Tilling the blogsoil

Slowly grinding through the Elusive Shift - a worthy book that I am not finding gripping; having it laid out in detail that we as a hobby have been hashing over the same arguments since the very start does not make for an uplifting book. The detail of how the same arguments have been going over and back since the dawn of the hobby is useful to have on record but I am not finding the book particularly easy going. It is not telling me anything new, it is just providing evidence in great depth that as a hobby we have absolutely no institutional memory and are continuing to go around and around in the same loop.

We apparently have no sign to tap.

Meme from @rolistespod.itch.io on Bluesky

I think those conversations are worthwhile in as much as they help to outline and define the different groups of practice or custom exist within the TTRPG space so that you can then know which tools and techniques, what advice and so on are good for your table. There are many styles out there and I figure people ought to try them on and see what works for your table.

That said I think more of that energy would be better spent throughout the play space on lessons learned, advice, practices, recommendations, things that help people get better, go deeper down and improve at running whichever of the different games of Dungeons and Dragons they want to be playing at their particular table.

This is being said in the context of the Bloggies 2024 currently voting (get your votes in) and there's quite a lot of very good posts that came out in the year 2024. Some whispers of a blogging renaissance which is nice, always good to hear and I would agree that there have been some really great fundamental points being said. There are still insights being developed and discoveries being made and refined points coming out of the general community looking at things and fitting things together and putting some context to them. Worthy conversations are being had when attention is directed towards fruitful places.

To my mind the key challenge is to catch the gold from the cascade and ensure that it's not lost. What I was thinking is in the OSR space alone we are now like 25 years in, 10 years into the 5e era of that and there is now a vast amount of blogged content, forum posts and so extant. It is not just the contemporary stuff that is worthy, there are great insights from back in the day. The lowest hanging fruit are blogs that are currently still renowned and active - their sidebars with their top 10 posts often have treasure.

There is the 'Links to Wisdom' page on the Campaign Wiki but it does seem to have crystallised and stopped updating. Even as recently as 2023 a request for 'impactful blog posts' on r/OSR got a range of other stuff too.

Should these be required readings? I think they merit it. There is really clever stuff in there and stuff that will help make your game better. There are deeply worthy things that we should be pulling out and basically kind of tilling over the soil from the past and resurfacing these good old blog posts to bring those gems back to the surface. I am trying to do it in a small way by feeding old posts I find into the weekly links but I know that I am only looking at one channel - blogs - there is probably a wealth of further know-how and wisdom on all the forums. Filter out the flamewars, scrape off the obsolete edition wars and we find perpetual wisdoms that help us run our games better today and inform further thinking to help run even better tomorrow.