Blogging Rabbit Hole

Announcing the next blog bandwagon for those who want to get on board

First order of business is to alert you bloggers that the next blog bandwagon topic and date has been selected. As a refresher, blog bandwagon is a seat-of-the-pants quasi-event wherein bloggers choose to post on a similar topic on the same day. I wrote about the most recent one, on the theme of “Elements”, on this very substack.

If you are a blogger and wannabe lemming, the next topic is “Holes” and we will be posting on July 16 (can you guess why that date? Try your best in the comments… Substack has comments, right?). Write a post for your blog that somehow, no matter how tenuously, relates to the theme of "hole". Possible topics include hobbits, vertical subterranean dungeons, the London Underground, the tactical significance of the "dig" move in Pokemon, plot holes, worm holes, leaving holes in your prep, porous enemies, the physics of holes in Looney Tunes, how to make an adventure out of the movie/book "Holes", etc.

Around the Blogosphere

With the preliminary business out of the way, we can get to the real reason you are here, if you have any sense. Here are a bunch of blog posts that I thought were cool and which maybe you will also think are cool:

• Prismatic Wasteland: You Don’t Need a Game System Before You Play: The Calvinball Experiment (describing a mini-campaign where all rules were created collaboratively on the fly, including the strange assortment of rules that were generated—you don’t want to miss the rules for sleeping in another character’s pocket).

• Following up on their post about vibes>rules, Novecento wrote Settings, not system. On a similar topic but different approach, From the Sorcerer’s Skull mused on Setting Presentation Again. Our fellow bloggers (let’s be honest) at the New York Times wrote about Metroidvania settings. Finally on the settings topic, Old Men Running the World wrote a review of one of my favorite settings in A Reading: Ultraviolet Grasslands and The Black City: Second Edition.

• LootLootLore prototyped a new concept to replace character class with tetrisy “Class slots”, while Personable Thoughts said goodbye to character class altogether in Trimming the Fat: Goodbye Classes, Hello Skills and Feats.

• I will never not read a post about vehicle rules (mostly because I still haven’t found ones I 100% love), so I would be remiss to not highlight Socratic Dungeon’s post on Vehicle Rules. But if wheeled vehicles are too terrestrial for you, Bastionland has cooked up space vehicle rules in Journeys through Space.

• All Dead Generations blessed us with Gus’ rules on magic in the Crystal Frontier setting with A Few Crystals More 1 - Magic Rules for My Games. And you know what else is magic? Friendship. But you know what friendship inevitably leads to? Factions, which is why you should read the post on Another Kind of Factions from Fallen Constellation.

• Explorers Design, introspective after winning this year’s Bloggies, wrote about How do we design a gaming community? while Goblin’s Henchman argued that the mere presence of the Bloggies, and particularly how it encourages starting your year off by reading a bunch of really excellent posts, increased their blogging output in Did the Bloggies make me Blog more? You?

I changed up my blog roundup format to highlight the connectivity of the various blogposts. No blog is an island. Do we like this format?