Friday 5 August 2016

[BLOG] How do you do, fellow kids?

It is The Year of Our Lord 2016, and I hear OSR blogs are a really big thing nowadays, so here is mine. This one will be dedicated to reviews of things that catch my fancy (see my review standards), reflections on game-related issues, plans that go nowhere, and whatever else comes up. Who knows, perhaps I will even write a zine or something – I have been wanting to write one ever since I got introduced to Judges Guild products, and haven’t been able to get the idea out of my head ever since that post on Planet Algol.

Just so you know, I am entirely qualified to write a blog, because I have long held strong opinions on them.
  • First, they are harmful to online RPG communities because they fragment the discussion that had previously taken place on (mostly) unified forums into a myriad sub-communities.
  • Second, while forum threads can be updated as long as there is a common interest in the discussion, blog entries have a half-life of a day or two at best, after which they just sink like a stone, never to come up again.
  • Third, blogs are invisible, lacking a common index and all. There is discussion happening, but who is responding to whom, and where?
Why would someone who was never a big fan of blogs open one? If you like forums so much, why don’t you marry them? 

Blogs are what’s left, that’s why. Most general purpose forums have been taken over by ideologues, pedants and crazy people, while niche communities only focus on the few narrow issues that interest them. My two loves in fanzine-land, Fight On! and Knockspell, have deserted me and aren't coming back. Google+ is still a bit scary, because while it is already vintage technology waiting to be discarded in our brand new image-based surveillance culture, I am still not sure it isn’t going to steal my soul (but just so you know, I also opened an account there). I used to have a website that was technically a blog, but it feels a bit like a mortuary of things I have laid to rest.

Blogs are still an honest option.


Onwards!

15 comments:

  1. Welcome to the cool kids table.

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  2. Good to know you're still writing. I remember you from the old Necromancer Games boards (where I went by "Thasaidon").

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    1. Thanks! I remember you too (along with the rest of the Necro crowd); it is just hard to tell who is called who nowadays. G+ even wanted to rename my Blogger account when I attempted to link them up.

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  3. Melan,

    Chris ("rogatny") from DF and K&K here.

    Great to see you active on the Interwebs!

    I hope you do more than reviews. I've loved the variousl dungeons you've released on the 'net from time to time. In fact, you should put a link to the one still floating around the 'net somewhere on your blog page.

    Looking forward to seeing what you have to offer.

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    1. Thanks, rogatny! It is good to be back.

      There will be more than reviews here, they were just the easiest to start with. Part of the reason I opened this blog was because I got bogged down with large projects in recent years, and lost my sense of progress. This will be a perfect place for the small stuff.

      I'll also talk about the two large releases I have been working on. One, a large S&W dungeon based on the ideas from my old Tegel Manor manuscript, will probably be interesting for the K&KA (from a mapping / stocking / presentation standpoint), so I'll cross-post it there. The other is a translation of Helvéczia, my picaresque fantasy RPG, about which I'll write later (it is harder to pin down, and isn't an OSR game in the strictest sense).

      Good idea about the links; will do that.

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  4. For some strange reason, I could never access your website from Argentina. Wierd internet malfunction. Zulgyan

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  5. Welcome. That raw spot where your soul used to be will scab over soon enough and heal completely in 4-6 weeks.

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  6. This blog is great. Love it so far. I'm sure you are more excited about posting stuff that is new to you, but if you ever happen to translated your DM's advice from the K&M's referee book, that would be awesome! Zulgyan

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  7. I really haven't thought about that, but I sometimes do return to older ideas, so who knows.

    "Some day..." (as Harmonica said near the end of Once Upon a Time in the West...)

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  8. "Blogs are what’s left, that’s why." - I'm sorry but I think that's bollocks. :) The RPG communities over Reddit and Facebook are pretty populous and active... (and Reddit is as close to a message board as it gets nowadays). Now I'm not sure they'd be for your taste, but you should know that the crowd that mostly left Hungarian forums for Facebook is missing your voice nonetheless. ;)

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    1. The line after explains what is meant by that.

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    2. Facebook comes with a lot of social obligations if you are on it. You have to interact with it and dedicate time to it. At least G+ has the advantage that most people either don't know it exists, or believe it to be dead. With FB, you are accessible in ways I don't really want to be accessible, especially not constantly. But this is getting far from gaming so I'll stop.

      Interestingly, 4chan of all places seems to have a lively OSR community.

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    3. We don't blog, we write articles!

      Back in 2009 to 2011 RPG blogs were huge and most stuff people posted was indeed the kind that used to be posted in forums before. And apparently it has all moved back to forums again.

      These days people who post stuff on their own websites are the ones who write longer articles and give updates on their publishing efforts. The number of people is smaller and they all post less frequently, but that's because all the pointless diary entries have vanished. The amount of useful material is still just as high, if not even higher. And there's still new people starting all the time. Not many, but you find new ones pretty regularly.

      The only problem is that people seem to rarely update their link lists these days. Aside from writing comments on other people's sites (which everyone should be doing anyway) it's about the only way people will find new ones.

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