What I want to read

09 Feb, 2026

My reaction to this year's Bloggie Nominees is a sense that the 'median culture of play' represented in the list has drifted further from that which I participate in (relative to previous years), and accordingly I find the selected posts less apropos to my own advice needs & taste. With more time in the hobby, and especially after much more time spent playing games, I've become marginally more discerning about what blog posts I find useful.¹

But rather than grousing about posts I'm not into, I've been trying to take a more constructive angle by reflecting on what I'm most excited to read. What am I looking to learn? For what problems am I seeking solutions? Up which which Jonses am I trying to keep?

Here's a rough list.² I've added cluttered examples that came to mind, but tbh there are too many good posts out there, more than I even have time to properly read! (I will likely update this as I think of more):

• Technical tutorials: I always like learning new hobby-related skills, whether it be software, writing, art, or something else. I'm a big fan of Vladar's excellent LaTeX tutorials. Sam Sorensen's tangible tips have been invaluable for honing by own writing. Luke Gearing has a great guide for writing in Markdown.
• Plain old referee advice: New nuggets of wisdom are always welcome, particularly when it pertains to the niche play styles I enjoy. Recent-ish posts I enjoyed in this vein include Mr. Mann's post on player mapping, Scribbles & Horrors on hiding/finding secret rooms & Justin H on "Action-oriented interaction".
• Advice about organizing a long campaign: This is the type of gaming I'm most interested in, and I find that it requires a lot of work beyond "having a ruleset" & "having a scenario ready". How do you keep players interested long-term? What's in your binder? How do you manage a large roster of characters? How do you design scenarios that can grow with your campaign? At what points did you have to adapt or even replace your ruleset? The how I prep bandwagon was a wealth of useful insight. I also come back to blark's Building a Binder series on a regular basis.
• Worked Examples: My sense is that it's easy to write a stocking procedure, tough to actually put it to use as written. I really liked that Yochai Gal posted a writeup of the Cairn 2e forest stocking procedure in action & would love to see more posts along these lines.
• Play reports, & especially campaign post-mortem writeups: Play reports are a weird one -- I don't find them that interesting to read, but I'm more likely to take a blogger's opinions seriously if they've documented their experience playing games in some way. On the other hand, a campaign retrospective is something I'll always jump to read -- I love seeing how people synthesize the lessons learned during a campaign. I really enjoyed NBateman's Devils World Heroes wrap-up, also Jenx's Zandan Megadungeon Retrospective & EvilTables' 2025 reflection
• Dungeons, hexcrawls, & other scenarios: I think that it's important to be able to share scenarios that aren't polished to the level of published modules. I find that studying these can be more instructive for preparing one's own campaign. Some not-at-all comprehensive recent-ish examples:
  • I really like the one-page dungeons that Eldritch Fields posts.
  • Unturned Hovel
  • Garamondia
  • Jared Sinclair
  • Forlorn Skulk
  • Also delighted to be seeing stuff for Antarctica Jam: 1, 2, 3, 4
• Modular rules: Although mechanics in isolation are not usually interesting to me, I love seeing a niche, modular system (the key is to pair the clever mechanic with a fictional situation that's tricky or annoying to resolve). I mostly play OD&D, a game that is very friendly to bricolage, so it's nice to see how others extend rulesets in response to problems that arise during play. I'm also a sucker for interesting magic rules, even though I keep going back to basic bitch Vancian casting. The Troika Tuesday material posted by Unturned Hovel, Joe B., and Pounds of Nothing is a good example of this kind of thing.
• Game history: It's always cool learning bits of lore about the early days of the hobby. In this vein, I also think there's potential to plumbing the archives of Dragonsfoot & ODD74 for interesting buried tidbits (someone recently pointed out that we are nearly as far from the early OSR as the early OSR was from the publication of OD&D!).
• Book reviews, book lists, & other hobbies:  I like seeing what non-RPG interests you all have. Just as play reports help establish one's credentials for talking about games, I find that the bloggers I most admire have a healthy range of non-rpg interests & curiosities. And, I've discovered quite a few good books through reading blogs.
• Weird shit: give me homages to 1950's muscle mag advice columns, undead philosophical dialogues, psychoanalytic swords, awful alliums, or ecstatic art manifestoes.

Anyways, that's my list. To be clear, I have no expectation that the wider blogging culture should conform to my niche tastes. But I at least will try to align more of my own efforts to the kinds of things I want to read.

If your list is different, post about it! Curated lists are probably more useful to the right audience than anything selected by voting.