Bloggies / New Year

— Jan Caspar Philips, mid 18th century

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The Dododecahedron is three years old today! 2025 was a good year of blogging and gaming for me. A few highlights:

• I wrote several hundred rooms (plus rules, origins, and more) for Castle Kelpsprot, my megadungeon capsule game, and ran eight sessions.
• I played over 20 sessions of Dolmenwood with the same folks I’ve been playing OSR games with for five years—and two of our respective partners joined this campaign!
• I co-founded Carouse, Carouse! with over a dozen writers, artists, and designers! I got the ball rolling by writing an initial pitch and putting out the call for collaborators, but beyond that it’s been an amazing group effort.
• I published 22 blog posts—two more than last year.
• Readership surged: The Dododecahedron got as many views in 2025 as in the previous two years combined. If I were in it for the views I’d be on TikTok, and this is still a small blog even by OSR standards, but it’s also really nice to have more people reading my words. I attribute this surge almost entirely to the lovely folks who have shared my writing on Discord or Bluesky or linked to my posts in their newsletters. Thank you to everyone who shared my work in 2025—and a special thank-you to Jay Dragon! The OSR Onion became my most-read post practically overnight after she wrote some very kind words about it on Bluesky.

The Bloggies

I love blogs. I think it’s so fucking cool that my favorite game designers publish freely-available posts on theory, design, and their works-in-progress. And you know what else is cool? Every year, some of my favorite ideas come from people I’d never heard of before. The Bloggies are a celebration of all that, and I’m a big fan.

Below are the posts from 2025 that I’m proudest to have written, plus a woefully incomplete list of standouts from other bloggers. Please consider nominating any that you deem deserving!

• Crossing the Dungeon Rubicon
• The OSR Onion
• Design Crawl 1
• Character Studies
• Classless Clerics

• Designing Dungeons Course by Josh of Rise Up Comus & Warren of I Cast Light!
• Mapping the Blogosphere by Elmcat of Among Cats and Books
• The Expressionist Games Manifesto by Jay of Possum Creek Games
• Let’s Make a Forest by Yochai of New School Revolution
• The Rest of the F#@king Owlbear by John from Carouse, Carouse!
• Pocket-sized Powder Kegs by Ty of Mindstorm
• A Hexmap for Middle-earth by Josh of Rise Up Comus
• Sandbox Settlements by Elmcat of Among Cats and Books
• Arthurian Mysticism and Violence by Amanda of Weird Wonder
• Sam’s Three-Question Taxonomy
• Monster, Maiden, Madonna, Medusa by Warren of Prismatic Wasteland
• Running Mythic Bastionland by Elmcat of Among Cats and Books
• How Jennell Jaquays Evolved Dungeon Design by Nickoten of Pathika
• Party Geometry by Rose of This Vorpal Coil
• Wilderness Stocking – Expanded by Ktrey of d4 Caltrops
• The 10 Types of Special Rooms from Traipse
• Why Megadungeons? by Warren of I Cast Light!
• Close and Distant Playstyles from Patchwork Paladin
• A Mask That Eats Into Your Face by Joel of Silverarm Press
• A Lock With No Key by Derek of Widdershins Wanderings
• Control Weather Should Not Be a Spell by Warren of Prismatic Wasteland
• Dungeon Room Index from Dungeon Scrawler
• Dungeons & Deconstruction by Josh of Rise Up Comus
• Make Better Mind Pictures from Was It Likely?
• Writing Rooms In Pairs by Sean of Failure Tolerated
• Dog Dagger by Zak of Bommyknocker Press
• Scooby Doo as Post Apocalyptic RPG Setting by Joel of Silverarm Press
• Combat as My Balls by Liz of Magnolia Keep

Plans For the New Year

• Publish an adventure (finally).
• Play more new games—particularly non-OSR games.
• Attend my first con: Between Two Cons!