Top 10 Early OSR Blogs, Now Defunct

In the lead up to my 2,000th post here at Monsters & Manuals, I am writing a series of 'Top 10' posts relating broadly to the blog itself and its context. For the first of these, I'd like to do a run down of some of the blogs that were active in the era roughly from 2008-2011, when the scene really took off and was in its initial creative flowering. At that time I followed literally hundreds of blogs through Google Reader, and spent a considerable portion of each day with my finger on the pulse, ear to the ground, eye on the main chance, and nose on the, er, something. My day job at that time involved long, long hours of boring but hard work, so the OSR blogosphere was like water in the desert to me - a raging torrent of creativity and enthusiasm into which one could simply dip a ladle to drink from.

The creativity of that period has probably now been surpassed in the sense that a lot of highly imaginative material - and very mechanically innovative systematisation - has emerged subsequent to it (particularly when G+ began to take over as the central hub of OSR activity), but the enthusiasm never has been. It is with that in mind that I have made this list: these are the blogs whose joy, alongside their other merits, I found appealing. In no particular order, then, the Top 10 Early OSR Blogs, Now Defunct are:

10. Sham's Grog and Blog. Sham's blog was one of the very first OSR blogs that I encountered, and alongside producing vast swathes of useful and inspirational material (just take a look at all the links in the sidebars, for heaven's sake) also contains a real-time obituary to Gary Gygax, serving to prove that the OSR was just coalescing 'in the air', as it were, at the very moment the game's original creator died - a regrettable but extraordinary coincidence that undoubtedly had a huge influence on the development of the scene.

9. Valley of Blue Snails. When I first started getting back into RPGs in the mid-late 2000s, I had in my head the typical image of the fantasy genre that somebody of my background and history would inevitably have had - largely a melange of Tolkien, Weis & Hickman, Eddings, Goodkind, Williams, Martin (yes, I was one of the people who read Game of Thrones when first released, as volume one in A Song of Ice and Fire, purchased from my local WH Smith circa 1997 or so) and the like - with a little Moorcock, Vance or Harrison on the side. This was what 'fantasy' really meant to me, at least in the context of D&D - so the early OSR era was almost an education in itself into what fantasy literature could aspire to be. Nowadays the Valley of Blue Snails sounds almost formulaically anodyne given the extent to which boundaries have been pushed, but at that time its creative scope felt truly vast.

8. ChicagoWiz's RPG Blog, now a blasted remnant of what once was, but which still contains a list of 25 of its best posts and some collected links. It is funny how memory of internet drama deteriorates; there are gossamer-like strands of recollections of controversy revolving around ChgoWiz, but whatever that controversy was, it no longer matters - all that is left, fittingly, is useful and interesting material (although I believe the author is still out there blogging somewhere).

7. Huge Ruined Scott's various endeavours. This perhaps constitutes a cheat, or a tease, or both, because Scott Driver has long disappeared (at least to my knowledge; a fragment of a hint of his material can be found here) and had a habit of deleting his projects in fits of either pique or insouciance (or madness). If anyone does know of the existence of an archive of his material, then please do say so in the comments. He was a fabulous writer and the most imaginative creator of the lot.

6. Malevolent & Benign. Max was a fellow footsoldier in the OSR's early days - distinguished above all by his pleasantness and enthusiasm. There was a lot of that about in that era, and his blog feels somehow exemplary of the positive, no-hang-ups vibe that prevailed in those days. I have a feeling that it was the move to G+ that actually killed off a lot of these people - the action moved elsewhere, and became more frenetic and fraught. This had its benefits, but also its casualties. 

5. Land of Nod. I perhaps shouldn't include John in this list as he is still blogging (if much less frequently than at one time) at a different web address, but his old site is a marvel. At one time he was putting out posts on a more-or-less daily basis, always very focused and tight, and his efficient and imaginative hexcrawl work in particular is simply a model for what good keying consists of.

4. A Hamsterish Hoard of Dungeons & Dragons. One of the signal features of the OSR blogosphere during its early years was the sheer number of people who just put out great content, as and when they liked, for free - monsters, spells, magic items, hexmaps, and so on. This blog was among the very best of these sites, and it stood out for its distinctly fairy tale-ish, slightly anime-inflected vibe.

3. Middenmurk. No list of top OSR blogs would be complete without a mention of Middenmurk. Tom Fitzgerald did not write more than 100 posts in his entire blogging career. (Although who knows? He may resurface.) Yet each of them is a pearl. Read his work - he is a man of peculiar and considerable gifts (and did some lovely map illustrations for Yoon-Suin 2nd edition). 

2. Kellri. Kellri's blog was always interesting and enjoyable to read, but it is the huge archives of PDF downloads for which he deserves the most credit - particularly the Classic Dungeon Designer Netbooks, which were (again) produced and disseminated for free, and of immense helpfulness to any DM. It was, to repeat, the sheer joy of creativity that truly characterised those early years, and Kellri's creative output was exemplary of that mood. 

1. How to Start a Revolution in 21 Days or Less. The author of this blog was neither the most prolific, nor the most prominent, but I include it simply because, having visited it for the first time in many years in the course of writing this post, I felt a feeling of almost unbearably poignant nostalgia wash over me for that lost era of thoughtful, calm, open-minded interaction which seemed to characterise not just OSR blogs but much of the internet experience in those days. There was a time, before social media, when the internet simply seemed to be an unalloyed good - a wondrous blessing allowing in theory everybody in the world to enter into a joint enterprise of communicative bonding. That vision has been displaced by world-weariness, cynicism, and tension, but sometimes it is edifying to revisit that earlier age to be reminded of what once was, and could have been. These are the thoughts that struck me when revisiting this blog in particular (I genuinely cannot explain why) and, since the early OSR seems so redolent of the pre-social media world, it seemed fitting to include it in my list.