The Bloggies have me thinking about blogging. As you well know, I am pro-blogging. I think everyone should write and share their thoughts. My personal blog has been chugging along for over 20 years! Social media is transient: blogs are forever. There is value in writing stuff down.
It is easy to feel like a topic has already been discussed, that it’s common knowledge. But common to who? My ideas about gaming are informed by the books and blogs I have read, the games I’ve played, and the friends I have made along the way. I talked to people on Google+ a long time ago and left with a sense of what I want from RPGs. There are lots of new blogs that are clearly great, but that I don’t find that interesting because they feel like they talk about topics I’m done with. But so what! Not everything needs to be for everyone. There is always someone new who will come along and not know what’s up. Maybe they find some obscure Goblin Punch post from a decade ago. More likely they read stuff being shared right now.
Clayton won the Bloggies with his post on puzzle monsters. He dubbed this idea the 1HP monster, riffing off an older forum post from stras. This is one of my favourite parts about an active blog scene. People taking ideas and running with them, learning from one and other. Clayton’s post also introduces stras’s decade old post to a new generation of gamers.
This blog is full of all sorts of posts of varying quality, and of varying interest to other people. I have a blog post about converting all the to-hit and AC scores in OD&D from descending to ascending AC, not because I thought it was revelatory, but because I didn’t want to have to work it out again. Sharing is caring, but the post was for me. There are lots of reasons to put stuff online. Perhaps the best is writing for yourself.
This title sounds extra nerdy because it is extra nerdy, but this is a nerdy hobby and being extra nerdy can sometimes be good. Assuming you aren’t already using a feed reader of some sort, here are some things you should do now.
A feed reader will check for updates from your blogs, grab them all, and display them as one long stream of posts. It’s very convenient.
I’ll update the file daily or something, as people add more blogs to that Google Doc. If you are already using Feedly or some other feed reader they are normally smart enough that you can import an OPML file and it’ll figure out what’s a duplicate. I’ve re-imported this file a few times to test and it seems to work out fine. If you want your blog or another blog to be part of this giant OPML file, simply add it to the original Google Doc: my scripts will eventually find the change and update the OPML file.
Evlyn’s blog Le Chaudron Chromatique is full of amazing art. There is so much great stuff i’m not even sure what to point out. Their most recent post was a lovely illustration of the Marsh Enchantress. An earlier favourite of mine was this posse of fungus monsters. There’s also the occasional post full of DIY D&D nerdism. Most recently Evlyn reimagined Gnolls as Hammer Goats. This blog is great: check it out.
Gorgonmilk is the place to go for all your DIY D&D needs. I’m a particular fan of his alternate covers for the Original D&D booklets. I discovered the site recently, and it’s really quite excellent.
Continuing my series of great D&D blogs, may I suggest the consistently good Dungeon of Signs by Gustie1. It’s hard to pick any one thing to highlight, so I’ll point out the most recent post about his demon infested ocean liner megadungeon the HMS APOLLYON. The post is a good mix of great writing, art, and creativity that is more or less the staple of each and every post on his site. Why are you still reading this? Go!
I now play D&D with him weekly, so this review isn’t completely unbiased: though I thought the blog was pretty great before we had ever met. ↩
I’ve added a new page to this site, listing the D&D books I currently own.1 I like seeing what books (and PDFs) other people own, as it’s a good source for finding new books that might be worth reading. That page will also be a good place to link back to reviews i’ve written about the books I’ve bought. For someone who doesn’t actually play that much D&D, I own a lot of books on the subject. I suppose this page also exists to shame myself into not buying more D&D books.
There are lots of great blogs about D&D out there on the Internet, but one that puts out consistently good stuff is Untimately by Toronto’s own Brendan S. His most recent post is on the rules that compromise Original D&D, distilling everything in the 3 brown books into concise lists of rules. A recent post that was particularly creative was about his take on schools of magic. If you’re into D&D you should be reading Untimately.
