Thoughts on Being a Prodigal Son; Or, an Excuse to Link to Lots of Blogs

On my long hiatus from blogging I became totally disconnected from the "old school" blogging scene (though I never considered myself to be part of the OSR, those were the blogs I read, and their readers were the ones who read Monsters and Manuals). When I "left" it still seemed small: the number of blogs with more than 200 public followers was comfortably less than a dozen, and it was possible to more-or-less read everything that was being put out into the blogosphere through my Google reader. No longer. There has been a serious OSR blogging boom in the last 6 months, it appears - so much so that it's impossible to keep up with it all. I like that, as it's a sign that these stupid and weird little games we enjoy have an audience that is growing at an impressive rate. But blimey if it isn't a little overwhelming.

It also makes me feel slightly outside of everything. I'm the most contrarian person I know - I can't bring myself to like anything that I deem to be popular - and if I'm perfectly honest a key ingredient of my interest in "old school" gaming was precisely its lack of popularity. Now that it is becoming more popular I find my enthusiasm correspondingly waning; I'll probably be playing 4e before the end of the year. But for now, I'm liking it still.

Particular discoveries of note include:

• A Hamsterish Hoard of Dungeons and Dragons is no longer being updated. This saddens me, as it was not only brilliant but also BECMI-focused, and there aren't many of us out there. (BECMI isn't as much of a red-headed stepchild as AD&D 2nd Edition is, but it's close.)
• There are a plethora of blogs that I'm now regularly reading, among them The Land of Nod, A Character for Every Game, Teleli, Hill Cantons, Appendix N, What a Horrible Night to Have a Curse, and Gorgonmilk.
• Tekumel seems to have taken over the universe.
• Zak S is all grown up. I can remember when he was knee-high to a grasshopper, asking me for a link to his blog to generate some readership when he first started out; now he's gargantuan. This is a good thing: he has a can-do attitude, (see here, here, and here, for proof) and there isn't enough of that in RPG geekdom.
• I like this. And it shows that the OSR thing is actually 'a phenomenon', at least of a kind. It wouldn't be getting satirised otherwise.
• Trollsmyth, who is by the way an excellent DM, is hexmapping like a crazed baboon.

Yes, fuck you, this post is just a glorified excuse to post up loads of links.