Rascal Subscriber Drive: History Week
News blasts about the past.
Welcome to Rascal’s August subscriber drive and our very first themed week of reporting: History Week. We’re offering y’all a neat trade: a whole week of stories delving into the history of the tabletop industry — and its players! — in return for your support.
If you’re new to Rascal, first of all: welcome! We are a worker-owned outfit of reporters, critics, and bloggers covering the tabletop industry and its associated online spaces. Rascal is supported directly by its readers, and solely by its readers. No ads, no corporate money, just pure people power. For all those current subscribers reading this, thank you for your material faith in the mission. We genuinely would not be here without you.
Some of our work over the last 18 months includes investigating the tabletop RPG scene created by and for Korean women, attending a personally harrowing January 6 insurrection wargame, writing an anti-review of a notoriously labyrinthine and chthonic adventure, and itch.io’s struggle to support a de facto fundraising network. We’ve also deepened our labor coverage with reports from a Catalonian Vallejo paint factory, a London-based board game cafe workers striking, and NYC’s Tabletop Workers United ratifying their contract. We’ve talked about Daggerheart, Horus Heresy, and Rebel Scum’s brush with censorship, among so much more.
In the past, we’ve laid out stretch goals for our subscriber drives, but History Week will work a little differently: we are already committed to bringing a new writer onto the team in order to expand Rascal’s capacity for news. We’ve scrounged up the money in the short-term but need your support, whether new or returning subscribers, to maintain this writer beyond an initial contract and keep them blogging in the long run. That’s it! No other goals, beyond our 2025 commitment to pay the team a living wage. No whiteboard thermometers with bonuses or snazzy unlocks along the way this time.
Why a news writer? With the recent death of Polygon compounding the loss of Dicebreaker mere months after we launched in 2024, this industry sorely lacks news from trusted, authoritative voices that we believe are essential to a healthy information ecology. While we hope other journalists will pick up the torch, Rascal could not sit idly and neglect its fair share. Instead of adding this to the existing workload of the team, we decided it was best to bring someone new onboard so the other work we do — the investigative reporting, especially — doesn’t suffer.
History Week
Every day this week, Rascal will be publishing a story illuminating a small piece of tabletop history. These might be interviews with figures who shaped iconic games and companies during their early stages, or investigations into how regular people first encountered the hobby. Expect looks back at specific threads in the tapestry of the past and conversations with brilliant minds actively cataloguing, dissecting, and researching the industry’s past. We hope you find History Week edifying, funny, and at least a bit interesting to read.
Check back here to see what History Week stories we’ve already published, or browse the linked tag:
Thomas Manuel
If you want to support the site, we are currently running a 25% discount code (DJNAY) on the first six months of new subscriptions to celebrate our losing the Diana Jones Award. Find general subscription information here, alongside a tip jar where you can kick us a little extra — or a lot, if you’re financially blessed — to keep the lights on. Plus, any subscription level gains you access to our Discord server full of very cool people having smart conversations. We might need to raise our prices soon, so this is your chance to sign up at our existing rock-bottom rates.
Thank you so much for supporting Rascal and independent journalism. We are, in a very small way, part of a historic movement away from corporate-owned media. You deserve journalism liberated from executive malfeasance, Google’s algorithmic shackles, and compulsory acceptance of “disruptive” technology such as LLM slop machines. We deserve a living wage for our labor. How fortunate that we have found each other, on this website, just above a big pink button prompting you to subscribe!
Write free or die, you rascals.
