My Own Cover Band

First, a couple of brief updates:

I’m still hard at work on the first draft of the second edition of Thousand Suns and, while it’s going well, it’s not moving quite as quickly as I had originally hoped. I’m still on schedule to complete most of the draft before I head off to Rome, but a few sections of it, including the High Struggle rules, probably won’t be among them. More information on the development of Thousand Suns (and my other writing projects) can be found over at Grognardia Games Direct, while the actual drafts of the second edition are available to my patrons.

Partly because of this, I won’t be returning to regular posting on this blog until after I return from Rome. I’ve got a great deal on my plate over the next three weeks and simply won’t have the time to devote to anything more than intermittent blogging until the second week of June at the earliest.

I say “partly,” because that’s not the whole story behind my break from regular blogging. Certainly, it’s a significant part of the reason – I really am focused on Thousand Suns right now – but it’s not the only one. Another part is that I feel as if I’m running out of things to say.

I realize that sounds rather ominous, even dire, and I don’t mean it to be. Feeling as if I’m running out of things to say is not the same thing as actually running out of things to say. Given my nature, I suspect only death will prevent me from having opinions about roleplaying games and science fiction and fantasy literature. At the same time, I do think it’s true that the way I’ve been writing Grognardia since at least my return in 2020 is unsustainable and that I need to remedy that.

To explain what I mean, what follows is going to be a bit self-reflective and “philosophical,” for lack of a better word, and I apologize for that. I don’t want to bore anyone with the ins and outs of my thought processes, but I can think of no better way to provide context for what I said above. Besides, externalizing my thoughts through writing has always been one of the ways I sort them out and find my way, however haltingly, toward solutions.

Broadly speaking, I have two recurring “problems” when writing this blog and they’re related. The first is one I’ve mentioned before in other contexts. After just shy of 5000 posts since 2008 – 4982 as of now – the odds are good that I’ve already written about almost every remotely old school RPG topic I can easily imagine. That’s obviously not literally true, as evidenced by the fact that I still occasionally strike gold even in well-mined veins of gaming history and discussion, but I’m not exaggerating when I say that I regularly struggle to find a genuinely new topic about which to write.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve begun a post on some subject and, as I search through the archives for a relevant link, realized that I’d already written about the same topic, sometimes even using the same title. That would be frustrating for anyone, I suspect. It’s especially frustrating for me because I used to have no trouble finding things to write about each day. One need only look at the first few years of the blog to see that, during the 2008–2011 period, I was often making two posts every single day. That’s a level of output I haven’t achieved in years and likely never will again.

Thinking back on the beginning of this blog brings me to the second problem with which I’ve been grappling: the increasingly recursive feel of RPG discussions. Grognardia has always included lots of commentary about both gaming history and game design. That was, I think, a big part of its original appeal during the early days of the OSR. After nearly a decade of Third Edition Dungeons & Dragons, a lot of us longed for the freedom and exuberance we remembered from the hobby’s earlier years. The OSR gave voice to a genuine desire to recover the things about roleplaying games that had once so appealed to us and I think it was largely successful in that endeavor.

There was a vital energy and effortless creativity in the early days of Grognardia. The blog was buoyed by the rising tide of enthusiasm for older RPGs and, in turn, offered ideas and commentary that contributed to that tide. It was a virtuous cycle and I’m still very proud to have been part of it. Likewise, whenever I see someone reference “Gygaxian naturalism” or “the oracular power of dice,” it pleases me greatly, because I’m reminded that I did, in however modest a way, contribute something worthwhile to the understanding and appreciation of old school roleplaying.

Nowadays, though, I often feel as if I’m making ever finer distinctions with diminishing returns for everyone involved. Whereas the early OSR was filled with Big Ideas and bold (and occasionally ill-considered) opinions, in recent years I’ve increasingly felt as if I’m repeating things I said better a more than a decade ago. To put it another way, I sometimes worry that I’m becoming my own cover band. A good performer knows when it’s time to leave the stage and I don’t want to become a parody of myself.

At the same time, I still feel a great deal of energy and creativity when it comes to my own projects, like Thousand Suns and Secrets of sha-Arthan. I doubt either of them will ever have the same broad appeal as my best Grognardia posts once did, which is why I’ve largely segregated discussion of them to my Substack. They don’t quite fit on Grognardia in the same way and there’s probably no point in pretending otherwise.

For obvious reasons, I’m deeply attached to Grognardia. I’m not yet at the point where I wish to abandon it for good. At the same time, I am at a point where I question its purpose. This isn’t 2010 and the OSR, to the extent that it can still be said to exist in any coherent sense, is very different from what it was during the blog’s heyday. Grognardia is different too and that's not necessarily a bad thing. After all, not every endeavor can or should remain frozen at the moment of its greatest cultural relevance. Blogs, like people, age and change. These facts by no means invalidate what's come before. If anything, it may simply mean that the role Grognardia once played is no longer the role it needs to play now.

Of course, I don’t yet know exactly what that means in practice. The one thing I do know is that the conditions that originally gave rise to this blog in 2008 cannot be recreated and that trying to do so is a recipe for frustration. If, upon my return, I'm to keep posting here as I have for so long, some things will have to change. To be clear, I don’t view this as a cause for despair. If I feel any frustration, it’s mostly the frustration of recognizing that a thing which once came effortlessly to me now requires more deliberation and care. That’s hardly unique to blogging or even to writing generally, though it's new experience for me.

In any event, I wanted to explain why posting here may continue to be somewhat irregular for the foreseeable future. Grognardia still matters to me. I’m simply trying to determine what shape it ought to take in the months and, I hope, years ahead – and whether I can find a way forward that feels both honest and worthwhile.

In the meantime, thank you all for continuing to read. Your continued support, appreciation, and encouragement have meant the world to me. More soon, I hope!