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| Carol of the Rings |
It's been over a year since I started writing this blog, and in that time I've gone from posting random garbage to posting random (but useful) garbage! To my readers, I'd like to say: thanks for reading! I never expected this to really go anywhere, it was more of a way for me to gather information on my D&D games and force myself to write every day.
So, in honor of my Monday Recaps (and also because all my players are on vacation...), I want to use the last Monday of the year to go over what I've written so far and look ahead at what I will be writing next year.
Looking Back at 2017
I started this blog to chronicle my games, put my homebrew content out there, and support the people in my life. At the time, I was running 3 campaigns of varying sizes, and I had plenty of backlog to put into blog form. Now, I'm running five campaigns, and have to write pretty much everything from scratch. It's been a wild ride.
My first "hit" article was the Alternative Uses for Trinkets list. Technically, I made this one a while back, and posted it to Reddit. When the article went up, I linked it from there and got a few extra pageviews. However, that ship had kind of already sailed, meaning it didn't really take off.
However, my next big article had a few more factors in its favor. The Monster Factory article was something I made to imitate one of my favorite D&D shows, The Adventure Zone. I posted the article to Facebook and Reddit, and those communities gave me a lot of amazing feedback. Not just on the list, either - I learned a few tips about writing a blog and being a good internet citizen from those groups.
My most recent success story was over three years in the making - the Creature Loot articles. It was such a massive undertaking, I had to post only a little bit at a time. Fortunately, that kept my momentum going while I wrote some other cool articles. When it was finally finished, I posted it on Reddit, and /u/writerchild85 turned it into an amazing PDF. I was so grateful, I offered to write music or a game for him, but he simply asked me to pay it forward. I intend to!
The rest of the articles have had their fair share of views, but not nearly as much discussion or feedback. I'm hoping that I might be able to increase the amount of discourse on this blog in the future, because my most valuable experiences have come from learning about my writing from other people's perspectives.
Into 2018
Speaking of moving forward, I plan to continue this blog for the time being. Since it's hosted through the free Blogger service, I don't think it will be archived anytime soon, but I'd like to keep contributing to it for the foreseeable future.
I already have a few ideas for what I can write about moving forward, including more Lore of Ahneria, more Monday Recaps, and maybe even a Creature Loot table for other D&D products such as Volo's Guide to Monsters.
However, now that I'm fortunate enough to have readers who check into the blog, I'd like to offer my services to any topic you'd like me to write about. Is there something you'd like me to dig into? More DM tools for your games? Another breakdown of a D&D module? Please let me know in the comments!
I don't want this to drag on too long, so please know that I'm very thankful that so many people have enjoyed my work. At this point, I'm not planning on monetizing this project, since it's more of a hobby than anything, but if things keep growing the way they have been, I might start a Patreon or something. We'll see!
Again, from the bottom of my heart, thanks for reading. May your dice always roll criticals!
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