Elf Ork Porn Welcomes You to OSR (And My Other Weirdest Keyword Hits This Week)

By this morning everyone is undoubtedly aware of James' brilliant idea to use his hottest blog keyword combo hot elf chick to pimp their blogs.

This is funny timing, because over the last week I have been keeping notes on the weirdest Google search keywords that have resulted in people finding my blog. Yes - elf ork porn uncovered my blog for some mysterious soul out there in the world. Don't ask me why, because I've never written about my feelings on this topic. Here are this week's keyword winners grouped by theme:

NAUGHTY:
elf ork porn   (cool)
cyclopeatron porn   (I'm flattered)
trent foster porn   (Another L.A. DM making naughty movies, eh?)
kitten raping clown demon
necro babe
limp hammer
3d tits   (Definitely better than 2d tits)
tits anaglyph

TATTOOS:
wizard castle tattoos   (Awesome - I want one of these)
happyclown tattoo  (I'll pass...)

MYSTERIES I CAN'T HELP WITH:
are there any tunnels on venus
how to identify water mycelium
the cost of cotton in 1840   (I hope this person enjoyed Cyclopeatron) 
80s fashion jcpenney    (Must be my new Arnesonian eyeglass frames) 
thought tunnel task sheet   (Sounds like an excellent gaming aide)

OBESITY EPIDEMIC:
fat larper
fat wizard  (This one has popped up twice this week)

GAME NERDZ:
half orc larp  (A result of human + orc larp gone to far?) 
larp hammer
dices my precious

Blog Readers Don't Want Creative Content

My last post about the OSR Blog Graveyard generated an interesting discussion about the nature of OSR blogosphere content. I mentioned in a comment that even though quite a few blogs have gone quiet, there are still over 200 that are regularly pumping out a Dragon Magazine’s worth of material every day or two. This comment generated these thoughtful responses:

-C: “Entirely too much of that dragon magazine's worth of material is equivalent to forum letters, rather than articles. I am fairly frustrated during my daily blog roll review at the amount of posts that are nothing more than opinion pieces on "what OSR means" and the absurd "OSR is dead" other rubbish.”

Dyson Logos: “I'm with -C from Hack & Slash. Even worse than the navel-gazing though is the edition warriors. Keep to the content generation and talking about how awesome our games are (with examples of play, not with navel-gazing) instead of how un-awesome something is.”

As a blog READER I like the best of both commentary (i.e. history, news, and opinion) and creative content. I think both can be done quite well. As well, both are equally susceptible to becoming trivial and uninteresting in the wrong hands.

In contrast, as a blog WRITER I find myself constantly pulled towards writing more commentary. Why? These are by far my most popular posts. I would be lying if I said I don’t get some sort of positive reinforcement when a post gets a ton of comments and hits. I’m only human.

I’ve put a modicum of effort into a number of creative content posts – like my Gamma World character sheet, fillable-PDF henchman cards, and fully-illustrated culinary guide to wizard entrails. I like writing these kinds of posts and I will continue to do so. The attention these posts get, however, is miniscule compared to something like my pretentious and gametastically useless I Am D&D post from a few days ago.

So what does this all mean? Well, one obvious explanation is that the creative content I produce stinks, which may well be true. I think, however, that most blog readers truly prefer commentary over creative content. Grognardia is the biggest old school gaming blog around – how much creative content does it have? Virtually none. On the other side of the coin, I could easily name several blogs that regularly produce excellent creative content yet attract relatively little attention.

Even though I think most readers would say they like creative content the best, I bet you dollars-to-donuts their mouse clicks would say otherwise…

The OSR Blog Graveyard

For my blogometric exercises I need to track blogs by following them on blogger.com. Unfortunately blogger.com only allows me to follow a maximum of 300 blogs. I have now maxed out this number. In order for me to keep track of new and interesting blogs that pop up, I am now forced to unfollow blogs that are dead or inactive.

I combed my list for blogs that are either DEAD, EMPTY, or INACTIVE (i.e. no posts for ~2 months or more). Here I present a list of these 59 blogs. I will unfollow and stop tracking all DEAD and EMPTY blogs, and all blogs that have been inactive for four or more months. If you own one of these blogs and care, feel free to drop me a note telling me that you intend to revive your blog in the near future, and I will gladly keep tracking it for my blogometrics posts.


Links to all blogs that have content, even if they are inactive, will remain on my master blog list.

Blog	Status	Months Inactive
Bite The Bulette	GONE
GAME SNOB	GONE
Romance Monsoon	GONE
THE DOOMED WASTELAND	GONE
The Rusty Battle Axe	GONE
Tremulous Antennae	GONE
HEYMIKEY.ORG	EMPTY
Welcome To Dungeon!	EMPTY
"It's okay; Gary sent us."	INACTIVE	2
1d30	INACTIVE	5
Apprentice Of Old School	INACTIVE	2
Back in '81	INACTIVE	2
Castle Dragonscar	INACTIVE	3
Cimmerian Chronicles	INACTIVE	3
Coffee swillin' analog gamer	INACTIVE	3
Creative Mountain Games	INACTIVE	7
DUNGEON ADVENTURES	INACTIVE	2
Dungeon Mistress	INACTIVE	7
DungeonCurmudgeon	INACTIVE	9
Dungeons & Dorks	INACTIVE	7
elves ate my homework	INACTIVE	8
ENCOUNTER	INACTIVE	2
In a Dark Cell	INACTIVE	4
Lost Papers of Tsojcanth	INACTIVE	2
malevolent & benign	INACTIVE	11
Mandragora: The Mandrake March	INACTIVE	8
MF WARS	INACTIVE	6
Middenmurk	INACTIVE	3
Musings from Myern	INACTIVE	4
Notes From Under the Kyak	INACTIVE	6
O RPG da Vida Real	INACTIVE	2
Penguin Overlord	INACTIVE	4
Polar Bear Dreams and Stranger Things	INACTIVE	6
Ramblings of a Gentleman Gamer	INACTIVE	5
Redbeard's Ravings	INACTIVE	7
Semper Initiativus Unum	INACTIVE	6
Some King's Kent	INACTIVE	3
Spell Card!	INACTIVE	2
Swords of Abandon	INACTIVE	2
Swords of Minaria	INACTIVE	4
Tales from the Dusty Vault	INACTIVE	5
The 25 Mile Hex	INACTIVE	5
The Badger King's Den	INACTIVE	5
The Burning Wastes	INACTIVE	4
The Contemptible Cube of Quazar	INACTIVE	3
The Delve	INACTIVE	9
The Dragon's Eye	INACTIVE	5
The Dragon's Musing	INACTIVE	6
The Keep on the Gaming Lands	INACTIVE	4
The Old Forest	INACTIVE	4
The Paradigm Traveler	INACTIVE	3
The XP Experience	INACTIVE	3
The Zonked World of Holmold	INACTIVE	9
Threads of Adventure!	INACTIVE	4
Valley of Blue Snails	INACTIVE	6
Warning - Mutagenic Substance	INACTIVE	2
Weird Worlds of Geoffrey McKinney	INACTIVE	5
Where'd my Vorpal Sword Go?	INACTIVE	5
Wilderlands of Runequest	INACTIVE	6

Wizard Banjo

One of the strangest and rarest of magic items: A Wizard Banjo!

F*ck Hasbro. I Am D&D.

So Are You.

What's up with these blog posts describing people shying away from saying "I play D&D"?

I play a game, and on the box it says "Dungeons & Dragons".

If someone is nerdy enough to know and care that there are different versions of D&D, it only takes two more syllables to say "I play old school D&D". Give me a break - Hasbro lawyers aren't going to break into your dining room to confiscate your Gary Gygax books. Hasbro might repress their legacy PDFs, but they can't unpublish the past. We need to fight, not acquiesce. Only through our constant use of the term "Dungeons & Dragons" can we promote genericization of the trademark. As the Old School Rebellion, I see it as our duty to do this. D&D is just too awesome and too personal to let it be co-opted by the highest bidder. It's not a simple boardgame like Monopoly or Trivial Pursuit - it's a beautiful, creative, life-long hobby we share with our friends. The dirty secret Hasbro wants you to forget is that you don't have to buy anything from them (or anyone else) to play D&D.

There is no reason to cede D&D to Hasbro. The only reason I can think of to use a silly code word for D&D is for commercial publishing - and that's what the retro-clones are for, right? End of discussion.

I play D&D. We all play D&D.

We are D&D, and D&D is us.

Poll: What Generation D&D Player Are You?

There's been a lot of interest in my last post, which outlines the six generations of D&D players. One commenter suggested a poll, which sounds like a fun idea! Soooo... based on the generations I outlined, where do YOU fit in?

Poll in right column ---->

Defining the Six Generations of D&D Players

People like to talk about what generation of D&D players they belong to (for example, see a post today at The Other Side blog). Here's how I've always thought of the six generations of D&D players. I consider myself late 2nd generation because I started with the Moldvay Basic Set.

I just started a poll in the right column -->

The Founders: Pre-1974
You belong to the tiny group of people who gamed with Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, Rob Kuntz, etc. before D&D was commercially available.


1st Generation: 1974-1977
Game: Dungeons & Dragons

Characteristics: You belong to a relatively small group that starting roleplaying with the three little brown books. These may have been blurry bootleg facsimiles, or, if you were lucky, they were originals tucked into a woodgrain or white box (shown).

2nd Generation: 1978-1982
Games: Basic Set (Holmes), Basic/Expert Sets (Moldvay/Cook), Advanced D&D

Characteristics: You belong to the largest generation of D&D players. You came of age in the late 1970s or early 1980s when D&D was a huge fad and sold zillions of copies. It's likely that you began playing with the Holmes "Blue Box" or Moldvay "Purple Box" (shown) basic sets, eventually "graduating" to the AD&D hardcovers. 

3rd Generation: 1983-1988
Games: Basic/Expert/Companion/Master/Immortal Series, "Updated" AD&D

Characteristics: Even though D&D went through a major popularity decline in the mid-80s, new players like you continued to pick up the game either through the expanded series of boxed sets - including Mentzer's famous "Red Box" basic set (shown) - or through the ever-expanding line of updated AD&D hardbacks with the Easley covers.

4th Generation: 1989-1999
Games: AD&D 2nd Edition, D&D Game, Classic D&D, Rules Cyclopedia

Characteristics: You primarily played AD&D 2e, although a small number of you may have been introduced to the game through the various basic editions (The D&D Game or Classic D&D). This was the lowest point for D&D as most roleplayers during this period favored games like Vampire or GURPS or skipped RPGs altogether to be part of the new collectible card game scene.
 

5th Generation: 2000-2007
Games: D&D 3rd Edition (and 3.5)

Characteristics: You started playing D&D with 3e or 3.5e, probably in the heyday of the d20 open gaming license. 3e breathed new life into D&D at this time, but interest eventually started to wane due to a glut of poor quality third party products, and a confusing progression of complex rule additions, updates, and errata.

6th Generation: 2008-now
Games: D&D 4th Edition, Retroclones (Pathfinder, Labyrinth Lord, etc.)

Characteristics: You first started playing D&D a couple of years ago, most likely the 4th edition. This generation is quite different than preceding generations, however, because many new players are choosing to start with earlier editions of D&D, especially the 3.5e retroclone Pathfinder which threatens to eclipse D&D 4e in popularity.