Once More, With Feeling

It’s been nearly nine years since Ze Frank posted that video and I still find myself drifting back to it when I need inspiration. Or consolation. Or moral support. It’s been years since I’ve kept up on this blog, though it’s always remained on my to-do list. I’ve even occasionally written some post proclaiming that I would return to it with similar results. Gods willing, this will not be one of them. 

I had almost given up on the blog. A big source of the traffic back in the day was shameless shilling on google plus. There had been a robust community there of people in the RPG space. With that gone, I’m not sure what is left. Facebook, maybe. Twitter. Reddit. All terrible, to one degree or another. I probably would have given up on the blog — after all, I have grandheresy, and now a patreon — but for the folks at Knock! messaging me out of the blue to ask about using a couple of my posts in their first issue. 

I was terribly flattered, particularly given that the articles they asked to use where two of my more whingy, philosophical ones rather than the fun game mechanics ones — precisely the sort of material that I assume no one reads. Naturally, I agreed. I even rewrote both articles to be more presentable and professional pieces, rather than stream-of-consciousness blog posts. I was even more flattered when one of those pieces ended up as the first article in the magazine, effectively the intro to the entire publication. What hit me, though, was when a couple of the people involved made it a point to tell me how much they loved my blog and that one of my articles was part of what inspired them to make the magazine in the first place. 

Well. Shucks.

I’ve never been good at taking a compliment. My natural inclination is to deflect with a joke or redirect the compliment to someone else. In truth, despite spending most of my life playing these games and fully half my life now dabbling in the writing of them, I still have some pretty major imposter syndrome. It never would have occurred to me that anyone even noticed my silly little blog, let alone that it made an impression on them. There definitely are big, popular names in the RPG blog space. Even in the OSR blog space. I am not and never have been one of them. 

But it made an impression on someone. 

Maybe that one impression is enough.

So I’m going to try to come back to this. Try to get back in the habit of writing and creating and getting inspired. I don’t yet know what I’m going to say. I don’t yet know how I’m even going to get the information out there, with G+ gone. But I know enough that I’m going to try, because if it reaches someone, someone is enough.

Thanks to everyone who has been paying attention to anything I’ve done over the years. A very special thanks to the Merry Mushmen, who are mostly responsible for my writing this. Check out Knock! It’s a quality product.