Anti-Energy and the Hobby

Anti-energy can be a dangerous thing. Let me define it.

This happened to me. My disappointment with Star Wars built up over years and finally peaked with this year’s lackluster movie release. So I dove in, collecting Star Wars RPG books and telling myself, “I can do better than them.” My goal was to tell classic Star Wars stories at the table the way they were supposed to feel.

The concept of “proving them wrong” is the crux of anti-energy. When that moment fades, the anti-energy fades with it, and you are left holding empty feelings and piles of useless books. Anti-energy is best redirected: create your own sci-fi universe and stories instead. Refuse to “fix theirs” out of spite.

Whatever actually appeals to you about science fiction—low-level free traders scraping by on payroll runs, explorers in barely spaceworthy junk craft, space mercenaries on the fringe, or the classic hard sci-fi stories you love—do those things. Do them instead of channeling anti-energy into fixing someone else’s pile of broken junk that no longer even knows what it is supposed to be.

Then the anti-energy starts to wane. You feel the riptide pulling your creative urges into the abyss. That is when you realize what this feeling actually is.

Anti-energy is a destructive force. It feeds on schadenfreude and the false-positive rush of “I can fix this.” You move on to the next thing. I can fix Dark Sun. I can fix D&D. I can fix Star Trek. You buy more books. You fall into the next trap. The anti-energy fades again, and you are left more drained and empty than before. Time wasted when new stories could have been told.

Look at where the official material is going. Dark Sun is turning into Splatterpunk meets WWE for the new D&D 5.5E version. Star Trek’s shows are crashing and burning—no longer exploring strange new worlds, but turning inward into Gen Z feelings and emotions, the kind of show better suited for the CW on those fringe syndicated budget networks. D&D itself is becoming a fantasy superhero game, and everyone by default accepts it like D&D is the new fantasy MCU. The original had those deep-rooted feelings of myth, heroism, savage survival, crawling into the unknown, crossing into the mirror, the dungeon funhouse of death, and personal struggles where you were not invincible and immortal.

Parts of the OSR are based on anti-energy for D&D. I feel that if D&D were ever to disappear, a good portion of that scene would retract and recede into a much smaller niche audience.

I’m not saying the OSR is artificial. But why you love it may be.

If you are in the OSR primarily to “correct D&D,” you are setting yourself up for disappointment the day modern D&D dies or stops mattering. That corrective drive is still anti-energy. It needs the thing it’s pushing against in order to keep its heat.

If you are in the OSR out of genuine love for the old ways—the resource tension, the real danger, the mythic grit, the dungeon as a place that does not care about your story—and you refuse the toxic anti-energy, you are in a far more creative and better place. That version does not need modern D&D to exist as a foil. It can keep generating new material and new tables even if the official line vanished tomorrow.

The same distinction applies to everything else. Star Wars, Dark Sun, Trek, whatever. When the urge is “I will fix their broken thing,” the energy is finite and extractive. When the urge is “this is the specific feeling and structure I actually want at my table,” the energy becomes self-sustaining. That is the difference between ending up with another stack of unused books and ending up with campaigns that actually happened.

Anti-energy is finite and extractive. Positive love of the play experience itself is generative.

The practical move is simple. Notice when the urge to collect, redesign, or “restore” is coming from opposition rather than appetite. Isolate the actual texture you want—mythic vulnerability, desperate scarcity, outward exploration, low-level free-trader grind, whatever it is—and feed that directly. Build the stories that only exist at your table. Refuse the invitation to fix someone else’s pile of broken junk that no longer even knows what it is supposed to be.

When the spite runs out, that is what remains: the campaigns that actually happened, instead of the books that never got used.