The Dundermoose Deception and the Return of Jeffro Johnson

Even in the TTRPG influencer space, sometimes it feels like nobody's real

It feels a bit uncomfortable and strange to touch on this because it’s not my typical style to do so. I had been planning an entirely different blog and told myself I was going to wait and let it simmer a bit since I have a super busy week ahead of me setting up my little music studio. But this was such a bizarre situation it seemed impossible not to mention it.

A couple of days ago, Dundermoose, a well known figure in the BROSR hosted a stream with Griff Morgan, The RPG Pundit, and Driving & Dragons, three TTRPG figures with what are often very differing views. Griff Morgan is known best for Secrets of Blackmoor, a documentary which was essentially the jumping off point for the BROS and their Braunstein focused experiments. RPG Pundit is an OSR faithful with a very contentious presence who has published a broad range of historically focused products, and Driving & Dragons is a YouTuber who generally criticizes other content creators in the space. You can look it up on YouTube on his channel - I’m not reposting it here.

Dundermoose is not a neutral party. He is firmly in the BROSR sphere but has spent the last few years positioning himself as a bridge between the BROSR and the rest of the old school TTRPG space, openly inviting guests who are generally non-receptive to BRO ideas, and in many cases, openly hostile to the BROS. Dunder is a generally solid host and interviewer who has maintained a pretty non-confrontational “nice guy” persona, and is probably the singular member of the BROSR that I have consistently praised for his approach. I think it needs to be said that I have also been interviewed by him in the past, and we have had a pretty cordial relationship, and as such, I have uniformly been supportive of him.

The BROSR is generally insular. They adopt a confrontational, collective persona based on WWE and fraternity antics, often weaving long running narratives which are effective at keeping them in peoples faces, regardless of who wants that or not. They WANT you to play better games and adopt their ideas, but are also unconcerned if you don’t agree, and react to criticism or pushback aggressively, dismissing it as counter-signaling, and often personally insulting the people opposed to them.

I won’t retread my history with the BROSR. Except to say that that every person in the stream the other day apart from Dundermoose, I have had some level of both confrontation and conversation with over time. It’s a testament to just how many strong personalities there are in this space, and how much passion is behind the hobby. It’s a level of grandeur I’ve since become pretty disenchanted with, opting out and instead just choosing to maintain my own space here rather than getting wrapped up in the constant ebb and flow of drama. Call it fatigue, or simply not being able to “keep up”, but either way it came to a point where I was actively and openly beginning to dislike many of those people just for engaging with it, and that didn’t feel very fair to them.

But there was nothing fair about what happened on that stream. As I said, Dunder has propped himself up as a pretty effective connective tissue between people who generally don’t see eye to eye. The fact that he was able to get Rob Kuntz, Sandy Peterson, Griff Morgan, and RPG Pundit on his stream at all is testament to his ability to maintain at least a sense of decency and neutrality not possessed by many of the other bros, and I think it was both a service to the bros themselves and to potential new adoptees of their gaming principles that he was able to bridge that seemingly impossible gap. I fundamentally find their approach interesting, useful, and fun, even if it’s arguable how correct they are in the position they have maintained that them, and their lost and found again leader Jeffro are completely revolutionizing the entire hobby.

Art from the “Winning Secrets” Kickstarter by Jeffro Johnson

And that’s the kicker. Jeffro Johnson, a writer, dancer, and wargame/RPG enthusiast was up until a year ago the most prominent voice in the BROSR. He rather abruptly and vaguely announced his intent to depart and then disappeared completely from the space with such immediacy that there are probably a lot of people who don’t even realize he left. A little over halfway through last nights stream, mid conversation, Dundermoose awkwardly and timidly announced that Jeffro was making his triumphant return, only for Jeffro to return, for Griff to express his dismay and leave the stream, Dunder with exasperated excitement at the “chat blowing up, fam” while the other two guests hardly acknowledged Jeffro’s surprise guest spot, and pretty much just carried on as though he wasn’t there for the most part. (Edit: I want to clarify, there was a lengthy back and forth that followed which was circular and pretty repetitive and didn’t cover any new ground. It was all the same stuff that has been discussed to death. It hardly feels like it’s even worth mentioning since the pivot point was Jeffro’s arrival and after that reveal it felt disjointed and irrelevant.)

I am a cringeosseur. I find cringe delightfully funny in a deeply mean-spirited away and I am not above saying that. I have done my fair share of cringe things, and due to some underdeveloped part of my brain, even when I recognize that, I don’t particularly get embarrassed about it. I just move on and try something else - some things hit, some things don’t. But I can see at least insofar as the TTRPG space is concerned, besides every single video Steven Saunders has ever produced, this was the singular most difficult to watch second half of a stream I have ever seen, to the point where I had my hand over my mouth during the agonizing surprise reveal of Jeffro.

And it’s not because I find Jeffro cringe. He’s a deeply interesting and strange individual, but I have always been entertained by him. I also can’t remember another moment where I thought Dunder had really missed the boat. I think that’s what made this such a strange fever dream - none of the guests knew this was going to happen. Dundermoose has spent the better part of a couple years slowly developing an amicable relationship with Griff, bringing him on streams, and from what Griff had said in a response to a comment of mine after this happened, giving him the general impression that they had a kind of relaxed and casual friendship.

It actually took me a few minutes to process what the hell had just happened, with Dunder carrying on like normal saying he would let Griff back in if he requested it, despite knowing the deep animosity he holds for Jeffro, who didn’t really contribute a great deal to the conversation thereafter until a short pitch and very in-character Jeffro “speech” at the end about how “you guys did nothing while I was away, so I’m coming back to keep revolutionizing the hobby” which while admittedly amusing, by the time it came up and in the context of what had happened earlier, just felt stilted, awkward, and vaguely uncomfortable.

More than anything it was confusing. The “good guy” of the BROSR, the infallible Dundermoose, who has spent so much time building this scaffolding between people who are very often confrontational and opposed to eachother, did a rug pull that essentially halted the momentum of the conversation for a few moments, made him come off as if he had no tact or etiquette or respect for basic decency, took all the wind out of the sails of Jeffro’s return, and didn’t even pay off in a heated blow for blow between the rising Pheonix of Jeffro, and some of his more active detractors. It came across as insulting, petty, and I think worst of all, completely shattered the perception of Dundermoose as a somewhat agreeable, accommodating guy, reducing him to the lowest common denominator of shitheel drama farming YouTube grifters. Dundermoose was a guy who was able to occassionally take off the mask of kayfabe in order to accomodate larger conversations, but this revealed that the friendly, perpetually gap-toothed smiling face underneath was not the real article at all, but just another mask entirely. It was bad for Dunder, bad for his guests who didn’t know it was coming, and bad for Jeffro.

I’m not going to harp on about it. Dundermoose has been facing a split of 80/20 support/criticism for this…interesting creative choice, and his only response to any of it has been passive-aggressive, disingenuous, cowardly dismissal. The real take away for me more than anything else is simply that Dunder is not who I thought he was. And I find that a deeply disappointing realization because it confirms my suspicions and the lyrics of an old Powerman 5000 anthem; that “nobody’s real”, man.

I want to juxtapose this with a creator I discovered recently who I have found imminently fascinating. He is outside of the RPG space, a fellow whose channel goes by the name The Hidden Fortress.

The Hidden Fortress is a YouTuber in the SHMUP or STG scene. Remember those little top down shooting games from the arcade where you pilot a plane or ship through hails of bullets while killing as many things on screen as possible? I’m really into those, they are where 90 percent of my limited video game is invested, and The Hidden Fortress is the same. But unlike the multitudes of gaming content creators on YouTube, the style he injects, pulling from a love for film, BMX videos, and punk sensibilities is so contagiously refreshing that after one video I was instantly hooked. But there is something else behind his channel that I find really appealing, which is just how honest, open, and genuine he is willing to be.

He wears his heart on his sleeve, talks openly about his insecurities and passions, sort of openly dissecting the kind of content he makes while in the midst of making it. He has no conceits or pretenses, at least outwardly, and makes no grand promises about what is next. He loves a certain kind of game, and wants to share that with other people - hard games. Games that have such a high skill ceiling that they require years of dedication to master. But he wants YOU to play them too, and believe that despite your own insecurities, that you can do what he does. And I will post his channel here, because that’s the kind of creator I am willing to support - go check it out.

So it’s upsetting to see this “heel turn” in support of a throwaway gag that came off like a shart because it’s so imminently revealing about what so many people in this space are - liars. And I don’t think there is a more apt way to describe Dundermoose except as a liar.

That’s not to say it was a Judas level betrayal or something - Griff will be fine, Pundit and Driving & Dragons barely gave a shit, and Jeffro’s new Kickstarter has effectively doubled its funding goal with 32 days to go, Dunder is getting cheered on by his fellow bros for his “omg epic” rug pull because that space is so dull, repetitious, and full of so much circle jerking and circular discussion about the same three or four topics that even the tiniest wrench thrown into it become imminently interesting to a bunch of uncurious and uncreative dullards and hangers on. But it was a little like driving down the highway and seeing your Pastor hocking iPhones out of the back of an unmarked van.

You think you know a guy.

The worst part about it is that it makes you actively question guys like Hidden Fortress, who come across so frank and real - is that also a persona? I talked at length with so many people in the TTRPG space on X and formed so few actual friendships with anyone as a result. It makes you feel like you were just another warm body to fill their space for a few minutes rather than that you were developing any kind of genuine understanding of one another. Although I try to keep Compleat DM focused on RPG’s…or at the very least, game design…a lot of my own personality and other interests pour in here because like Hidden Fortress, I have a desire to be understood, and to be genuine. I don’t expect connections to arise from it necessarily, but at the very least I want people to read what I write here, and if they ever got to know me in “real life”, have them be able to see that there isn’t a large degree of separation from Joel here, and Joel in real life. It’s important to me because as we move forward in a world that is increasingly synthetic, where marketing is now something everyone has to adopt if they want to spend any amount of time on here to develop a persona and find a way to monetize every single creative thing they are doing, I want there to exist spaces where people can just be genuine. Where they aren’t selling something. Where they just go to exist, and be them, and find others like them without the intent to turn those people into market value.

And to me, what Dundermoose demonstrated was the complete opposite of that. Just another desperate influencer type who has effectively hidden that behind a series of developed masks. Another day in the world of kayfabe in a space that actively suffers by virtue of its caretakers either being so dull that they have nothing else to talk about but the exact thing they are interested in, or are otherwise feigning being genuine in order to farm as much attention as possible. It reinforces the thing I don’t want to believe, which is that as soon as you step on here, you aren’t you anymore. You just become whatever puts you in front of as many eyes as possible, regardless of what that does to your integrity.

Thanks for reading. You can find the aforementioned Kickstarter for Jeffros new book at the link below.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cirsova/winning-secrets/posts