Well here I am again, a solid decade after my first foray into tabletop blogging. I hope, anyway.

The first “hoard” was (and still is) over on Blogspot, and was dedicated to critters and magic and a few random ramblings, focused on the Mentzer/Rules Cyclopedia version of Basic D&D. I had a decent enough output for a stretch; then life started getting rocky and some things flared up, and my posts tapered off and then stopped. There were a few attempts to get back up on the horse, but between continued RL rollercoasters and, frankly, not remotely feeling comfortable with the way the OSR had evolved (and even less so with specific bodies in that scene), I never did wander back. Mentzer being revealed as a creeper frankly didn’t help either.

In the meantime I poked at 2e AD&D, Exalted, a few other games; picked up The Black Hack; and so on. I also was — and to be honest, mostly still am — paralyzed enough by anxiety that it took me well over two years to write a take of my own on TBH and then even longer to publish it (so long 2e was well out by then, so I only priced a few dollars because I didn’t want to draw attention away on top of whatever other stress-derived reasoning I have/had), which I did under an alias which I assume worked if only through obscurity. I was too nervous to mention it, even under the alias, or to do more than make a post or two on the blog I made for it. The second, smaller project and the small companion to the hack are still unfinished, because I talked myself out of them; the more words, the more I might get recognized. Rational? Nah. But stress and anxiety and work issues and life issues don’t care about rationality and neither does the internet.

In the past year-ish, though, I’ve tried poking my head up out of the gopher hole I’ve been hiding in, mostly on Twitter. The net result of this is having refound some folks, following some new people, and squeaking out a few tiny little things to discover that the current flavours of posting shiny things on Itch and whatnot wake up my screaming frayed nerves like nobody’s business. I don’t want to feel that anxious constantly and the guilt of not succeeding in joining in/in not making the same sorts of things that I see on Twitter/etc etc is no fun either. But I’d still like to try to do a few things now and again.

So, what to do?

Start another blog, where I can throw words around randomly every once in a while and breathe a little better. And who knows, maybe I’ll get this step wrangled also and be able to join in without panic elsewhere, some time in the future.

I don’t promise a steady stream of material like way back when. It’s also entirely possible this project crashes and burns. But I’m going to try, slowly.

It’ll probably be mostly TBH-related things (1e, by and large, though I have 2e and quite like it I spent those years with 1e), and I’d like to try some Troika after all, and probably some fairly system-agnostic tables and lists. And oh how I’m looking forward to my copy of Old School Essentials — and maybe I can get my Basic off the ground again soon. That would be nice. Noodling around with variations on that one minirpg (to be re-linked here soonish) may also happen, because maybe I’ll feel less embarrassed about writing variations on a theme and ruleset if I’m just doing it in my own space, you know?

… and this got long as hell, and I’m squirming. Oi. Still, it’s needed said. Let’s see what trickles out over the future.