OSRewind: September 16th

Yesterday I shared the idea of a daily digest that looks back at the posts made in the OSR (or maybe games blogs in general?) in previous years. There's lots and lots and lots of ideas out there, with more being shared every day. A look back could highlight ideas that have been forgotten or showcase the origins of concepts that are part of the language of the OSR now.

I'm quite taken with the idea but not sure if it's something I can commit to exploring along with the other projects that I have underway. But for today at least, and because the term "OSRewind" popped into my head as I was thinking about this, here's a quick jaunt through the last few years...

• 2014: [Tuesday Map] Hubert's Tower/The Butcher's Tower - Dyson's Dodecahedron - I really like the step-by-step approach and the details of how this was done. I'm quite keen on the how-to of maps at the moment so seeing this was serendipitous!
• 2013: Demogorgon implies.... - Playing D&D With Porn Stars - A really cool method for world building and inspiring interesting ideas for sandboxes. If I get around to running Oddpool on G+ some time soon I think I'll be using this method to set the city up.
• 2012: The Verbs of Madness - False Machine - My nephew and his friends were players in a campaign that Patrick ran and which I turned up to sometimes. Being teenagers their minds quickly turned to evil, and they ended up allied with a genuine Dark Lord. In this post Patrick describes how the Dark Lord comes up with his orders.
• 2011: Faking It; or, you'd better be Al Pacino; or, stop rolling the fucking dice - Monsters and Manuals - a short rant about player agency, DM fiat and Quantum Ogres goes on to generate 121 comments! Hoo-ha!

Something visual, a couple of solid tools and a bit of a theory: nice things to find and start thinking about...

On This Day

I've grown to love exactly one aspect of Facebook over the last few months. I hate the interface, I hate the notifications I get when I logon, I hate that I see things that people have liked, I hate to see that a friend-of-a-friend has posted something and a friend has liked it. There's a lot to hate.

But one thing I love is the "On This Day" feature, letting me look back and see what happened in years gone by. For post-fatherhood this is quite nice, it lets me see my daughter a year ago (and soon, two years ago) and I can do that whole "Awwww, she's grown so much!" thing that some people find sickening. It also lets me peer back to the early days of married life, and even further to my PhD days - in fact, exactly seven years ago today I said goodbye to that and started my business!

Time flies.

In the last few days I recorded an episode of A Gaming Podcast About Nothing, and Dave and I got on to talking about terminology and blogging and "has everything been said already?" - things of that nature. This conversation is on my mind, as is "On This Day"...

People have said in the past that it might be difficult to do a regular "OSR Digest" as a site or a newsletter, but I wonder if there is some value in a site that looks through the back catalogue of the OSR and does a regular link share about posts from days gone by - with or without commentary.

For example, on this day:

• in 2008, Dave shared a post of random spellbook appearances on Monsters & Manuals, which is a neat way to spice up your fantasy game;
• in 2011, Patrick was asking whether or not he had invented drawing a dungeon on a polyhedron, and a couple of related questions;
• also in 2011, Zak S shared the Caves of Chaos as a really neat one-page dungeon;
• and also in 2011, Chris shared six random jerks you annoy in town! 

It's interesting to see people riffing on ideas as they come up, but I wonder what ideas might be re-discovered or re-examined - even appreciated more - by looking back?