Old-School RPG Blogs Built a Culture of Shared Ideas and Debate

The lasting appeal of the early Old School Renaissance blog scene wasn’t just its archive of spells, monsters and dungeon ideas. It was the way readers and writers worked on those ideas together: testing mechanics, arguing about play, and turning comments into new posts. That culture has faded from view for some longtime readers, but its most useful habits still fit the OSR today.

James at Grognardia and John from The Nine and Thirty Kingdoms recently revisited the blogging scene around 2010 and the years that followed. Their reflections brought back a period the author remembers as a daily source of reading, conversation and material for home games. They occasionally commented, ran a blog briefly, and spent many hours following blogs and message boards.

The memory comes with caveats. The scene had arguments and personal friction, because gamers are people with different tastes and strong opinions. And the author was glad to see Google+ go: its rise helped break up the connected blog network, but its disappearance didn’t bring that network back. Discussion instead scattered across other platforms.

A working library for home campaigns

From about 2005 to 2012, OSR bloggers published a steady stream of material that readers could lift, adapt or use as a starting point. A post might offer a new spell, monster, character class, table or small rule. Put together, those pieces made a sprawling reference shelf for referees looking for something to bring to the table.

The volume is visible in the archives. Gavin Norman’s City of Iron posts from 2011 number 135, with many devoted to gameable creations. Jeff Rients’ 2010 archive offers another window into the period. The author drew on blogs for ways to adjudicate situations, dungeon and adventure structures, optional mechanics, spells, magic items and monsters. Those fragments went into a personal fantasy adventure game built on Swords & Wizardry.

That kind of borrowing is more than collecting house rules. A referee can take one procedure, combine it with a table from another writer, then reshape both for a particular campaign. The result belongs to the table using it, while the original post remains part of a wider exchange.

Ideas moved through iteration and argument

Bloggers didn’t only publish finished concepts. Other writers would pick them up, try them, revise them and share their own versions. A 2011 Necropraxis draft of a thief class is one example of that iterative approach. The author has done similar work over the years, though it seemed more common before Google+ reshaped where people spent their time.

Debate helped define the vocabulary of the scene, too. Questions around the “Quantum Ogre,” emergent narrative and “rules not rulings” played out across blogs and message boards. These discussions gave players language for describing different approaches, but they could also harden into claims about the one correct way to play old-school games. Alongside that friction, writers developed broader principles for recognizing an old-school style, collected in resources such as Principia Apocrypha.

The exchange mattered because it let a reader encounter an idea, see someone challenge it, and then watch others adapt it. A comment thread could become a longer discussion, and the discussion could generate more material for play.

Blogs opened a door to RPG history

For this author, OSR blogs also filled in a large gap in their gaming education. They started playing in 1987 in a rural area, with limited money for games and few local ways to meet other players. A bookstore at a mall 30 miles away was the nearest shop carrying Dungeons & Dragons material. They owned the Player’s Handbook; friends had the Dungeon Masters Guide, monster books and orange-spine supplements, but those were mostly skimmed.

When second edition arrived, that became the author’s focus. The 1974–1981 era, along with the original game and earlier editions, stayed largely out of view until the OSR drew them back around 2010. Sporadic issues of Dragon didn’t lead to much exploration of other roleplaying games: nobody nearby wanted to play them, and buying more books wasn’t practical.

John Peterson’s Playing at the World blog, Grognardia’s historical retrospectives and other writers revealed how much of the hobby’s past the author had missed. For readers who entered through later editions or had little access to game shops and clubs, that material made the wider history easier to find.

The network changed, but the writing continues

Whether there are fewer old-school blogs now is hard to measure. Blogrolls still turn up unfamiliar sites, including writers who have been publishing for years. Many blogs that were active around 2010 have gone quiet, disappeared or shifted topics, while newer ones continue to create the same kinds of material. The author’s own blog began in 2019, well after the period often described as the OSR blogosphere’s peak.

For this writer, the clearest difference is the amount of visible back-and-forth. In 2010–2012, comment threads could carry on for days or weeks and lead to several related posts. Shared efforts such as Petty Gods, the early One Page Dungeon Contest and prompts inviting many bloggers to write on one subject gave people ways to build something together.

Some of that activity may now happen on Discord or Facebook Groups, though the author rarely uses Discord and finds Facebook a difficult place for sustained discussion. They also wonder whether their own reading habits have changed: Feedly keeps familiar blogs close at hand, but they no longer browse blogrolls as often. A stream of links from Seed of Worlds’ Shiny TTRPG Links shows that newer blogs still have plenty to offer.

Bring the useful habits forward

The old network won’t return in precisely the same form. The practical lesson is to carry its best habits into the spaces players already use: comment on another writer’s idea, test a rule at the table, link to posts worth reading and explain what you borrowed or changed. Those small acts help readers find newer work and give creators a reason to keep developing it.

The author has recently struggled to find blog topics that feel worth the writing time. Responding to other bloggers and riffing on their ideas may provide a way back into the work. The early OSR scene is gone as a particular moment in internet history, but its most valuable feature—a community that made ideas easier to discover, challenge and reuse—can still be practiced one post and one conversation at a time.