State of the Blog (post #950)

Dropping in this 'mid-range' state of the blog update mostly to mark having down-shifted since the end of June from Shiny Links plus two posts a week to Shiny Links plus one.

Empire of Crust sounded an appreciated warning - as per their post On the Cancer of Creation for Others - a mere hobby blog such as this, must retain its utility to me. I make not a cent from this, it would be futile indeed to get trapped in some sort of content mill mentality *for free*.

Even assuming 2/3 of all traffic is bot-nonsense, traffic surges. Cloudflares boss thinks its 57% for all the internet.

On Writing

I was going to take this as an opportunity to cover off the 'why I write' prompt and then while I was travelling, things got spicy with A Knight At The Opera getting torched.

There were a few who commented on the 'who do you write for' topic - Dungeon Fruit started it, Roll to Doubt and Mightier Than a Sword contributed and I spent a good long time pondering. Mostly, I post that others may have the benefits I had in coming to the OSR blogosphere when I did. I missed G+ by a hair, so my entire experience was the blogs that preserved the thing that was gone. There were lessons learned, tips and tricks that lit a fire under me and so I resolved to chunter along as best I could that I might do likewise.

I recognise I am no genius game designer, nor have I the time to polish ideas up to A-grade on a regular basis. I can document table-fixes and ideas I come up with for my own campaign - the work-log of a journeyman DM - that it might help others avoid some pitfalls or - better yet - be inspired to do something they would never have otherwise come up with.

As part of this I try to fish out and preserve some of the torrent of ideas and discussion that sluice past in the digital abyss of discord - that they might be preserved against its ruin and better found and referenced today.

I had written *exactly this far* when I put down my pen, and between that and picking it up again, one of the great sites of the OSR was deleted (fair enough) and excised from the wayback machine (boo!).

I was very upset but I talked it through with an old friend, a musician, on the topic of a creatives control of their archive. By their views, since noone had paid a penny for any blog posts, none had any claim to them - freely distributed, freely taken back. Too bad for those posts of mine that now lead to dead pages, more fool me for not saving down copies of everything. I have no right to any of those writings, I paid no money for them. It still feels like someone painted over a mural that enriched a community because they did not like the people taking selfies in front of it, or locked up a park because 'the wrong sort' were using it.

That blog succeeded in creating a vibrant patch on the internet, one worth visiting and revisiting. Whatever about declaring you were done and hanging a sign refuting those interpretting your works in a way you disapprove, blocking access to all with no warning is not cool, tearing all trace from the archives spites everyone who ever appreciated the place, not just the bad apples who so infuriated the creator. However the creators was/is well within their rights and I will swallow this bitter taste eventually.

One of the masters of our community of practice has been driven off. Now those who come after us will find less. Gems of gaming are still found on blogs ten years defunct or more. What we do not work to preserve, for the wonder and enlightenment of those who come after, will vanish.

I do not know why this has hit me so damn hard, I don't know Dwiz, he has no idea who I am. There is probably something in watching someone run a blog like I might aspire to in my wildest dreams - expansive, interesting, with useful things in there, throwing off ideas that spark inspiration in others - and to find it brought him *no joy*. Grim.

Restoration of the r/OSR blogroll

tl;dr: a tale of recovering a piece of blogging community infrastructure from bad decisions and technology failure.

Regular readers will have noted I flag the r/OSR blogroll as a place to look for interesting blogposts. I think even in this time of blog-rings, bluesky feeds and other blog aggregators, the r/OSR blogroll serves a purpose in being a low-threshold start point for folk to throw their blogs out in front of a place where their likely audience comes to look.

Around the start of 2023 there was a question about getting the blog-roll pinned to the top of the r/OSR subreddit and at the same time the mods offered to automate its creation which I took them up on. By the end of the year it was clear one or both of these may have been a mistake and I suspect it was both - pinning killed visibilty on mobiles and the automation subsequently broke/stopped updating in early 2024.

After waiting out the year, on the anniversary of things breaking, I relaunched it in the old way - manually done, this time on a Friday, and mercifully it has seemed to reignite, albeit at a lower intensity than before.

Now in the stewardship of u/Leicester68 of Leicester's Ramble, the blogroll has run since pre-pandemic I believe - I took over posting them every Sunday in mid-2021 from u/Sofinho1980 of Alone in the Labyrinth as they took it over from u/shuttered_room of Shuttered Room.

Taking "comments" as our core indicator of success - these are the people leaving links to blogs, commenting on the blogs of others and generally participating - we see things are steady since we restored the blogroll, but still only half of where it was before the unintended hiatus of the auto-updater breaking. Being optimistic, there is a suggestion that the new stewardship of Leicester68 might be bringing in some more eyeballs, certainly there is proven, recent potential to be doing better.

State of the Blog (post #900)

The blog rattles along, last such milestone in the 3-digit posts. I hit a tough patch in the immediate post-Xmas lull; finding it hard to get things back up and running which may have been associated with finishing out a Rogue Trader (CRPG) run that ate sleep. I find myself now with a whole bunch of post drafts based on transcribed notes and a forward-log of two weeks so in a better place. Which is good because a new small householder is now causing new sleep disruption.

Between this and the last State of the Blog there has been quite a bit of recognition for the Shiny Weekly Links (including a Bloggie nomination) which is validating.

There has been quite a chunk of discussion on how blogging is not gaming which is also useful to put things in perspective; for me, I have found help for my games on other peoples blogs - an apt random table, a useful how-to, an inspirational site or monster or class - and this blog is my attempt to both log my own experiences to try and avoid forgetting the lessons I learn and to put my ideas and experiences out there like seed in a bird-feeder, hopefully that the games of others might benefit as mine have from theirs.

On traffic

The stats are bananas, I have no doubt these are utterly poisoned by bots, scrapers and AI training but I put them up to give a sense of what I am seeing. Lines goes up, but are any humans in there?

I have handed off stewardship of the r/OSR blogroll to stalwart comrade Leicester's Ramble and the stats for that look relatively healthy. They have significantly higher reddit karma than I, I hope this helps bring the blogroll to more eyes. With rumblings about Discord becoming non-viable and the general rolling background of social media enshittifying in various ways, maintaining more channels is a good idea, I feel.

To that end, I have joined the New Old Gaming blogring and rootr.ing for the same reasons - I see rootr.ing already seems to be leading to a bunch of folk stopping by which is neat.

Nominations for the Bloggies 2026

Clayton at Explorers Design hosts The Bloggies - a yearly celebration of blogging in tabletop roleplaying games. Below are my nominations for the categories they gave.

Image by Clayton

Theory Category. Thinking about systems, settings, and more.

Idraluna Archives gives us Notebook Kayfabe

Pithy, but a keen insight into how to preserve suspension of disbelief even when blind-sided by players.

Gameable Category. Ready-to-use rules, monsters, and more.

A Beholder for your Setting - Lantern Heads by Garamondia

I repeat what I said for the GLoGgies - so good it kicked off a bandwagon, plus a genius monster that has massive potential to make fascinating campaigns and feel eerie but manageable once you figure out their schtick.

Advice Category. Advice for play, prep, publishing, and more.

Weird Writer's Prep Bandwagon

I rounded up some of the responses on Shiny links #229 and #230 and I know I missed many others - a huge response from the blogosphere with lots and lots of great advice so I think Weird Writer deserves a gong for perfectly timing the zeigeist and drawing forth so much useful blogging.

Strong runner-up for me was Brian Yaksha of Goatman's Goblet's hexfill methodology, only posted as a bluesky thread alas. I got a good few gaming sessions and multiple blogposts from this solid, actionable advice for 'regional' hexcrawling.

Critique Category. Critical analysis of books, games, and more.

Elmcats colossal work

I had a glimpse behind the curtain at the blood, sweat and bits that went into this - Elmcat put an unbelievable amount of work into coding this up and hunting down all the legacy blog-feeds of the distant past. Incredible work that helps us put fact-based answers to some bitter arguments and best of all - provides a one-stop shop to explore the greatest legacy hits of the OSR and find new bloggers you would never have stumbled on otherwise.

Best Debut Blog. Recognition for newcomers that make a splash.

Sages Sanctum

Early doors yet but Sage just started blogging and cranked out methodology bangers, lots of great ideas - mentions in the Glatisant & MT Black's newsletter already. I am watching eagerly to see what they come up with next.

Best Series.

Rise Up Comus + Warren D - Designing Dungeons Course

A huge work, a most generous gift of their time to the cause. Deserving of serious recognition.

Year in Review 2025 - Endies Edition

Since the Endies were kicked off by Lady Tabletop, I am going to include those bits in my usual end of year. I am stealing Luck Roll's format as it speaks to me most.

This year in stats:
Live sessions ran as a GM: 56
Live sessions as a player in a group: 14
Games read: 13 close read enough to review, est. double that again skimmed
Number of systems played: 5 (3.5e, 5e, Salvage Union, Fabula Ultima, Levity)
Hours played: 328 hours
Number of groups played with: 8
Number of games purchased: Not tracked for sanity's sake. Est. I filled 1 meter additional shelving.

All told a top-3 year, mostly driven by running the Hexcrawl on Friday nights, underpinned by running Ducal House and a bit of Lizard Kings 2d20, and playing the completion of Rime of the Frostmaiden and homebrew Nirealis campaign. Fewer little opportunistic bits than last year, driven by a huge amount of energy in the early year going into implementing code of conduct for RPGVienna and all the cat-herding involved there.

Most played / least surprising inclusion: D&D 5e .
Funniest game: Hexcrawl25 game - the flying lizard session.
Best personal achievement: Getting the Hexcrawling mechanisms down, seeing the players working with the map without my input.
Most memorable ending: Finishing Rime of the Frostmaiden - squeaky fight to the finish, big feels choice at the end, our DM pulled together a great epilogue.
Most satisfying crunch: Starting to get the hang of the Conan 2d20 system.

On running games

Ducal House - slowed this year, 21 sessions, ~3/4 the time we have spent on it post-pandemic, which was effectively a strong start through to summer and then it has slowed dramatically since - pratically becoming a monthly game. A big 'arc' got resolved in June, tracking down an artefact and slaying the last emissary of a dead god. There was some good old fashioned wilderness bashing, stirring and avoiding entanglements in a whole cats-cradle of fighting factions, and a big aerial fight. An adversary encountered in session three in 2020 was finally slain. Things calmed after that, with some self-contained sessions and an impromptu trip to the moon. We shall continue into year seven, see which big threads get reeled in next.

The Dukes Last Stand, by the Bard

Hexcrawl Dual Mode - a standout success - 30 sessions, 136 hours in the Friday night slot - what I switched from open tables to. The Hexcrawl25 challenge serendipitously crossed my radar just at the point I was looking for something new, I pulled in a roster of vibe-matched regulars and got to kill three birds with one stone - motivating myself to build the hexcrawl, running a back-to-basics sandbox campaign and giving myself an easy way to run stand-alone adventures for 'off-cycle' weeks. Overall, solid success, have to work out some squeak where players split up and then do not proactively regroup but 30 sessions says the formula is generally working.

Lizard Kings 2d20 - an attempt to spin up a second 'online after-hours' campaign, modelled off the successful Southern Reaches game. A lumpy start so far, very high drop-out and cancellations, much, much higher than predicted. Paused in Nov with a view to rebuilding the roster and restarting in 2026. Those sessions that ran were not bad and it did succeed in one primary aim to bring some great commissioned art into play. Ran with Conan 2d20 but one has to ask - all the D&D games go ok, the one non-D&D game I've got, the wheels fall off. To be pondered.

On games played during the year

Rime of the Frostmaiden - we wrapped our campaign - this our monthly online game, the core group I started D&D with in the 90s + the in-house test team + one of our college gaming comrades. We took ~169 hours over 28 sessions to save the Ten Towns and Icewind Dale, our second 5e official campaign to get done in cover-to-cover. Great times, always a treat saving overcoming obstacles with such seasoned, goal-focussed adventurers. I liked Rime quite a lot - we did a lot of thundering around the tundra, uncovered a couple of big mysteries, some of which were tied masterfully into randomly rolled character backstories by our DM, and then rushed about saving the Ten Towns from threats. I played a budding megalomaniac evoker, a danger-close fire-ball slinger who was a Reghed tribesman by background - and being a wizard faithful of Tempus - "never back down from a fight" led to me getting downed 22 times in 28 sessions, including one dead-dead and wish resurrection. Good times, good times.

Niraelis - a new campaign - homebrew from a local DM, play in person with some luxurious pre-game rituals like pot-luck meals beforehand. More character-led and world-exploration driven, we are still in the early phase of unravelling mysteries in this one.

Fabula Ultima - a con-game at the Indie RPG Con organised by the Vienna DM Supergroup. Bufo Bufo, one of the veteran GM's from the Friday night sessions ran Fabula Ultima. It was fun to play the system, rolling with the archetypes, and it was a nice change to do a one-shot of a new system at a con, it has been a while.

Levity - a playtest session with the Vienna GM Supergroup, fun, sort of reminiscent of Royal Blood but a more universal-ised system.

Review of gaming goals

Decent gaming - top 3 year by session count and hours - though I definitely felt the drag of scheduling static more this year than previous - Ducal House, Lizard Kings and Niraelis both suffering from slow patches.

From about April you can see my playcount dropping below what might be expected from previous years as my energy got sapped away by all the nonsense that drove us to stand up the code of conduct for RPGVienna and then dealing with the pushback from it. It seems to have had the desired scarecrow effect as there has been not so much trouble since it was instituted.

Looking back at the goals I set last year to see how things went, it looks pretty good.
"Continue Ducal House - year six!" - that big arc got closed out, things slowed but continued so success.
"Continue Spelljammer Academy at the Friday night drop in games - or pull the plug and try something else by end first quarter." - The answer to this was "pull the plug and do the Hexcrawl" - pulling in a roster of vibe-matched regulars.
"If a new Friday night drop in game is required, maybe something using Ultraviolet Grasslands?" - see above.
"Run more DM'ing 101 to get more new folk happy to try and DM their first game." - only got in one at the start of the year.
"Play more Rime" - done, to great success.
"Try and organise more DM Supergroup" - less done than I might have like but not bad - there was a burst of energy leading up to the Indie RPG con, with a pulse inspired by a false-alarm of Quinns possibly visiting Vienna. After the con, folk relaxed a bit and we did not really pick back up from there.

Blogging has also been more entertaining this year than others - catalysed by Elmcats big project; I think it gave us all a bit more of a sense that there are multiple communities out there, we are not just screaming into the void.

Gaming goals for 2026
Weather the coming of another small householder and return to gaming within the year
Running up to that, conclude Hexcrawl campaign, dismount from Niraelis cleanly
Decide whether to pause Ducal House on a cliff-hanger or some manner of resolution
Try to run more 2d20 Lizard Kings in the New Year, decide if worth maintaining
Do more GM Supergroup, where possible
Hack Your Sector, Your Problem into some form to test at table

Sunshine Blogger Award

This blog has been graciously awarded a Sunshine Blogging Award by Halfway Station - "peer recognition to bloggers who bring positivity, joy and creative content to the blogging world" - my first awareness of it but greatly appreciated nonetheless. Halfway Station specifically grants this "for the analyses of gaming data" - for which I am further gratified, those 'dungeons & data' posts can be a slog at times, glad to see people like them.

As part of this I need to answer questions from the nominator and then select some nominees myself.

Courtesy of The Wonderful World of Cinema we have a recap of the steps to accept the award:
1. Include the Sunshine Blogger Awards somewhere on your blog and/or in the article
2. Thank the person who nominated you
3. Share the link to this person’s blog (it goes without saying)
4. Answer the 11 questions asked by the blogger who nominated you. In my case, it will be 22 questions.
5. Nominate 11 bloggers yourself.
6. Ask 11 questions to these bloggers.
7. Notify the bloggers by commenting on their blogs.

So should you find yourself nominated below, and you would like to accept and pass it on, this is the process.

Many Faces of the OSR

tl;dr: "OSR" is a banner flown over many folk, often unalike, occasionally strongly opposed - generalisations do not come easily.

Elmcat did a thing - Mapping the Blogosphere - pulled in a lot of blog feeds, looked at who linked to who, over a good long block of time. Threw them into some network-detecting software and out pops a neat hex of communities.

Noting the caveats of link-rot, blog-deletion, loss of G+, etc. that mean this is not the complete picture of all online effort around the thing known as the OSR, we can still discern a couple of true-enough to be useful facts.

First, this lets us put some kind of shape to the unsurprising intuition that there are a number of separate communities that travel under the banner of the OSR - some overlap more or less with others.

Second, there have been pulses of activity, some of these groups within the wider blogosphere are differentiated in time more than any approach to gaming.

Adapted from original logo by Matt Jackson

I hacked together the mashup above to reflect the truth, that whatever other facts there are, there are at least six meanings someone could have when they say OSR, one for each of those communities. From that persons point of view they are correct, that was a reflection of their experience of the OSR, thought it might have been a time and a community that is no longer extant. Another person going looking for just that OSR will not find it today, only its shadow, but that does not make the first person wrong.

We have a multitude beneath the OSR umbrella - and Elmcat's work gives us a sense of which bits were/are at the foreground and when.

We can assume that brickbats will continue to be thrown at the OSR based on the behaviours of the meanest, most unwelcoming fraction of assholes and while it is true that those folk are in there, they are not a majority and to abandon the OSR to them is to hand a great victory to a puny force. Similarly, those claims made by outsiders can now be countered with something more than vibes - they are demonstrably a small bunch of bad actors, just ignore them and soak up the rest of the good stuff in here.

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

State of the Blog (post #800)

Was a bit of a grind these last dozen or so posts getting a bunch pre-written so I could travel but as we hit this milestone number I am somewhat happier to continue blogging and am a touch more optimistic about the general health of the blog-o-sphere at the moment. Long may it last.

On Traffic

It remains hard to tell is the trend in traffic growth across this place real people or bots. Even accepting that a large fraction (~50%) of internet traffic is bots, that fraction has been stable over the past could of years so the slow up-ward trend in visitors might be real folk. Comments suggest people real people do turn up here (welcome!) and mention made elsewhere of the shiny weekly links posts - and some very welcome direct email appreciation - suggests people find those useful.

So all in all - probably more of you stopping by than before but very, very hard to say anything more definite than that.

The restart of the r/OSR blogroll is having a small impact. Although it has come back as a shadow of its former self - roughly half the participants despite the same amount of upvotes as the latter days - there are flickering signs of growth as the weeks progress. Dare I say another subtle sign of blog-o-sphere health?

Gratitude must also be expressed at this point to u/Leicester68 of Leicester's Ramble for generously taking over blogroll duties these past four weeks while I was travelling - it is not important who posts it, just that it gets posted regularly!

The hunt for DM Zero

Or: on spontaneously generating DMs.

tl:dr; trying to backtrack the 'origins of the scene' that I started playing in finds we were apparently a collective of spontaneously generated DMs who all figured it out from books.

This started with a call with an old pal from back when I first started gaming, and we got onto the topic of whoever taught us how to DM? We chased the rabbit's tail around and expanded it out to other friends of ours that we remember being among our first DMs, the answer we came back with was no one.

This was early 90s, hinterlands of Ireland. For those not from there, this was pre-Euro and the punt/pound exchange rate and postage was a mild-to-serious choke on getting your hands on any gaming material and we were the literal end of the line. Nonetheless there was a pretty decent TTRPG gaming scene that sprang up and I was curious as to how and where we all figured out how to DM.

State of the Blog - 6 year Anniversary (post #750)

Timing of this round-number blog and anniversary of this site getting activated coincide so let us take a look back at the mission statement; it was brief enough I can reproduce the whole thing here:

Mission Statement: dusting off the old, creating the new

The OSR blossoming has inspired me to participate in what ways I can. This blog will host two things - tidied up old material from the 90's/00's era 2E/3E games I ran and also serve as a notepad for work in progress.

Secondary aspect will be sharpening up publishing skills.

So - running bottom to top;

Shower scribbles for idea preservation

Ages back a friend got me a waterproof notepad with suction cups that is supposed to stick to the walls of the shower because you always get the best ideas there; the in-house testing team had an even better idea - why not just use the tiles themselves?

Example shower inspiration notes

It works pretty well - because you do not need huge amounts of writing you just need to capture the thought in the moment. You could stand there and scribble away but I find the great annoyance to avoid is forgetting the idea as a whole so any small note serves to avoid that.

All you need is a dry erase marker that can live in the shower and you are sorted. Given the prevalence of wipe-clean battlemaps, odds are that you have a spare one lying around.

Key equipment

This also works for the bathroom mirror for similar idea-preservation during tooth-brushing; there you can even go for one of the colors that are often less used because they are a lighter shade.

To paraphrase the tag-line went on that original gift 'don't let your good ideas go down the drain'...

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

Year in Review 2024

2024 was a great year for gaming - down from last years banner year but I do not feel in any way short-changed.

On running games

Ducal House (3.5e) - got in another 22 sessions, tailing off toward the end of year. This fifth year began with nailing down the altered ducal succession that had nominally been the campaign goal since session zero, a considerable amount of politics after a lot of time saving the realm and then further venturing forth to thwart a foe/potential allies plot. A venture onto the astral finally levelled everyone up to 11. The bard became heir apparent to the realm, unsought. The sorcerer has become fascinated with the potential of lichdom and the cleric continues to restrain them, in person or as the voice of conscience.

State of the Blog (post #701)

Strange concidence has post 700 coming in right before the traditional 'last slot of the year' so this one will be blogging and stats, the next one will be the year in gaming.

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.

State of the Blog (post #600)

I skipped out talking blog stats on the 5-year post, focused on meat-space so here we'll talk about how fares the online realm in a bit more detail.

On Traffic

Everything has gone weird - I assume scraping to feed AI models? The geographic origin of traffic here used to mirror where TTRPG-ers identified as their point of origin - 55% US, then 15% UK/Canada/Australia/Ireland, 10% EU, 20% rest - and over the past couple of months I've been getting *70%* of my traffic from the Pacific Rim - bouncing between Hong Kong and Singapore. That ain't real. Stripping off all that what I assume is bot-nonsense and traffic has been stable for 2024 so far at ~ 7800 hits a month.

Looking at this in the raw from blogger we can see the anomaly clearly - standard traffic is noisy, with occassional spikes with a quick drop of if I get featured somewhere. That big, sustained ramp-up since Feb 2024 is obviously nothing to do with me - either AI scrapers, backwash from other peoples cyberwars or whatever.

I am reassured some real folk do actually turn up because there are the comments and I see myself mentioned in random chatter now and then (shiny weekly links or the 1.2 million character sheets post). The r/OSR blogroll has been killed - the last one has just been left up and ... well throw your links in there to die I guess? I find the auto-feeds that folk set up on Mastodon are much more effective anyway so I am choosing not to fight this fight anymore. Farewell r/OSR blogroll, you served your purpose for a time. The two major replacements for getting the word out have been Sly Flourishes TTRPG Blogroll feed and the TTRPG network on Lemmy which is great because you can follow it on Mastodon and it just connects straight to your feed.

And again, I have to thank the following comrade-bloggers as those who bring readers here - both the long-standing Lizardman Diaries, DIY & Dragons, Chaudron Chromatique, Weaver.skepti.ch, Nothics Eye, Ynas Midgard, Uncaring Cosmos, Retired Adventurer, Kelvin Green, Awesome Lies, Spot Hidden, Shuttered Room, Wierd Wonderful Worlds, A Continent of Banalities, Archons March On, 3d6 Polar Bears and Advanced Mystery and Manners. I appreciate being on your blogrolls.

On content

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.
Class/Race archetypes in 1.2 million D&DBeyond characters
Review: Reach of the Roach God
Review: Worlds Without Number
Campaign Spin-Up VIII - Fuzzier West March Sandboxes
Masquerade as social depth-crawl (RPG Blog Carnival)
Terrain, Terrain, Terrain
Landing the session ending for one-shots (RPG Blog Carnival)
Chekovs Hooks III: Loose Ends from Written Modules
Thoughts on a new "DMG of house rules"
Review: Beyond Corny Gron
Growing your game group (5yr Blog-iversary)

Of all of those, I am so glad I called out that I got all this data from Dice-scroller right at the top of the post about class/race archetypes post or this would be excruciating - I changed the colours to beef up the contrast and discussed the chart of all the data they pulled and somehow this post has become the 'go-to' post for discussing the dataset not their original post. Why, internet?

The review of Reach of the Roach God has shown legs which is nice but the Worlds Without Number one is really surprising - top 3 for Q1-2024 and it got published in Dec '21! Only other notable point is that the RPG Blog Carnival is providing good chewy topics to get the creative juices flowing on a consistent basis - join in if you don't already.

Another nice online moment was when Bruce Heard (of Princess Ark and Calidar) found the table-test I did of the flying ship combat system he published on his blog and reposted that Skyship Battle Playtest to his own blog. Praise from Caesar!

Additional online effort has gone into wrangling event notices on the RPGVienna forum and on the meetup - button mashing to get people to tables rolling dice.

On Goals

Since the last major check in I can cross off one major goal in that we brought the Spelljammer Light of Xaryxis campaign over the line - only my third campaign to hit their actual planned conclusion. Otherwise open night gaming continues, DM 101 session is at least scheduled and I am getting to play some Planescape as well as continuing Rime of the Frostmaiden.

I notice I have more fodder for 'actual play' and lessons learned posts, less time to do data posts - I guess that is a good sign of more actual gaming getting done.

Going to keep this thing running, it serves well as a place to document observations and lessons learned, flex creative muscles in the Blog Carnivals and so on.

Growing your game group (5yr Blog-iversary)

To mark the 5th anniversary of spinning up this blog I find the theme this past year has been 'getting more people gaming' - from running events to helping bring more people into our local game group to trying to connect up disparate D&D folk - nothing has been particularly innovative or high style just the shovel-work of running open tables and pointing people at other people.

One thing I did find inspirational from the broader blogger community was Gorgon Bones best practices - Record your hobby experience, Introduce others to your hobby and Participate in a hobby community - having that list was a weirdly helpful acknowledgement that we got to get the basics right - find the people, figure out when they can be at tables, find places with tables - before we can start doing the rest of it.

The things I've put my shoulder to over the year has been
- maintained the Meetup 'funnel' to bring people to our local gaming groups forum
- simplifying the big beginner events (Night of the Rolling Dice) so they demand less of us to run them
- helping expand to a second location for the regular Friday nights - mostly by just being one of the regular DMs there
- linking up a whole new bunch of local D&D folk with the DM supergroup - they've done some stuff already while my calendars been a shambles

The online stuff - Meetup, the RPGVienna forum, the discords - have got their memes and minor connections but there are a lot of folk who chirp up when booking their place at one of the open table sessions that we never hear from otherwise. I read this as the majority view the online spaces as somewhere face-to-face gaming is coordinated.

Online is all well and good for what it is, but for folk who want to go offline - who are sometimes folk with thriving online gaming - it is hard to do that from a cold start so giving them a helping hand is worthwhile. My own online gaming got nuked by the smallest householders shifting sleeping patterns - last year I was able to near guarantee they would be asleep by a time - enough that I ran the whole Southern Reaches campaign on weekdays after bedtime. This year - no such luck, even getting the last few episodes of Light of Xaryxis done is proving tricky.

Instead I've put the bits and pieces of time I have in evenings towards helping to try coordinate face to face gaming over weekend slots, both for myself and others.

Having that big online footprint is bringing folk in, both regular gamers and more unusual things like someone who's turned up to do an ethnographic study for their course. We have enough presence that we appear when you search so good enough. Certainly at this point, when I've been ill things have trundled merrily along without me doing anything which is good.

d6 Ways to funnel folk to your game group
1. Make sure something pops up when someone googles 'D&D' and your locality
2. Run open tables where people with no experience can rock up and game for the first time
3. Be flexible as DM's so you can say yes to whoever wants to join you; one of the people attending having a T1 game in their back pocket in case folk turn up but also being happy to play too
4. Figure out where is good to play - and when you start to hit the limits on a venue, be prepared to run multiple locations - so when they show up you can seat them
5. Tell your Friendly Local Games Store your group exists and is open to new folk - they'll cheerfully tell anyone who comes in shopping for the books
6. Trial periods on 'connector' social networks like Meetup, Couchsurfing, Internations, even Facebook can be low-effort ways to get the word out to people who are not actively looking for you (those people found you from point 1.

I figure there are lots of better game designers and OSR theoreticians out there, if I can road test and document what helps with getting those tables clattering with dice, that is probably a worthy use of this place - til the 6th anniversary at least.

Year in Review 2023

2023 was a great year for gaming - a recent, if not all time high

On running things
Ducal House (3.5e) - ran 24 sessions to take us up to 102 during the year, covering mostly the long road home from closing out a major quest and its fall out. I've written an in-flight retrospective from DM'ing it here. I have a dig into all the plot arcs, problems solved and in-world events to come. Below, behold the sorcerer, drawn by the bard.

Spelljammer - Light of Xaryxis Remix (5e) - 19 sessions running a sand-boxed Light of Xaryxis, smoothing out as we went through the year and settled onto a regular schedule. Ramped up from 4th to 8th level, closing in on the campaign finale. I have stayed a bit quiet about this since it is a big arc in progress but I have been having fun

Spelljammer Academy (5e) - 12 sessions of episodic campaign, mostly a vehicle for venue tests about the city. Ludicrous hi-jinks intercut with some dangerous fights and tours of much of Realmspace. Campaign retrospective here.

Southern Reaches (Brancalonia, 5e) - 22 sessions of open table, light-hearted west-marches type campaign. On hiatus since my evening playing slot has become a lot more tricky, perhaps to be resurrected at some point in the future. Campaign retrospective here.

Bay of Princes (Brancalonia, 5e) - 10 sessions to date of running through the published Brancalonia adventures at my local games society regular Friday night open tables. Using this as the vehicle also to hang newbie induction from Meetup. If judged by the fact that I'll get sign-ups from our regulars any time I run a table, then this is going well. I am enjoying the challenge of working through all the adventures.

On games played during the year
Rime of the Frostmaiden (5e) - continuing with the same crack group of adventurers as Out of the Abyss, 13 sessions saw us progress to level five, traversing Icewind Dale solving problems for every Tom, Dick and Harry and trying to piece together what the hells is going on.

Empyrean Dynasty (FKR) - final wrap up of the epic galactic politics game - bizarrely, my faction-group sort of won? We achieved our goals of becoming the universal religion at the cost of multiple worlds and bitter galactic war.

Scarlet Heroes - some old school open table dungeoneering - henchmen and a sparse handful of hitpoints all that stands between gold and glory or an early grave. Great fun creeping through corridors and then employing flaming oil and caltrops for any edge against a foe. I really liked the fray dice mechanic.

Tyranny of Dragons (5e) - 7 sessions to close out the first book, significant traipsing about the wilderness, an epic fight with a wizard and its minions, duplicates, clones and various other head-fakery, and slowly uncovering the contours of the conspiracy we faced.

Spire (Spire) - played a pair of sessions of this, one shots part of building up a drop in campaign - now four sessions in and the in-house testing team has been getting great fun out of it.

Grand Planar Adventures (5e) - newly joined planescape campaign; running through some 2e classics to level up and synchronise with an existing planar party.

As shown here, monthly sessions played this year was higher in each month than any month in the previous five years. Not sure this tempo will be sustained but a *lot* of gaming got done this year.

The other big thing has been trying to on-ramp some of the legions of D&D interested folk attracted first by Honor Among Thieves and then Baldurs Gate 3. I took on a Meetup group to try and catch those folk and they have been turning up at our tables. I ran a little survey to see what exactly people want and those results seem to have encouraged folk to kickstart some new campaigns and fish for players on the RPGVienna forum which is great.

On blogging content

Since 2022 (blue) total posts are stable at 2/week plus the weekly links. Interestingly for 2023 (orange), pick-up by the Glatisant is no longer my key driver for views - pick-up on the front-page of ENWorld turned out to be the planet-buster numbers spike - the seismographs are still twitching from that *four months* later. Upticks in day-to-day readership is driven by Lemmy and Sly Flourish's TTRPGs feed. Overall, chopping out an estimate of what was leakage from cyberwarfare and AI scraping, it looks like ~ 63% rise in views/year. Who knows how much of that is real people - you are, at least.

Blogging this last half year has seen a switch in focus - from frameworks and ideas to lessons learned and write ups as I have run more stuff and had less time to write creatively. In particular the logistics of wrangling folk for the Meetup group has sapped the exact same well of time to sit at the computer and write that would previously have turned into blogposts.

Blogging projects that got done nonetheless:
- Glass Candles GLoGtober '23 - contributed a list this year
- Campaign retrospectives - following the format from Against the Wicked City
- Monthly RPG Blog Carnival participation and one month hosted

Notable blogposts from the year by views were:
Class/Race archetypes in 1.2 million D&DBeyond characters
Player Class Stability from 1M D&D Beyond Sheets
Reach of the Roach God
Review: Historica Arcanum - The City of Crescent
Class / Race choices in Baldurs Gate 3 vs tabletop 5e
d30 Things Above a Mindflayer World
Campaign Spin-Up VII - When One-Shots Sprawl
Review: Swords of the Serpentine
Masquerade as social depth-crawl (RPG Blog Carnival)

Goals for the coming year

- Continue Ducal House, run out Spelljammer LoX - see what to replace that with afterward (Planescape Turn of Fortunes Wheel?).
- Run more Brancalonia at the Friday night drop in games.
- Run an event, see about doing some DM'ing 101 to get more new folk happy to try and DM their first game.
- Play more Rime, Planescape and perhaps Scarlet Heroes.
- Should things massively break my way timewise I have a notion of some sort of silk-roads campaign.

Overall a focus on gaming at table and trying to help the new folk sloshing into the hobby to get started.

Thanks for reading along, hope you find more to interest and amuse in the coming year. If you have any suggestions or requests, drop them in a comment below or ping me on twitter (while it lasts) or on mastodon or on bluesky - I even have a bunch of invites for that last if anyone else wants one.

State of the Blog (post #500)

Been a chunk of time since we looked at this but a good time - close enough to the end of year for stats to be interesting but not the end of year itself.

On Traffic

Overall its been a decent year - views were cruising along at ~4400 a month until a trifecta of posts around stats - first the 'classes' and 'race/class' posts based on the Dice-Roller 1.2 million character sheet set and then by the comparison from them to the Baldurs Gate 3 stats. Getting an article onto r/rpg (by someone else) tripled last years average for August. No doubt, that will fade off but the long tail of that is still massive. I recognise that was a lightning strike, no point my trying to replicate it so let us see where things bottom out from that surge.

Fading of the r/OSR blogroll

tl;dr: comments and upvotes are dropping on the r/OSR blogroll - time to de-automate or un-pin?

Every week I flag the r/OSR blogroll as a place to look for interesting blogposts - I took over posting them every Sunday from u/Sofinho1980 of Alone in the Labyrinth as they took it over from u/shuttered_room of Shuttered Room. Around the start of the year there was a question about getting the blog-roll pinned to the top of the r/OSR subreddit and at the same time the mods offered to automate its creation which I took them up on. One or both of these may have been a mistake and I suspect it was pinning.

Taking 'upvotes' as a proxy of who is seeing and engaging with the blogroll, it took a hit immediately and has so far not recovered and is trending further down.