There are various reasons to like a blog. Generally speaking, I’ve heard it say that posting controversial opinions gets you more interaction than “useful” content. I know I fall into the same category. My gaming category on Feedly has 243 unread posts and when I start reading, I skip a lot.
Not only do I skip all the session reports, I also skip most of the new classes, most of the new spells, most of the new magic items, most of the house rules... I guess I feel that my game hasn’t reached a point where I’ve exhausted the material at my fingertips and therefore I have no need for all the little extras.
This is where Links to Wisdom comes in. This is the wiki to collect cool OSR house rules, including new classes, new spells, new monsters, advice for the creation of dungeon adventures, wilderness adventures, urban adventures, and so on.
OK, so *Links to Wisdom* has been growing steadily. It has nearly 1000 links on it, right now. 998 as I’m writing this, to be exact. I kept wondering, though: which sites had contributed the most links? Shouldn’t that be some sort of blog recommendation, as people would have to *actually recommend particular posts* on a blog? It’s better than a simple popularity contest, it would seem. And it would be better than a simple list of blogs. (If you’re interested in a list, check out The Great Blog Roll Call 2014 on Dyver’s blog.)
Anyway, I wrote a script to extract the blog domains from *Links to Wisdom* and list them according to numbers appearing:
If you click on the domain, you’ll be taken to the blog (unless it’s a useless domain such as plus.google.com or docs.google.com). It also says how many links were found, and if you click that number, it links to a list of all the matching entries.
At the moment, *Daddy Grognard* is the top dog because he’s been adding all his monsters. Thanks! Check out all the Daddy Grognard items.
Here’s how to make it easy to *contribute to the wiki*:
1. create a dummy bookmark
2. edit the bookmark and replace the URL with this: `javascript:location='http://campaignwiki.org/add-link?url='+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href)`
3. rename the bookmark to “Submit OSR Links to Wisdom”
4. save
If you’re looking at a cool page, click the link, and you’ll be taken to the submission form immediately.
It works if you’re on a mobile device, too. On my iPhone, there’s this little dance I do: Read cool stuff in G+ app → “Open in Safari” → “Submit OSR Link” bookmark. How did I manage to get a javascript link in my bookmarks? Create a dummy bookmark and edit it. Paste the javascript URL over the dummy URL.
As for the categories: they are generated automatically from the web pages of the wiki. That means it’s all editable.
If you’re a coder yourself, you might want to write your own app to submit links or edit the wiki, something easier to use, for example. Check out the Help page, if you’re so inclined.
#Old School #RPG
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I mostly read stuff that is about how to actually run and prepare a game. Additonal content like treasure, spells, monsters, maps an so on isn’t really useful for me, same goes for people telling about the conventions they’ve been to or ranting about what some game designer or commenter say, which they don’t agree with.
– Yora 2014-07-28 12:15 UTC
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Haha, yeah. Convention reports about conventions I did not go to are even less interesting than session I didn’t play in. 😄
I do like three supplements focusing on spells, though: The Basic Illusionist by Nathan Irving, Theorems & Thaumaturgy by Gavin Norman, and his (not available for free) *Complete Vivimancer*, also by Gavin Norman. Those collections provide a bit more than just a bunch of spells, they provide an entire theme, a spellbook for villains or allies, that kind of thing. Then again, situations where these come in handy are so rare, these spells and classes still haven’t made it into my campaign. I guess that just goes to show how little extra stuff is actually *needed*.
As for running and preparing games, I hope that the section Preparing and Running the Game has some interesting links. I keep thinking I should add some more subsections and reorganize it all, but I always get stuck and leave it as it is. Oh well. 👻
Preparing and Running the Game
– Alex Schroeder 2014-07-28 12:57 UTC
