I'm speaking of a long-simmering idea of assembling a collection of the "Best of Grognardia." Over the past sixteen years, this blog has published nearly 5,000 posts on a wide range of topics, such as old school RPGs, pulp fantasy, gaming history, interviews, reviews, nostalgia, and curmudgeonly digressions (or, as some prefer to call them, unhinged rants). Some of these posts still get linked and cited today, while others have quietly passed into the digital ether.
The question that keeps coming back to me is: Should I try to preserve some of this? The internet is ephemeral by nature. Blogger still functions – for now – but we’ve all seen Google abandon products without much warning (RIP Google+). If that happens to Blogger, what becomes of Grognardia? A properly edited and formatted anthology, whether print, PDF, or both, might serve as a small bulwark against that impermanence. It'd be a way to retain some of what made the blog meaningful to me and, I hope, to some of you as well.
Would a project like this be worth doing? More to the point, would it be of interest to readers? What would you want to see in a Grognardia collection, if I pursued this seriously? The most widely read posts? The most obscure? The ones that sparked discussion (or controversy)? Should it be organized chronologically, thematically, or by some other criterion?
To be clear: I don’t yet know if this is a project I’ll take up in earnest. A lot depends on the response it receives and whether there’s real interest in such a thing. So, consider this post a bit of informal market research, but also a chance for me to gauge how much of Grognardia's legacy still resonates with its readers.
If this project does move forward, I’ll likely be discussing it in more detail over at Grognardia Games Direct. My intention is to keep the newsletter focused on my writing specifically for publication, while Grognardia remains a space for broader reflection and commentary. So, if you’re curious to follow the development of this or other projects I’ve mentioned in passing over the years, you might consider subscribing.
I think that's a fantastic idea. You could start with a volume of the most important/popular posts ("greatest hits"), and if that's successful, you could do another volume of the more obscure ones ("deep cuts").
ReplyDeleteI am already finding that links to articles on blogs are broken and many of these (my) saved links go back to a time before Wayback Machine. I find it problematic that in this day and age, we are losing some of our history; or maybe even worse, the ability for some people to go back and rewrite that history.
ReplyDeleteI'm a relatively new reader, but I'm always interested to see you repost something from years ago, so a print/PDF anthology seems like something I'd enjoy. Thematic or topical organization makes a lot of sense in this context; I'd be more likely to pick it up and turn to a section on pulp or old-school gaming to browse than I would be to read it in posting order.
ReplyDeleteSome (most ? all ?) of the site already gets archived over at 'The Internet Wayback Machine' aka archive.org :
ReplyDeletehttps://web.archive.org/web/20250212192649/https://grognardia.blogspot.com/
PS: If you like what archive.org is doing, please consider making a donation (as a nonprofit, they run entirely based on donations).
If I was trying to preserve the posts (which I obviously am not), I would likely try to archive the blog in it's entirety, without making any specific sub-selection of it (which may or may not turn out to be the 'right' selection in the future).
ReplyDeleteDefinitely! If I find anything online worth revisiting, I save it to my hard drive. If something is REALLY worth revisiting, I print it out. Even the Wayback Machine could disappear tomorrow. I would definitely buy a copy.
ReplyDeleteI definitely think that you should preserve Grognardia. Would a series of themed PDF available via DTRPG work?
ReplyDeleteI read avidly everything you write. Because of that, I don't know that I personally would re-read an anthology of the blog, but I'd certainly purchase it to have. In any case, I definitely think there should be some preserved anthology and archive of the blog, which is a unique and in many ways unsurpassed expression of the hobby and the particular sensibility that has come to be called OSR.
ReplyDeleteAn anthology could be a greatest hits or chronological "best of." But another option might be to select and organize in the form of the *story* that Grognardia has told and tells: about the hobby, the experience of gaming, the landmarks, the questions, the reemergence of an old school outlook and retrospective understanding of what it is and why it's meaningful.
I guess that's a vote for thematic organization, but I mean the big but still particular theme of the gaming outlook you've helped to shape and articulate through the historical, mechanical, and personal explorations you've shared on this site.
Hi James I'd do it thematically. I think it would be a major resource for not just RPG players but for game historians in the future. I'm not sure what the sales would be, but I think what you have done would have a long tail and would last through time.
ReplyDeleteInstead of making all the manual effort of deciding 'what needs to be preserved and what not' (and obviously making mistakes there no matter what you choose), and all the (by nature limited) efforts of converting HTML blog posts to an entire other format (like, but not limited to, PDF), you could also opt to make an HTML copy of the entire Grognardia blog through tools like wget/curl (ICT commandline tools to make downloaded copies of websites among other things) or similar GUI tools (if these exist). That way, you could put a read-only HTML copy of the entire blog site on your favorite hosting platform (perhaps even with an optional zipped compressed downloadable archive of the entire thing for whoever wants it). And then as long as HTML browsers exist, it would remain fully readable and browsable by anyone who would like to.
ReplyDeleteThis would be what I would suggest, too. I would download such a zipped archive. That way you also get it backed up for free by your dedicated readers. There are also ways to automate periodic downloads (e.g., cron, if you’re using wget/curl or some such).
DeleteYou should definitely archive the site. I have gone through a lot of your stuff here but not all of it and I'd certainly like to have that option in the future.
ReplyDeleteAnd take it from someone who lost a decade's worth of blog posts (because I let my hosting lapse), you don't know what you have until it's gone.
Totally, but keep it simple. Set yourself a word-limit for your POD or PDF product, select a theme ("all my early AD&D posts"), cut and paste the relevant columns after some editing and updating, get Mr Zhu to do some evocative incidental art, and slap it up on DTRPG. Non-RPG related, the zoologist Darren Naish did something similar with his popular Tetrapod Zoology blog, although he only did one volume so far, but it was a must buy for me.
ReplyDeleteThat would be cool. New to the site, so I haven't been here from the get go. Having a summary of the most popular posts would be great. One question I have (and you may have already covered it in an earlier post): I just picked up copies of Goodman Games Adventures Reincarnated. I've only played AD&D, but have some friends that play 5e, and I was thinking about taking them on an old school adventure. While perusing the 5e versions, I noticed that the monsters have way more hit points. It seems like this would exacerbate protracted combat, or make most combat encounters a suicide mission. (I haven't picked up the 5e rulebooks yet, so I'm assuming the PCs are also powered up?) But my question is, what was the rationale behind the power up?
ReplyDeleteI think a published collection of the blog's greatest hits would be great! False Machine and Prismatic Wasteland have done similar collections recently, there's definitely interest out there for the format.
ReplyDeleteOMG yes please. Warts and all, I would love to have a physical representation of this amazing slice of internet history
ReplyDelete