Forgive me Father, for I have blogged.
I started reading blogs when every decrepit crypt keeper my age did, sometime in the early Aughts. I had just had a horrible breakup that was entirely my fault, was struggling through the last days of my (soon to be useless) BA, was living with my parents, and we were starting a war in Iraq. Again. I was deeply depressed, and I read a lot of early left-wing, moonbat political bloggers. I became even more of a filthy pinko, but never considered that there was anything I particularly needed to say. Nothing has changed on that front.
This blog is not (explicitly, officially) about politics. It is intended to be primarily about TTRPGs, especially the OSR, NSR, POSR, DIY elfgames end of the spectrum. Despite the fact that the nascent OSR scene erupted right when I started reading blogs, I never encountered it. I was relatively happy playing D&D 3e, after having completely skipped 2nd edition playing other things in the 90s. I wasn’t particularly bothered by 4th edition either; it certainly wasn’t the D&D of my early youth, but I wasn’t super nostalgic about that (something I now slightly regret, as I got rid of a lot of my old D&D stuff in the late 90s that I sort of wish I still had). I bounced right off of Google+.
No, I’m very much a johnny-come-lately to the OSRish scene and to blogging both. I was playing 5th edition with strangers at a gaming cafe in Brooklyn when my daughter was born, and I stopped having time to go. So I started considering running my own game once she was older, and started creating my own setting as I did in my youth (it was the style at the time) and of course it meant mixing up some of the default assumptions of 5e! And homebrewing!
It was the style at the time!
Then, early 2020 (as we were just beginning to deal with That Third Thing) Wizards released an Unearthed Arcana with (I’m surely misremembering the name here) something like an Order of Scribes wizard. Yes! This sounded just like it was up my alley, and would mesh with the ideas that I was experimenting with!
Ah, no. This absolutely solidified what I was struggling with. Without getting into the specific rules or balancing or anything like that, I suddenly realized that instead of a wizard who focused on inscribing spells or delving into forbidden lore, it was… a wizard with a flying book. And I realized that, nothing wrong with where Wizards wanted to go, but it wasn’t what I wanted. Vaya sin dios.
Then I’m backing zines, I’m reading blogs, I’m finding out about the last 15-20 years of iteration, I’m finding out about the nazis I never had to deal with (whew!), and my fate is sealed.
So why start now? Partially, it was the death throws of Twitter. I was doing a lot of my blog-following and discovering new creators through Twitter, and while BlueSky scratches that itch, given the amount of blogs I was following I felt an urge to return to the Old Ways. I got meself a feed reader, and started thinking about things I might want to talk about. Josh also got the idea in my head, and I felt like some of the ideas I was working with on my own home game maybe needed to see the harsh light of community.
And now my kids are are old enough to start playing! I’ve started an Old School Essentials game with them, and I think my first real posts are going to be ham-handed summaries of how that’s going. I’m excited! Let’s go!
