On Traffic
The r/OSR blogroll last dead post was stripped down by the mods - after freezing the auto-update widget back in Jan 24, it finally got deleted in summer. I had stopped paying attention and missed when exactly it was finally deleted. Someone with more grit than me could go back to classic weekly reposting? It definitely drew in people that did not come in by other routes.
Looking at the raw from blogger the anomaly continues to recede into the distance - my feel is probably AI scrapers packaging everything up so someone can replicate this! Jokes on them, my spelling is not great.
I have seen the shiny weekly links posts called out a few times by (what appear to be) real folk in (what appear to be) actual conversations so unless someone is running the longest of long-game sock-puppet scams, there are actually readers for that.
Once more I must thank the following comrade-bloggers as those who bring readers here - those who have appeared before: Lizardman Diaries, DIY & Dragons, Weaver.skepti.ch, Nothics Eye, Retired Adventurer, Archons March On, Chaudron Chromatique, Ynas Midgard, Uncaring Cosmos, Kelvin Green, Awesome Lies, Spot Hidden, Shuttered Room, Wierd Wonderful Worlds, A Continent of Banalities, 3d6 Polar Bears and Advanced Mystery and Manners together with those who have started appearing on the traffic links in this past year; Prismatic Wasteland, Bruce Heard, Beneath Foreign Planets, Taskerland, Tim S Brannan and Spriggans Den. As ever, I greatly appreciate being on your blogrolls - that human touch is ever more appreciated as the machines swarm ever more thickly about.
I spun up a bluesky presence this year - not showing a marked impact yet, certainly not compared to a number of impressive pipes and feeds that others set up - the TTRPG network on Lemmy and DNDBlogs.com being two that keep cropping up.
On content
Beyond the base-load of weekly links posts, this past year has shown a ramp up in actual-play documentation and lessons learned, more inspirations posts that were mostly RPG Blog Carnival and GLoGtober plus a few jams like BarkeepJam and Hexcrawloween. Data posts have faded off because I am finding new survey sets *real* scarce on the ground. I have begged for the raw data from a few I know of but until something interesting crosses my inbox, I do not see that reversing. Reviews were down a bit which is a shame, must try to work on that in the coming year.
Most popular posts of the past 6 months - assuming that all got equally affected by the bot-nonsense this is still some measure of what was popular.
1. Class/Race archetypes in 1.2 million D&DBeyond characters
2. Player Demographic Trends Update
3. Review: Worlds Without Number
4. Review: Reach of the Roach God
5. Review: Where Evil Lives
6. Actual Test: Scarlet Heroes Adventure Generator
8. Review: Historica Arcanum - The City of Crescent
9. Review: Thousand Thousand Islands
10. Capsule Reviews #7: Castle of the Silver Prince
11. The Githyanki Main
The remaining nine of the top 20 were all Shiny Weekly Links posts - in order of popularity; #201, #200, #184, #199, #197, #198, #196, #188, #202 and #194. So the weekly links, data and reviews for the most part - all the stuff I've been doing less of except for the links. Oops. This is a big swing from last I looked at all this stuff - practically none of the 'community of practice' things - all links, reviews, stuff that suggest folk that don't know this place and are finding me through google are becoming the greater part of traffic? Something to check again in six months, see does it hold.
On Goals
I spent a bunch of time this year wrangling RL stuff - a Meetup group (now dead) and a Code of Conduct for our local games soc (now implemented in alpha) - so hopefully that time is going to be available for more blogging in the coming year.
Blogging projects that got done nonetheless:
- Glass Candles GLoGtober '24 - I contributed a list again, participated again
- Campaign retrospectives - following the format from Against the Wicked City - Brancalonia, Light of Xaryxis
- Monthly RPG Blog Carnival participation and one month hosted
- Gorgon Bones "Record your hobby experience" best practices
Going to continue running games, try and lean back towards reviews since that I can plan for whereas the data stuff is dependent on a source turning up.
Specific blogging projects planned:
- GLoGtober '25
- Continue RPG Blog Carnival
- Lessons learned (Gorgon Bones style) and retrospectives (Against the Wicked City style) as the gaming allows.
- Try to get in some gaming with actual Old School Systems and write about what it takes to pull that off with a pool of 5e players.
Other than those, the only surety is I will end up writing about stuff over the coming 100 posts that I will not have seen coming. Thank you for joining me, onwards!
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