Tag: Bloggies

The Bloggies 2026

It’s Bloggies time again! This year, I’m not nominated, mainly because I didn’t nominate myself, which is what I did last year. But there are lots of great blog posts involved. I recommend you go and treat yourself to some of them.

This year, it’s being run by Clayton Notestine, last years’ winner over on the Explorer’s Design blog. It’s a lot of work! The honour of winning is tempered by the commitment of time and effort it requires to run it the next year. But he’s doing a brilliant job so far.

Today, I’m going to highlight one of my favourite posts from each category. The categories are:

  • Advice
  • Critique
  • Gameable
  • Meta
  • Theory
  • Debut Blog
  • Blog Series

For voting purposes, the posts are all paired, so they’ll be pitted against each other in a brutal gladiatorial blog-off. There can be only one!

You can read them all using the links provided on this page. Or you can join me in listening to them via the We Read the Bloggies podcast, to which many members of the TTRPG/blogging community have so generously donated their time.

Advice

This is my pick from the Advice category:

Just Tell Them What They Need! by Nate Whittington of the Grinning Rat blog. It was published on December 9th 2025.

If you have ever read a TTRPG adventure and screamed at it to provide you with the relevant information on a dungeon room, an NPC or a situation, this one’s for you.

Critique

This review of Mausritter, and, more specifically, the campaign set, The Estate, for that game, is really interesting. Recently, Quinns was on the Dice Exploder podcast talking about his love of the tactile, chit-based inventory system Mausritter uses. But, in this review, although the author, Malmuria, likes the way the system works, they point out that it’s a lot of work just to keep track of all those little pieces.

Gameable

On the d4 Caltrops blog, we have a very short but incredibly useful post on the stocking of wilderness hexes in OSR games. The main resource here is a d66 table which identifies discoveries as:

  • Landmarks
  • Lairs
  • Resources
  • Special
  • Hazard

Or some combination of these. Mostly, it provides sparks of inspiration to allow a GM to come up with discoveries that make sense in their campaigns/worlds. Here’s an example:

Hazard/Resource: Consider a Hazard that renders the Resource invaluable or inaccessible in some way.

Doesn’t that get your little GM brain whirring?

Theory

I love this post about Making Hacking an OSR Style Problem from the goblin.zone blog. I don’t play a lot of cyberpunk games or even games set in the modern day so this is not a subject that comes up very often in my gaming life. I am, however, in my day job, responsible for system security and data protection so I particularly clicked with Part 2: Useful Real World Concepts

Meta

I write RPG reviews here on the dice pool dot com. Some are better than others, but I do always try to make them useful to the reader, the potential player/GM or the prospective buyer. I don’t often think about how I go about doing this. But, if I did, it would probably be encapsulated in this post from The Dodecahedron blog. It references another post from one of my go-to reviewers, Idle Cartulary, on the Playful Void blog, which also did a lot to lay out what reviews should do. I appreciate any writing that makes me consider what it is that I’m doing and both of these posts did that.

Best Debut Blog

My pick in this category is the Valeria Loves blog. Here’s the post that got me hooked. Valeria has a compelling and entertaining voice:

I am a priestess of Blorb. Just as the map is not the territory, the rules are not the fiction. You do not need a codified movement speed to permit player characters to move.

And there is a satisfying assortment of blog posts so you’re sure to find something to your liking.

Best Blog Series

It’s the Playful Void again. Over the Christmas/New Years period Idle Cartulary reviewed a truly staggering number of games/modules for Critique Navidad. It was one a day for thirty days. I wrote a blog a day during my first month on the dice pool dot com. I can tell you, that’s a lot of work! And I was only prattling away about the shit the occurred to me, not reading, critiquing and writing about the work of others in a thoughtful and fair manner. That’s what this series is. Go check it out.

The Bloggies 2024 – Debut Blog Voting

Quality

Dear reader, the Bloggies are in full swing. Voting has been occurring, on and off, since the 3rd of January. I didn’t manage to get through to the finals in any of the four main categories. There are many edifying, entertaining, exceptional blog posts that did and I would strongly urge you to hop over to 2023 winner, Sachagoat’s blog to find links to all of them. The quality is universally high and, having had a chance to read them all now, I can see what I would need to do to reach the finals next year.

It’s not that I’m dissatisfied with the type or quality of the posts I have put out over the last few months, more that I can see the sorts of topics and the level of thought and detail required if getting into the finals of the Bloggies is to be a goal in the future.

Debut Blog

That said, The Dice Pool is still in the running for the 2024 Debut Blog award. If you would like to get a flavour of all the thirty-five (!) finalists for the Best Debut Blog category, Prismatic Wasteland has collected them all in one place with a link to a post that is emblematic of what you might get from each blog too.

If you have enjoyed my posts, or if you have gotten anything from them, I’d appreciate a vote! You can find the voting form here. Thanks in advance, and may the best blog win!

The Bloggies 2024

The Dicepool

At the start, 87 posts ago, all the way back in July of this year, I wrote this:

I think I’ll write how I feel about some of the things I consume as a way to digest them (not the food and drink, I’ll do that in the traditional way.) But, mostly, I’ll be writing about my main creative outlet, playing, running and making things for tabletop role playing games. Let’s not be coy about this; the internet is not lacking for nerds going on about their games, or someone else’s games or games they watched other people play or games they hate or games they actually quite like, surprisingly enough. So, even knowing this, why would I have the gall to add to it? Good question, good question indeed. Maybe I will figure that out as I do it. The adventure is the journey and all that.

And, that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing. I am still doing it. I have learned a lot by doing it. This blog has genuinely been an enjoyable and useful outlet for me. It has allowed me to work through some game-related ideas that might otherwise have floated freely around my brain, temptingly close but always oh-so frustratingly out of reach. It has also given me the opportunity to express my feelings on more personal matters. Mainly, though, it has provided me the chance to write regularly about one of my favourite subjects, RPGs.

I have made a few changes over the last six months. I went from posting daily to every two days to every three days and then to twice a week. I feel like I have found the ideal schedule now and hope to continue with it. Thedicepool.com joined the woodpanelled.org web ring. I hope to see Woodpanelled grow even more in the new year. I started posting some of my own fiction pieces as well as the RPG-related posts. I’m hoping this will encourage me to write some new fiction soon! Finally, I have been sharing my posts more on social media, both Instagram and Bluesky. where I have made some connections with other people in the TTRPG sphere. I have had some great feedback from some of these interactions and that has encouraged me to put the blog out there a bit more.

The Bloggies Awards and a request

So here we are, it’s the end of the year and a good time to consider some of the things we liked from 2024. In this incredibly niche corner of the internet I find myself tucked away in, there is a way to show your appreciation for those things you liked, or that you found useful or inspirational or that just tickled your fancy. You can nominate a blogpost for the Bloggies Awards, which originated in 2022 on the Prismatic Wasteland blog.

The 2023 winner was Sacha (or sachagoat.) He won for the first part of an excellent series of posts about Re-inventing the Wilderness. You can check it out here along with an introduction to the Bloggies themselves. Basically, people nominate their favourite TTRPG blogposts within four categories:

  1. Theory – I don’t really get into this area too much on the blog, although I may in time
  2. Gameable – I also don’t have a lot of this sort of thing here. I have considered sharing some of my home-brew stuff, but I would need to do some more work on most of it first
  3. Advice – I have a fair few posts of this kind. I’m thinking of those on world-building, beginnings, endings, combining systems and mechanics, session prep, building community, etc.
  4. Review – I would hesitate to call myself a proper reviewer of RPGs but there are several posts that fit into this category. I am thinking particularly of the posts on Liminal_, Cthulhu Dark, and the series on Between the Skies and Dragon Age. But a lot of my other posts dealing with games I have played would probably fit into this category too.

Sacha has introduced a couple of new categories for this year too:

  1. Debut Series – This is me! Despite having 87 posts under my belt, this is still my debut year.
  2. Blog Series – I have several of these, including my series of character creation posts, the Between the Skies and Dragon Age series as well as those on combining D&D and Blades in the Dark mechanics

I won’t go into any more detail here. Sacha explains it all on his blog. Suffice it to say, if there are any of my posts from the past six months that have resonated with you I would appreciate a nomination. You can use this Google form to do it before December 31st. It only takes a couple of minutes and is pretty straight-forward.

Thanks

I appreciate all your support during the last six months, dear reader. At the start, I pretended like I would do this whether or not anyone read it, but the fact is, I do take great encouragement and motivation from the fact that others have read and gotten something from this blog. I would like to extend my gratitude to all of you who have taken a few minutes out of your day to read even a few of my words since July.

Happy holidays!