Blogs from the Year of the Dragon

There are a whopping 35 Finalists for Best Debut Blog 2024. I highlight one (1) post from each of them so you can get some familiarity before entering the voting booth.

Cruisin’ around the Blogosphere:

Blogging, as a medium, likely peaked around a decade ago, but refuses to die. Largely choked out by the oppressive social mediums that dominate the web, the era of blogging from the late Bush and early Obama years (excuse my American frame of reference) seemed to be a golden age for a more decentralized web. But I don’t need to shed too many tears for those bygone years. After all, I didn’t start blogging myself until the last few days of 2020, way past the novelty of blogging. In our little corner of the web, by which I mean the shady corner darkened by various old-school gaming types, the blog is one of the central repositories by which our non-oral traditions are passed down, our best and worst ideas excised from our brains, and we argue with each other in far greater depth than allowed by any character limit.

The host of this year’s Bloggies, Sacha Goat, has introduced a new category with one big vote on January 18: Best Debut Blog. Many, many of the nominees are somewhat frequent loiterers on my own discord server, so I don’t feel like I can endorse any one of them. Instead I am going to find at least one (1) post from each of the 35 blogs in this category to highlight and recommend you read! Some of these are finalists in the other Bloggie categories, so the reading list isn’t that daunting if you’ve been doing your Bloggies homework this year, but if not this is a pretty good excuse to fire up those tabs!

• 1999 A.D.: The Megadungeon of Tomorrow (imagining the megadungeon that The Line might possibly become, with random tables to flesh out each of the 140 modules).

• Among Cats and Books: Dolmenwood Factions (breaking down the factions of Dolmenwood with new NPCs and systems for faction management). - GAMEABLE FINALIST

• Behind the Helm: Location Events: Making Rumors Natural (giving examples for dynamic rumors that disrupt the static traditional format for rumors). - GAMEABLE FINALIST

• Big Bite Games: Bite-Sized Mechanics: Fail Forward (weighing the pros and cons of fail forward mechanics and offering tweaks to the standard formula).

• d9000 Patricks: My first years in RPGs and the OSR (answering many questions someone wading into the hobby might have, from how to find a gaming group to how to take notes for a campaign)

• Darling Demon Eclipse: The Treasures, Realms & Guys Manifesto (Part 1) (pontificating on populating a setting, drawing on a variety of exemplar games from Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast to Caves of Qud).

• Der PigDog’s PigBlog: Simple downtime maneuvers (presenting a simple downtime system where you spend downtime points to accomplish varying downtime actions).

• Dungeon Doll: Dungeon Gods (introducing petty gods, shrines, and a prayer/boon system to drop into your next elfgame dungeon). - GAMEABLE FINALIST

• Dungeonometry: A Crash Course in Fate of the Norns' Social Combat (describing rigorous rules for running social conflicts).

• Farmer Gadda’s TTRPG Hayloft: Sherbet Forest Clearing (presenting a full adventure in an alternate Robinhood setting, Sherbert Forest).

• Fool’s Pyrite: Understanding the Line (examining the traditional line between player- and GM-authority and how that line is better preserved in the persuasion rules of Apocalypse World than it is in D&D-alikes).

• Gnomestones: My Most Unpopular Take (arguing that gnomes should be one of the standard character options in any non-Tolkienesque setting instead of off-brand hobbits and that “halflings” are more interesting as half-gnome half-human hybrids).

• Goblincow: life locked and failing in a dark fort (praising the efficiency of Mörk Borg's design that communicates more than the sum of its words).

• Hendrik Biweekly: How Under Hollow Hills emphasizes player choice (reviewing Under Hollow Hill and how its unconventional approach to dice fudging improves player agency).

• Kobolds & Konsequences: In Defence of the Modern (Dolmenwood) Witch (exploring Dolmenwood’s portrayal of women and the occult from a female perspective).

• Kontent Punch: Save Time to Maintain Tempo (describing ways to speed up your games so you have more time for the parts your players game there to play).

• Library of Words: Goblin Tax Fraud: The Astonishing Power Of TTRPG Props (reviewing a LARP about playing as dungeon tax collectors and how the props enhance the gameplay experience).

• LootLootLore: Everything-as-XP (my home game) (describing a simple FKR-friendly system of elf-game for getting people who are new to TTRPGs into the action quickly without being bogged down by copious rules).

• MURKMAIL: You liked that map huh? (extolling the virtues of pointcrawl-style dungeon maps).

• Patchwork Paladin: Preparing a published adventure for play (advising on how to take a published adventure and bring it to your gaming table).

• Personable Thoughts: Toppling the pillars of the OSR: against lethality (standing athwart the popular sentiment that lethality in games is good because it provides meaningful consequences).

• Reece’s Dungeon Rooms: The Magnetic Trap (describing a trapped room involving magnetized walls).

• Retreat to the Trench: Faction Dossier: Fetterers (describing a capitalistic faction in their setting).

• Revivify Games: Why I Love the NSR (defining the NSR and describing what drew them to it and how it keeps them enthralled)

[they also drew a really cool map of Tyr from Dark Sun, which I present below for visual interest]

• TableTobRPG: The Azure Archipelago - A LEGO hexcrawl (detailing a 36-hex nautical hexcrawl for the Summer LEGO RPG Setting Jam).

• The Ash, the Elder, and the Hen Elm: 60 Minutes of Thoughts: How to Doom Everyone, rules for lives hanging by four less-than-stout ropes (elaborating on momentum rules for when two parties are fighting atop a rickety bridge, or similar situations).

• The Dice Pool: Case Closed (reporting on two very different experiences playing two investigative adventures for different systems).

• The Fields We Know: Monsters in a Low Fantasy Setting (creating an interesting setting where monsters are scarce).

• The Foot of Blue Mountain: Connecting the Hex; Creating Full Hexes with Meaningful Encounters (proffering advice on how to populate a hex map).

• The Weeping Stag: A Great Game Finally Gets the Rulebook it Deserves (celebrating the new Star Trek Adventures tabletop roleplaying game). - REVIEWS FINALIST

• The Wondering Monster: Motivating Players to Hexcrawl with Maps Found as Treasure (extolling the virtues of maps themselves as in-world treasure for exploration-focused games).

• Torchless: SETTING BOUNDARIES: The Ruin That Befell Dolmenwood (reviewing Dolmenwood against its earlier incarnation in Wormskin to determine whether it has been made lesser by its success).

• Unboxed Cereal: Sword World: What If D&D Didn't Matter? (praising Sword World, the most popular TTRPG in Japan, as an alternate lineage for TTRPG design).

• Veritas Tabletop: Rethinking Fantasy Feudalism: What's a Guild? (pointing out misconceptions in the use of guilds in standard fantasy compared to their historical antecedents).

• Wobble Rocker: Better Character Deaths in Dungeons and Dragons (musing on character death and how to make them better). - THEORY FINALIST

By the way, I am trying to keep track of all the new TTRPG blogs from 2025 (or late 2024) and so far have 15. That is nearly one blog a day, probably more considering my fallibility.

Over at the Prismatic Wasteland:

I am imagining you, the reader, having dutifully read all of the above-linked blog posts and yet still clamoring for more, such is your unquenchable thirst for DIY gaming ephemera. You frighten me, reader. Well, I come with one last humble offering for you, this time from my own blog: Monster, Maiden, Madonna, Medusa. It’s easily one of my best posts of 2025 so far! In it, I do a case study of certain monster encounters in The Keep on the Borderlands, White Plume Mountain, and Numenera, and draw some obvious conclusions. Here is a snippet, but I think it is worth you reading the whole dang thing:

“This honeypot encounter design was not at all uncommon in the early hobby, and once you know to look for it, you see it everywhere. The distinct impression is that “dumb, horny straight male adventurer” must be such a common aspect of the implied setting of D&D that whole swaths of monsters evolve to exploit this bottomfeeder of the dungeon ecology.” - Me