A Year in the Wicked City

It's now a year since I started writing this blog. I started it for two reasons, one positive and one negative. The positive reason was that I was really inspired by the level of creativity that I was seeing in the OSR blogosphere, and I wanted, in my own small way, to contribute to it. The negative reason was that my son had just turned one and my opportunities for actual gaming had  shrunk to almost zero. I was still writing game-related stuff, because I always write game-related stuff, but I didn't have a chance to use it; it was just piling up on my hard drive, where it was no use to anyone. So I started the blog, partly as a substitute for actual play, and partly in the hope that even if I couldn't use this stuff, maybe someone else out there could...

I didn't really expect to find an audience: after all, 'romantic clockpunk fantasy inspired by the history of early modern central Asia' isn't exactly a mainstream genre. Once I finally overcame my squeamishness about Google plus, however, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that there actually did seem to be people who were willing to read my ramblings about Mongolian shamanism and clockwork zombies, or at least people who were willing to click on a link to them, shake their heads in weary despair, and then hit 'back' on their browser. These days, I average a bit more than 200 pageviews per day, which is a tenfold increase on what the blog got back when it was just starting out. So that's nice.

Over the course of my year-long foray into the exciting and glamorous world of D&D blogging, during which this blog has risen from the lowest levels of the OSR blogosphere to, um, the lower-mid-regions of the OSR blogosphere (maybe around its knees, or something), I have learned the following Important Lessons:

1: Everyone's really friendly. 

It's actually kinda spooky. I've been hovering around the edges of online RPG fandom since the late 1990s, so when I started the blog I assumed it was only a matter of time before someone contacted me via G+ or the comments section to tell me I was evil and stupid and possibly mentally ill because of the way I like to play Dungeons and Dragons. That a whole year has now gone past without this happening, and that all the comments I've had have in fact been very positive and supportive, is a testament to the friendliness of the community, or at least the bits of it that I've interacted with so far.

2: There's no sense of hierarchy. 

The people who run the biggest, most popular, best-known OSR blogs really will read and reshare and link to posts on new and unproven blogs like this one. I mean, I know it's not as though there's that many of us to start with, but anyone who's ever been to school will know that small numbers are no barrier against the establishment of exclusionary social ranking systems. It's nice to see that's not the case here.

3: 'General-purpose' posts seem to be much the most popular. 

When I started the blog, I thought that no-one could possibly care about my thoughts on how to run D&D or what I liked or disliked about other people's adventure modules, but actually those have consistently been my most frequently read and reshared posts. Original material - classes, monsters, settings, the stuff I think of as actual content - tends to be much less popular, both in terms of page-views and '+1's. I'm going to carry on posting the setting-specific stuff, because that's what gives the blog its identity - without it, it'd just be another website full of some random guy's opinions about games, and I think the internet probably has enough of those already - but there may be a bit of a slide towards more general topics as well.

4: People really love 'gaming archaeology'

Delving back into D&D texts from the 1970s and early 1980s, to give them a new look and see what's been forgotten along the way, always seems to get very positive responses. Not that this should be very surprising: many of those old books really are treasure troves. It's probably only a matter of time before I write a post in which I wax lyrical about B10 Night's Dark Terror and/or X5 Temple of Death.

5: I need to write more about romantic fantasy

My initial post about romantic fantasy and oldschool D&D was written in about thirty minutes, just as a way of explaining the 'romantic fantasy' bit in the blog header; but people keep writing to me about it, really intrigued by the idea, and there's clearly a lot more to be said on the subject. So one thing I'm definitely going to be doing in the near-future is a few more posts on what I mean by 'romantic fantasy', what it might look like in play, why one might want to play in such a style, why I don't see it as incompatible with the use of horror material, and so on.

6: Oh my god it's full of worms. 

The more OSR stuff I read, the more I notice the patterns of shared imagery. Worms. Rats. Cults. Insects. Snake-men and lizard-men. Horrible cities. Corpses. Fungus. Machinery. Cannibalism. Blood. Slavery. Mutation. Drugs. Masks. I do it too; half the stuff I write is about masked lunatics lurking in creepy cityscapes full of weird machines. It's not enough to say it's because OSR gamers tend to have an interest in horror in general, and Lovecraft in particular. I mean, that's part of it, but there's something else going on. I'm not sure what it is, yet. I'm working on it.

Anyway. I've had a lot of fun writing the blog over the last year, and it's been hugely inspiring to see all the brilliant people other people have been coming up with over the same time. (In particular, Goblin Punch never fails to impress me, and the stuff Noisms is doing at the moment on the dream-world of a several-million-year-old crocodile is just brilliant.) I know that the OSR blog-world isn't quite as hyperactive as it was a few years ago, but a lot of extremely strong work is still coming out of it, and its collective creativity still dwarfs that of the official industry. So: thanks for all the feedback, thanks for all the links and +1s, do let me know if there's anything you want to see more of, and here's to a second successful year in the Wicked City.