Year of the Owlbear

Source: http://hicksvillecomics.com/1752

One year ago tomorrow, I published my first real article for Raging Owlbear which began my journey into the blogosphere in earnest.  Over the past year, I gained about 88 thousand page views from 75 posts, just shy of what I hoped would be a 100K freshman year, but still respectable in my mind. I have a few hundred Google+ followers and I've made a name (albeit a small one) for myself in the RPG blogging community. Not too bad for year one.

Blogging over the last 12 months has also improved my creativity. I'm thinking a lot more about game design, DMing, world building, and my writing has improved overall.

On the other hand, I've also had challenges. I've started several creative projects that are sitting at anywhere from 10% to 25% completed and obligated myself to others despite my already limited time to work on my own blog. It seems I want to do a lot more than what I realistically have time for.

For my one year resolution, I plan to get back to several of my half-started endeavors and complete at least half of them (trying to be realistic here).

I stumbled in my development of 1st Adventures when I discovered that many of my ideas had already been done, and done very well, by others. While I knew many of my ideas were probably not revolutionary, the more I dug into other OSR systems, the more I realized I didn't have as much new or different to offer as I initially thought. This was a bit of a blow to my creative juice. I've been thinking of new ways to approach this project to get it off the ground again.

Second, I want to get back to the D&D Primer. I still have some compelling ideas for a "newbie packet" that includes more than just my introductory example and character sheet.

Third, I want to keep the ball rolling on creating 5th Edition conversions of existing modules and I'm hoping to rope in some other popular bloggers to the table, so this becomes more of a community affair.

In addition, I'd like to keep writing about Dangerous Journeys to see what else I can discover about Gygax and his... uhmm... "creative" game design.

Lastly, there are at least 3 or 4 other half-baked ideas that I haven't mentioned on the blog. It'd be a personal feather in my cap if I could get at least one of them launched.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you stick around for another year. I think you'll see some more entertaining, compelling and useful articles coming out of the Owlbear for your gaming edification.

Marty -- The Raging Owlbear