Join me, dear reader, as I indulge in some self-reflection...
2025 Retrospective
This past year was a quite a solid one for my home game. We completed our 24th session after about a year and a half of playing. My players, all people who entirely new to D&D, have taken to the game swimmingly, graduating from groping about in the dungeon to groping about in the overworld. Standout sessions from 2025 include an impeccable raid on an Owlbear lair where for maybe once ever everything went exactly to the players' plans, a mass combat battle against a hobgoblin warband involving me finally getting to use a table-sized whiteboard I found in an alley, and a high-stakes stealth mission in a pig man fortress which culminated in hijacking an alchemically powered battle wagon right from under their snouts.
The PCs went from nervous pushovers to fantasy JSOC guys, in the sense that when they're not performing highly tactical and morally dubious infiltration missions they're partying recklessly, fencing stolen goods, and generally being a menace to the local townspeople who nonetheless have to tolerate them (I've been reading Seth Harp's The Fort Bragg Cartel recently; highly recommend to see what is essentially murderhoboism applied in the real world and all its horrifying consequences).
As for the blog, I've continued my cozy rough-monthly posting scheduling and felt great doing it. This past year's hottest post was The 10 types of special rooms, which a decent number of people found useful.
The current blogging meta seems to be tools and resources for prep, as opposed to houses rules and setting posts, which seemed way more common when I was first getting into the OSR. Something to consider for those of you who want to raise your blogging game.
On to 2026
This year I want to up the posting cadence a bit.
When this blog first started, it was during a time when there was a dramatic drop in the kinds of posts I enjoyed reading throughout the OSR sphere. This was due to a number of factors (notable controversies, end of G+, etc.) but in my mind can mostly be chalked up to the '10s era of the OSR drawing to a close with no real direction for what comes next.
I started posting as a little side hobby to get my disparate ideas about the game into a more polished and shareable form. As such, I didn't have much aspiration to participate in what I understood as the larger "scene," which was really a bunch of siloed communities scrambling to define and defend ingroup identity.
Now it's fair to say a new iteration of the OSR is in swing. There is a wide variety of people doing a wide variety of cool and interesting things. Posting's BACK.
I feel like I have more to contribute in this new era, so I intend to be more active.
On that note, I started a Bluesky! Follow me there. It's not a perfect platform but in my mind it's a nice medium to have more back-and-forth conversations with people without being as cloistered as forums or as fleeting as Discord.
That's all for now. See you in the future.
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