall into a coma."

Plus, the MTG earnings are largely propped up by the speculative buying of the latest Lord of the Rings set which had a one ring card... one of them ... buried in a zillion packs.  So speculators bought mountains of cards hoping to get the ring, driving up sales.  Now that the ring has been found, the sales have dropped off significantly, and the entire controversy has driven players and buyers away.  So you get maybe one year of sales that way then what?

I've always thought of Magic The Gathering as a cancer on the TTRPG Hobby since it's debut in 1993 Worldcon. It's a curse, that crippled the hobby for about a decade, until Paizon figured out a formula to avoid it, but that caused a bump in CCG's that just sucked money out of the hobby.  MTG is Hasbro's  flagship at the moment, as it's on of the few activities they still sell that makes money, and does not require a screen to play. For what had been a toy company, that produced GI-Joe, and then later Transformers, the loss of Toys-R-Us, as well as a general shift to screens for kids, meant that their options had changed and CCGs were it.