Looking Forward: 2020

There was a lot of experimentation in 2019, and a lot happened that will feed into my plans for 2020. One thing I had been looking at was possible commercial products. A few of my blog readers have suggested that I do this, but I wasn’t sure if it would be worth it. So, I started a regular publication schedule, promoted my PDF releases more regularly, and tracked the results of my efforts.

The results weren’t encouraging.

I do get positive feedback from a few people, but the reality is that few people actually checked out the PDF links. Even map PDFs, which get a lot of attention, don’t really make much of an impact. And they require the most effort: I tried to maintain a weekly schedule for releasing maps, then reduced to bi-weekly, then eventually monthly. Map Mondays was never really that popular, and maps take up so much time that they basically destroyed my weekends and prevented work on other projects, blog-related and otherwise.

So, the current plan is to abandon commercial attempts, including Map Mondays. There will still be maps from time to time, but I’m thinking only a couple a year, with no set plans. Product schedules are being dumped. I have a couple big projects in mind, but they will be done when they are done. There won’t be regular product releases.

There will still be a Monday/Thursday post schedule, but the content of blog posts is changing. I’m thinking there will be much, much less analysis, very few rules-oriented posts. Most of the things that needed saying have been said, and I should really focus creative efforts on the remaining PDF projects rather than in blog posts. One exception, however, is that I want to do more posts about my setting. These will be short and descriptive, but infrequent.

So what will I be posting about twice a week? One thing I want to do more of is linking to other people’s blog posts. I’ll be doing less commentary on other people’s posts, maybe a few sentences, but more re-directing to things I found interesting.

I also plan on expanding the focus of the blog. It’s been almost exclusively tabletop RPG-related for more than ten years now. I’ve talked before about doing reviews of non-RPG stuff I read or watch. Still mostly fantasy adjacent, or nonfiction that ties into fantasy, but as time goes on, you’ll be seeing more stuff that has no real connection to pseudomedieval D&D fantasy. Also, I may have some things to say about a couple video games. I am not really into video games that much, but the few I do play, I play a lot. I may want to talk about them.

There may actually be a few other non-RPG topics I may blog about. I’m just warning everyone now: 2020 will be mostly RPG, but not completely. So don’t be shocked when 30% of the posts turn out to have no relevance to D&D.