A CHALLENGE from Sundered Shillings off the the OSR Discord server: Hunt down the blog posts that have forever changed how you have run your games, prepped your games, done your game design, or is otherwise terribly significant or personal to you.
Some of these may be obvious but while they are fresh on my mind:
Just make it a bear - was something I needed to hear. The importance of the critter having the exact correct stat block from that specific Monster Manual that you have not brought along to the table is minimal. Just repaint a bear.
Three Clue Rule by Alexandrian - in particular the 'red herring is over-rated' corollary. I needed to hear this - a game is not a Sherlock Holmes episode, there are plenty of difficulties enough without the players stalling out trying to find where the mystery even is.
In Corpathium by Last Gasp Grimoire - a dice drop city generator with amazing tables that has become by go-to for cooking up a city. A work of genius.
Hexcrawls vs Pointcrawls by Hill Cantons again hitting the point of 'streamline things to get to the fun' but also helping to define that according to table the fun objective maybe in the travel (hexcrawl) or the destination (pointcrawl) and getting that clear both for yourself and the table is important.
This awesome reference on what fits in a 6-mile hex from Coins and Scrolls really helped me conceptualise how much adventure can be packed into travel - and that there are plenty of reasons to miss things and for there to be huge variations between hexes because a hex is big!
Non-Euclidean Geography (first of three posts) on Goblinpunch with some great thinking on how things manifest, what it really looks like and effectively a practical guide to bringing highly wierd physics into your dungeon or wizards tower.
Conceptual Density by Against the Wicked City helped me to understand what I was looking for in blogs and supplements - I even wrote about this myself recently.
Cave Girls primer for Gardens of Ynn is a guide to how to run strange realms / other planes.
The Guild Dogs initiator post from The Lizardman Diaries both spawned the awesome Infinigrad generators that eventually became Ordure Fantasy but were most useful to me for the conceptual clarification of 'sometimes you just need enough of a stage to run this particular caper' - sometimes you just need this street, not the whole city.
This handy table on Joesky Tax Preparation is a nice codification of what people find valuable on blogs, also a fine source of inspiration if you are stuck for something to write. The concept of the Joesky Tax itself is a good one (why the hell should anyone grace you with the presence of their eyeballs?) but was not revelatory for me.
A second one from Goblinpunch on how elves should be a lot more horrifying than they usually are.
The Lazy DM prep steps by Sly Flourish was super helpful to me as helping me to rationalise effort spent in prepartion and direct it towards what would be useful at the table.
Note that the common theme you probably lift out of all of these are 'things that helped me break out of 'over preparation' and handling large, complex settings without having to know what was behind each and every door. Below are another few posts that inspired me, provided great reading fodder withour necessarily changing the way I play
How to do a Citycrawl Campaign by Bearded Devil - inspirational but so far beyond my abilities that I can only admire from afar.
I really want to play this in a game - The Extras - where you are 'all those other folks hanging around behind the named members of the pirate crews.
Modern Minds & Medieval Distances is a great meditation on how far things are from one another and how the people of the time would think of them.
Good isn't stupid, weak or nice - useful to remember.
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