Querying OSR Blogging Scene Vibrancy

On Ye Olde Question of 'is the OSR dead' but this time with some data - based on community participation in jams and challenges and continued appearance of 'big idea' posts - not dead yet.

A bit ago there were a slew of posts on the OSR blogging scene losing vibrancy - and I had no way to tackle that in a non-subjective way. Hero of our times Elmcat has been sweating over a red-hot RSS feed to pull together a colossal graph of the OSR blogverse by back-tracking peoples blog feeds and linked posts. They have also generously provided us with 'top 10 posts' lists for the last ten years which allow us to at last have some sort of visibility on activity levels.

The Blogverse, by Elmcat

To try and get a sense of vibrancy increasing or decreasing, what metrics are we using? The main complaints that seem to get brought up are a shift toward selling product in place of improving practice at table. Even there, one mans post refining practice at table is another mans "why is there yet another 'how to dungeon crawl' post?" A laudable retro-clone to one is anothers sign that everything is a rehash.

Another set of complaints is the channel-jamming effect of various awards, various crowd-funding seasons and so on - but those are social media noise complaints. The underlying concern is the reduction in new creative things. I think we must accept some repetitive blogging as new folk rediscover the basic truths of gaming styles and blog about it. Our institutional memory is nil so it feels unfair to get salty at folk when they write up something older hands already know - how were they to know what they just wrote was hotly debated on defunct social media sites years before they could even read?

So to try and find a handle on whether or not we are seeing creativity fall off or whether we are getting new ideas, we can turn to Elmcats great labour to try to spot whether big new touch-stone posts, those with a lot of link-backs, are still emerging.

Published	Post	Links
31 October 2018	Automatic List Generator v2	233
17 October 2007	Grand Experiment West Marches	143
19 December 2008	Party like its 999	95
08 October 2019	Landmark Hidden Secret	80
06 May 2008	Shields shall be splintered	87
06 July 2024	RPGADAY 2024	72
10 June 2017	Tomb of the Serpent Kings	71
06 April 2021	Six Cultures of Play	69
07 May 2016	The GLoG	70
24 April 2011	twenty quick questions	75

So here we have an initial pulse of three all time greats in 2007-2008, one in 2011, a steady annual great for 2016-2019, one in 2021, one in 2024. Of those we have a tool (the html translator) at the top - truly, the smart play has always been to sell those pick-axes to those gold-miners. West Marches, the OG carousing table and 'Shields Shall be Splintered' have stuck with us from that first wave of late 3.5e, cusp of 4e OSR blogging. We have the jam/challenge posts - '20 questions about your campaign' which was a favourite of the flail-snails/G+ era folk and RPGaDay which has been running more lately. Then we have a number of touch-stones - the founding post for the Goblin Laws of Gaming, megapost for Tomb of the Serpent Kings and Landmark/Hidden/Secret and Six Cultures of Play.

Looking at that you could say 'there were early greats' which to my mind is true of most scenes - be they art, music, etc. you get a wild creative ferment early on and a lot of the brilliant ideas get shaken lose. Compiling all the 'top 10 linked posts' for 2025-2016 from Elmcats work we can see from the green spots that there are posts coming out each year that are getting similar amounts of traction year on year which suggests there are still good ideas being had. Given that blogs get shuttered/deleted over time, we might want to assume that a post surviving as a yellow since ten years ago might be comparable in impact to a green from more recent years.

One thing to note is that every year the 'jams and challenges' posts are big - as has ever been so - from RPG Blog Carnival and RPGaDay through to GLoGtober/GLAUGUST and Lore24. One could argue from this that a lot of the fizzy energy of blogs talking to blogs is turning up in the GLoG at the moment. Even the GLoG founding post only got 14 links-in during its own first year so 10-15 links for a concept/theory post is doing great.

So coming back to our question of scene vibrancy - these are not blog-posts shilling product only. We are seeing two categories which I would suggest indicate that the blogosphere is still kicking - community jams and challenges which get broad participation and a small handful of 'big idea' posts every year still- ICI doctrine, Underclock, Blorb Principles, MOSAIC, Overloading the Encounter Die, Conceptual Density, Aesthetics of Ruin - all since the G+ days. So for the *blogging* side of things, there is still life.

None of this is to say that there are not valid points around the social media channels - that OSR Twitter/Bluesky feed might be choked with marketing or the Disc Horse as opposed to actual trading of ideas on how to play the game but that is a different piece of work. From what apples-to-apples comparison it is possible to make, there are still good ideas cropping up on the blogs and people talking about those ideas on their blogs.

Once again, kudos to Elmcat for doing the hard work behind this - I look forward to scrobbling around deeper into the data.