Welcome to the second anniversary of the Blog Formerly Known as Espharel! You can find last year's reflections here, for comparison and contrast. Here are my reflections from a second year of blogging, plus what the blog looks like from this side of the curtain.
What is A Distant Chime?
One big change from last year. The blog has a new name! Truth be told, I can't remember exactly when I did it. Maybe around summer? I also accompanied that with a spring cleaning of the old place, a new background, a browser symbol, the works. Much nicer on the eyes. It doesn't have the clean-cut, straightforward appeal of some other blogs I could name, but it has its own identity.
The name change was motivated by a feeling that the blog was held back by a weird name. I have no data to back this up, but when these sorts of fits take me over it's best to let them run their course. Thus the makeover.
I mentioned in last year's State of the Blog that the name Espharel was a nonsense word which came to me out of nowhere, which I selected when my first choice for a blog name was taken. The subjective quality of the word recalled to me the chime of a bell; perhaps describing a City of Bells. So when renaming the blog, it didn't take long to settle on a new and improved title.
Content
Last year, I noted the shift in the kind of blog content I posted, from imitating Goblin Punch with bestiaries and locations, to later become a GLOG class creator, and after that transitioning into an adapter of other settings and media, such as Joseph R Lewis' short stories and the Elder Scrolls setting, into GLOG content.
The biggest change this year was that I started running games regularly. I had a GLOG game in my university, but it was slapdash and infrequently attended. People were busy, and a homebrew system which didn't have the elements they wanted didn't build a strong campaign. I also had the ESGLOG game, but it was extremely slow, went via text on Discord, and collapsed when the pandemic hit.
I floundered for a while, writing blog posts without a game running, then trying and failing to start campaigns. My plot to playtest my underwater OSR rules, Point Nemo, fell apart pretty much immediately (well enough that it did; I had virtually no material to test!) and a brief stint on a 5e West Marches server inoculated me against that sort of environment.
Then the Castle Xyntillan game began. Since late April, we've had sessions nearly every Friday night, totaling 29 sessions, around three hours each. The lion's share of all the time I've ever spent GMing has been on this campaign. It's pointing towards a conclusion, though it hasn't reached there just yet. The party now knows about the greatest treasure in the castle, and has a solid grasp of where to find it, and the metaplot I've overlaid onto the campaign is reaching an ending. I expect it will continue a good ways into next year before concluding.
Then there's the very brief playtest sessions of Depravities of the Dinosorcerer. I called them off after just a few sessions, since I really didn't have enough material to go further, and the group's small size negated much of the point of playtesting. Ah well.
And now, I'm even running a 5e game which I expect will continue for some time. The me of even a few months ago would have been surprised by this. It came together much more quickly than I had expected, and regular Saturday sessions (at a much more convenient time than Castle Xyntillan's late-night game) seem to have a lot of enthusiasm behind them.
Now, my content is composed in large part of play reports, short essays and discussion articles, some advice on running certain modules, and only rarely something that could be considered playable content. Depravities of the Dinosorcerer is on the backburner, as running two campaigns and writing regular posts takes up all the bandwidth I'm willing to put in the direction of my hobby, and writing and playtesting a module of my own is just so much work.
On one hand, I don't wholly like this move away from playable content. On the other hand, it's a lot easier to write, and in many cases more enjoyable. I'm no longer doing quite so many systems, since I don't want to be putting out too much content which isn't playtested. But I also don't have endless opportunities to playtest. So it goes.
Diagnostics
My tools tell me that the blog has accumulated 32.5 thousand pageviews, averaging 88-ish a day, and 113 comments in the last year, accounting for the vast majority of blog views (all time views are at 37, 420 as of writing) and comments (113 of a total 128). Granted, a bunch of those comments are my own, responding to others, but that's in the minority.
In the latter months of this year, I committed myself to trying to get a monthly average of 100 page views per day, if not more. I have succeeded in doing this for the months of May, June and August, and am well on track to succeed for the month of December as well.
Posting Rate
My least active month this year was in September, where I posted only four pieces to the blog, of which three were Castle Xyntillan Session reports.
Most of my months hover around 6 or 7 posts. Once per week reliably, plus some more erratic posts. The months of May, June, and last December all hosted 11 posts. Once this post is added this December will break that record, with 12, and several more to come before end of year!
In the last State of the Blog I wrote about how, during the Christmas season, I was putting out a 'blistering' output of one post every two days. Like last December, I had a lull early in the month where nothing got posted, followed by a flurry of subsequent activity. Except that this year's flurry is nearly daily, as opposed to a more disciplined 48-hour schedule. I attribute some of this difference to the change in content described above.
Once this post is included, posts for this calendar year will number 96 in total, 99 once one includes posts which came last December after the last State of the Blog. (Alas! I fall one short of 100! I didn't even know I was working towards that, but now I have another milestone to beat next year.)
Audience Size
Last year, I noted that most of my blog post got between 30 and 50 page views, with some notable posts, especially my Elder Scrolls GLOG posts, receiving more than that.
This has, to say the least, changed. The typical range after a week of being online is between 100 and 200. Some posts, such as CX session reports, and other miscellaneous post get notably less, around the range of 80-90 views. It's kind of a trip, knowing that I can post something and reliably get a hundred eyeballs on it.
I didn't record the number of followers I had this time last year, but I seem to recall it was less than ten. We've recently gotten up to 21 followers, plus some others who don't follow directly but nevertheless signal boost the blog via their own platforms (special thanks to Anne of DIY&Dragons!).
Presentation
I've experimented with titles for posts a bit especially on some posts which are more commentary than content. Namely, more provocative titles such as 'Stop Antagonizing Your GM with this One Simple Trick' and 'Stop Writing Lazy Quest Intros'. I used to title these sorts of posts 'OSR Discussion: [insert relevant title here]' but felt that they were getting less engagement than otherwise. Changing this seems to have worked. Or maybe it's a different element entirely and I'm misattributing the reason for this shift.
I started crossposting occasionally to reddit (especially to the regular r/osr blogroll), and sometimes to the OSR Pit. However, I've drifted away from the latter platform, since it doesn't seem that shameless self promotion fits the tone there very well.
Notable Posts
The elephant in the room here is the original Shrines and Patron Saints post, which remains by far my most read post. It came out immediately after the first State of the Blog, so I've had to wait until now to really talk about it! It accumulated a truly ridiculous amount of views very quickly, and its position at the top of my popular posts page has allowed it to keep doing so. It has just shy of 1400 views by now. I have no idea how or why this happened. If you were responsible for sharing it widely, please let me know in the comments below.
Besides that, ten posts which I particularly enjoyed writing follow:
The Index
I have one. I have so far failed to put it somewhere obvious, and it has been sadly neglected, as I have not updated it in some time. Put this one up as something to fix.
Endnotes
I've started using intentional endnotes in some of my posts. Standard stuff, a line of dashes ending the post, followed by a request for readers to follow the blog and comment. I think it does increase comments, though I haven't looked at it concretely. So far my use of these is inconsistent, but I will likely make more of a habit of it.
Also, I still have no idea how the 'schedule post' button works.
Unfinished Drafts
Holy Crap I've got a bunch of these unfinished drafts floating around. I include the premises of a few of these, mostly based on books. Comment below about which of these drafts you'd most like to see completed!
Oaths and Vows: an expansion on the Shrines and Saints systems, retooling it for more flexibility and easy application.
Emperor of All Maladies: a post on vampirism, analogizing it to cancer via Weinberg and Hanahan's six 'rules' of cancer described in Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee's book, The Emperor of All Maladies.
The Faecrawl: an approach to hex or point-crawling in a space-bending Fae realm based on the Kingkiller Chronicles.
True Names: a system for determining and using true names for PCs in old-school games, based on the Wizard of Earthsea.
The Day of Wrath: an approach to adding to your game the sense of impending apocalypse described in Mark Bloch's Feudal Society, pages 91-93.
-------------
Merry Christmas to my fellow Xyntillan ref. Hope to have many more blog comment exchanges in the new year.
ReplyDelete