State of the Blog Year 7

 Well, this is a bit awkward.

Content

I only published one (1) singular post this year, Brief Thoughts on Fantasy Monotheism. It was a short, mostly stream-of-consciousness pondering of a model of fantasy divinity that better merges Standard Fantasy Polytheism with Big Centralized Church in a way that allows a lot of the broad tropes, stories, and dynamics people want out of both of those, while at the same time opening new and more detailed possibilities by making this model explicit and visible to the players.

There were some aspects of this idea, as I noted in a comment, that I forgot to even mention in the post itself, so I regard it as somewhat incomplete, and I may return to the topic at some point to flesh it out further, possibly revamping my old Shrines and Saints system (the more I think about it, this remains one of my best ideas that I've never fully executed on. I might need to port this to PF2e).

Since this is rather thin on the ground, I might as well list some of the blog posts I started drafting, but never finished:

Some Early Thoughts on PF2e and the Old School and Fleeing in Pathfinder: A pair of posts I've been writing and rewriting periodically since I started playing PF2e: there's a lot I love about the system, but there are holes in it, especially around parts of exploration and fleeing from combat, that cry out to be filled: with that, I could see myself running a somewhat trimmed-down version of the system for an old-school style game.

Worldbuilding: The Transmigration of Souls: A fragmentary exploration of what exactly an angel, devil, demon etc *is* in terms of fantasy metaphysics. Not quite sure what direction I was going with for this one.

What is a Goblin, Anyway? Monsters as Statblocks vs Play Patterns: Following a disagreement with JB from B/X Blackrazor (though I have no idea where to find that argument now) a reflection on AD&D monsters and how we can interact with them as statblocks or as play-patterns+flavor, and what these different approaches imply for your game.

The Warlock: Mercenary, Company Man, Vassal: Inspired by a Pointy Hat video, an exploration of different ways to imagine the 5e Warlock as a fantasy archetype, tracing source inspirations from the medieval witch to Dr. Faustus, to Daniel Webster and The Devil, to Elric of Melniboné and Harry Dresden, showing how the notion of what a 'pact with dark powers' even means and implies, metaphysically, changes a lot with cultural assumptions, and we can play with these possibilities in fantasy RPGs. 

Whence the Bandit?: A draft I've been coming back to repeatedly for over a year now, but which I can never get right: intended to be an exploration of historical banditry as a social phenomenon and significant literary portrayals, from Water Margin to The Count of Monte Cristo. The poverty of the fantasy bandit as a trope or archetype is, in my opinion, rooted in the cultural distance to this phenomenon, such that it's been totally flanderized and nearly worthless, but we can recover it with some reading and re-energizing of the concept.

Diagnostics

In spite of posting almost nothing this year, the one post I did write is... one of my most popular posts to date? I haven't been checking my stats lately so I didn't notice until I sat down to check, but I haven't gotten a post this widely-read since Ship of the Damned, which was published four years earlier. 

My stats also show that the blog received 103,000 reads in the last 12 months, making this by far my most-read year. The vast majority of these views are concentrated in my old, top posts, with Intro Statistics for RPGs: The Wheaton Dice Curse continuing to be my most popular post by a country mile.

I'm inclined to think most of these views are bots of some variety, particularly since one of my views from the last 24 hours supposedly originated from 'perplexity.ai'. In all likelihood, a lot of undisciplined web scrapers are crawling the blog and providing phantom views to posts.

That said, there are hopefully some new, actual human readers in the crowd and I do invite you to introduce yourselves in the comments!

Away From the Blog

I know I said this last year, but good goddamn this has been an eventful and busy year for me. I don't even know where to begin, so let's start at the end. 

As of a couple weeks ago, I finally finished my MS degree and have now moved out of Chicago to Manhattan, and will soon begin a job search in earnest, along with searching for a new, in-person tabletop group. Earlier in the year, I became a great deal more involved with my local software meetups and open-source communities, and have now spoken several times at meetups and small conferences. I spend a good bit of my time these days contributing to an open-source black hole simulation codebase (I'm not an physicist, just a code monkey helping them optimize it). I also got involved with a group of academic sleuths, helping them to detect and publicize scientific frauds and developing software to help them do it. 

In all the commotion, role-playing fell by the wayside: I did complete my PF2e game this spring as expected, though I had to rush it with less time than expected and it ended up being quite railroady, which I regret. I ran a couple pick-up sessions this summer for colleagues at my internship, and for my little cousins, all in PF2e. I had intended to at least run a couple small sessions this fall, but the final quarter of my MS proved to be far too busy.

Hopefully, I'll be back to regular play at some point in the coming year, which will get the blog juices flowing again. 

One other obstacle to the blog is that I'm increasingly writing elsewhere on other topics, mainly on software on my personal site and on scientific topics on a substack (though I'm increasingly dissatisfied with the platform and may move that somewhere else in time). I started this blog and a lot of my internet presence kinda-pseudonymously, but I'm no longer bothering to keep these separate, so have at the links. The software stuff is a lot of inside baseball, much of it talk transcriptions, tutorials, and reference material rather than more accessible introductory stuff (though I am currently writing an introduction to scientific Python and high-performance computing patterns that I will publish on my personal site, if that's the kind of things that tickles your fancy).

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So ends another year of blogging and gaming! Special thanks to regular readers and commenters gyrovague and D-Skelector, and to new commenter Dave Bloodaxe! I hope all of you have an excellent holiday and a wonderful new year!