Roundup: Hole Lot of Posts

Dig into over 30 blogposts that are loosely related to a strange prompt, including several adventures!

The Prismatic Wasteland Blog and my book with Games Omnivorous (Prismatic Wisdom) are nominated, respectively, for Best Online Content and Best RPG Related Product. Voting is open NOW (but only for a couple more days), and I would be downright tickled to get your vote as “1” for both. Here is a link to vote: https://vote.ennie-awards.com/vote/2025/

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On July 16 (give or take), the blogosphere participated in another blog bandwagon, this time around the prompt of “holes”. I’ll give you a rundown of the posts first, then I’ll try to explain how this prompt came to be. I am going to order the posts based on how directly they related to the prompt.

Straight-Forwardly About Holes

• Billhook Blog: In Praise of the Pit (arguing that pit traps are good, actually)

• Magnolia Keep: Fear of Holes (With Due Apologies to Jacob Geller) (arguing that holes are actually fucking scary)

• This Vorpal Coil: Yearning For the Mines (presenting a streamlined subsystem for digging for use in dungeon delving games)

• The Dododecahedron: You Fall Down a Hole And… (listing 1d100 things that might happen after you fall down a hole)

• Carouse, Carouse!: Bonus Post - What’s in the Arm Hole? (listing 1d100 things that might be in an empty “arm hole” [which implies a Lego person anatomy])

• Personable Thoughts: On Treasure in Holes (asking who exactly is leaving all this treasure in holes anyway)

• Semitext Games: Suddenly a Hole in Two Parts (musing on the duality of holes; also a spark table for what you might dig up in Vaults of Vaarn)

• Bommyknocker Press: A Leak in the Hole Factory, Pt. 1 (detailing an absurdist, industrial adventure in a malfunctioning premium hole factory that sprung a leak)

• d4 Caltrops: What’s At The Bottom Of This Pit? (listing 1d100 things at the bottom of a hole)

Conceptually or Metaphorically About Holes

• XP Rolls: Session Zero: Down the Rabbit Hole (introducing himself as a late bloomer TTRPG hobbyist who has dug deeply in the rabbit hole in the past 6 months) [NEW BLOGGER ALERT]

• Wayspell: [SWS] Hole in Your Soul, or Lack Thereof (detailing ways that gaining cybernetics can complicate a character’s life without the usual ableist framing)

• Farmer Gadda’s TTRPG Hayloft: Holes-Posting: I Find An Excuse to Talk About Digimon (describing how Digimon World 3 for PlayStation repurposes holes in its levels to later take players into the code of the world)

• Binary Star Games: The hole at the center of the mech, or: why isn't it about the people? (describing how people, and the players, are at the center of Apocalypse Frame, an in-development mech game)

• Sultan’s Musings: Stop Worrying and Love the Hole (advising you to not worry so much about plot holes in your games)

• Harpoon Cannon Thoughts: Holes of the Systemic Variety (lamenting when TTRPGs have holes where a rule is implied but then does not exist and how to avoid these)

• Table 46: Jewelsea - The Hole in History (outlining a forgotten, fallen empire what lacks a concrete history and theories thereupon)

The Holes Are Implied or Ancillary

• Behind the Helm: Dwarf Ecology (sketching out a fantastic reality where otherwise unexplained geological phenomena are the result of generations of dwarves)

• Viridian Void: This Is a Triumph (detailing a scenario for Triangle Agency involving a Portal gun)

• Golem Productions: Running OSR Dungeons: Turn-by-Turn vs. Narrative Exploration (reminiscing on running The Hole in the Oak and how it made them learn to stop worrying and love the procedures)

• The Novel Game Master: The Hole in the Wall: A Magical Tavern (presenting a tavern where the walls are covered in extradimensional holes with strange signs and effects)

• Blog of Forlorn Encystment: The Hole in the Wall Lounge (presenting an entirely different [or perhaps just from a different dimension] tavern that is mostly accessible by portable holes)

• The Play Reports: Bandwagon - Death Drop Delve (describing the method for Death Dropping deeper into a dungeon)

• Benign Brown Beast: Time Capsules (listing the possible contents of the time capsules that have been scattered across the world by an ancient empire of moles)

Tenuous Relationship to Holes, At Best

• Prismatic Wasteland: Lego Rock Raiders as Space Horror (presenting a subterranean sci-fi setting based on an old Lego theme, and the monsters that dwell within)

• Slow Loris Press: Potter Wasp (a mini-adventure about a baby-stealing monster and her medicine, which is made in pots, which have holes)

• Seed of Worlds: Distinguishing mirror world with house-rules (providing some guidelines for dimension hopping)

• No Foes, No Traps: Y2k/25 Jul 16 Elf Rogue (describing a pirate whose name, location, ship, and captain’s name are all reminiscent of the name “hole”).

• Valeria Loves: I Do Not Like Horse Women (ruminating on Uma Musume: Pretty Derby and the “yawning pit of loneliness within each of our souls”)

• Pointless Monument: Tumbling Down the Rabbit Hole: The Case for Pitcher Planet Dungeon Entrances (pitching dungeons that are easy to enter but hard to leave)

• Wandering Diejack: GMing (Mal)adaptive A.I. (designing a method for running A.I. [the fictional kind, not the kind that is trying to steal and repackage your thoughts and sell them back to you] as a NPC that is fun to outsmart)

• LootLootLore: Roguelite campaigns and fishing my white whale out of a hole (describing the difficulty of roguelite TTRPG campaigns and also reasons why the hole is everchanging)

When I issued the challenge for this blog bandwagon, I expected a lot more bafflement than ever actually manifested. Why “hole”? The blog bandwagon about clerics made sense—it’s a classic part of D&D and also related to a current event. So what is the deal with the hole thing? Well, it originated on my own watering hole, my discord server, where there is channel for blogs. The server is still small enough that no heavy-handed moderation has been necessary (knock on wood), but sometimes I will check in on it and the conversation has gone chaotic and hard to follow, rendering me like that well-loved .gif of Donald Glover holding pizzas in the television show, Community. It was one such day that all manner of chaos was happening and, frankly, I don’t know what all was said because when I see 100+ messages anywhere, I am going to skim (if even skim) just to preserve my own sanity. But somehow the topic of “Steve Harvey posting hole” came up and… well, actually, here just have a snippet of the conversation. You’ll probably be able to make just as much sense from it as I can, and I was there.

If there is a moral to this story, it’s that blogging isn’t a terribly serious endeavor. Go and have some fun with it, write silly posts and read silly posts! But always blog.

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My incredibly humble blog, Prismatic Wasteland, is nominated for an Ennie Award for Best Online Content, and my book, Prismatic Wisdom, is nominated for an Ennie for Best RPG Related Product. Voting is currently open to the public (e.g., you) through July 20 at this link: https://vote.ennie-awards.com/vote/2025/

If you haven’t heard of the Ennies, they are the Oscars for TTRPGs, if the Oscars were a bit more like Nickelodeon’s Kids’ Choice Awards with marginally less slime. Voting takes only a single combat round of your time but would mean a great deal to yours truly.

How to Vote: Voting is easy and I bet you’d figure it out without my help, but here is a procedure just in case:

1. Follow this link to the voting page: https://vote.ennie-awards.com/vote/2025/

2. Scroll to the “Online Content" Category

3. Select the drop-down menu beneath “Prismatic Wasteland Blog”

4. Vote “1” from the options to rank my blog as your top choice

5. Once you’re done ranking your votes (you don’t have to rank them all, but I encourage you to rank the others you like), just hit the “Vote!” button at the bottom of the page to submit your vote for this category

6. Scroll to the “RPG Related Product" Category

7. Select the drop-down menu beneath “Prismatic Wisdom”

8. Vote “1” from the options to rank Prismatic Wisdom as your top choice

9. Same as above, rank your other choices if you want, then hit the “Vote!” button at the bottom of the page to submit your vote for this category

Simple as! I really appreciate your support, whether that takes the form of reading my blog, reading my book, and/or voting for both.