The Foot of Blue Mountain

2024 Retrospective

Introduction

While I've been lurking and shitposting in OSR/NSR spaces for a while, I only really felt like I had something to share this year. Since the year is coming t o an end, I wanted to make a retrospective post going over everything I've done in the year. This is more for me than anything, but you might enjoy the shop talk (and anyway its a chance to link all of my stuff in one place :P)

Blogposts

My blog started this year and got way more attention than I thought it would. My most popular posts this year were "Sparse Dungeon Design, or the Virtues of Plain Rooms," "Connecting the Hex; Creating Full Hexes with Meaningful Encounters," and "Having an Opinion; How to Play OSR Games". My personal favorites among the ones not already listed were "Craft Writing; Ideation and Revision" and "Sages & Willy Wonka".

Blogging is a really nice way to build up the volume of your writing, even if you only post every few weeks. I wrote roughly 29,000 words this year on my blog, posting about once a week. It's been nice and feels relatively low pressure compared to some other things on this list. If you're reading this and don't have a blog (or, in my opinion, any space to talk about the things you like) start one! It's fun, easy and a good way to get into a writing habit.

Habit is kind of a recurring theme in my creative work this year, partly because I've had an excess of free time and partly because the things I used to occupy my free time with (computer science) became the things I was primarily focusing on for school. I've had a lot success going from writing essentially nothing at all to writing pretty regularly, so that's been a nice surprise!

Community Projects

I've participated in several community projects this year that I'm really fortunate to have gotten the chance to take a part in! Here are a few in particular I want to highlight:

Song of Eastlake: A ton of hexcrawls all based around the same bestiary and set of hexfills. There are some amazing hexes here with some truly great monsters to boot. Stella Condrey organized and did most of the legwork putting this project together, and I'm really proud I was a small part of it! It's available **FOR FREE*** here

I heard about this project only a few hours before submissions had closed and wrote most of it with the digital keyboard on a tablet (I would not recommend) but in terms of quality I think this is probably the best thing I've ever written for tabletop stuff. There's a lot I like in this and I'm hoping to match and exceed what I did here in the next year.

Hexcrawloween: Another... hexcrawl community project (I am beginning to see a pattern.) during October focused around putting out some hexcrawls! This was interesting because of the time constraints; with Blue Mountain, I had a lot more time to work through doldrums in my process and be much more methodical with how I went about things, but Mermaid Mire was more of a sprint. The big challenge was dungeon rooms, which I complain about being bad at writing all the time. Good dungeon rooms are hard. Good Dungeons are hard. I don't mean the goofy, B/X stocking table dungeons, but the ones that cohere into something more than the sum of their parts. I don't think any of the dungeon stuff in Mermaid Mire is all that good (although it is worth reading and you should all go read it :P). I do think I learned a ton about the intentionality of the craft of adventure writing, though, and I'm already utilizing these lessons in my next project!

Solo Work

Blue Mountain: Yadda yadda, if you're reading this you probably know the deal. I named my blog after it, I've written another retrospective here, and in general it's probably the best thing I've put out.

It was lots of fun to write! I think that joy comes out in the text.

It was not a lot of fun to present to an audience! It was annoying working with the pdf software I was using at the time (an issue I have fixed), I really disliked making the maps, and generally speaking it does not look pretty. Does it need to? Not really, but I'd like to make something that looks nice!

Goals for Next Year