Attronarch's Athenaeum

Blogging

Looking back, I realise I wrote much more than I remember! 182 blog posts, mostly session reports, news about new releases, crowdfunding campaigns, and sales, and various challenges (Character Creation Challenge and RPGaDAY). Regardless, I am still a bit shocked by the volume.

I blog for fun, and write what I want when I want. Turns out I like to write more often than I thought! Looking at analytics, I see that the blog was visited 23 000 times. Five most visited blog posts in 2025 were:

  1. Goodbye to Alarums & Excursions APA. Legendary RPG APA ceased publication last year, and this was my humble farewell. The post was picked up and re-shared in the blogosphere, resulting with many views.
  2. Swords & Wizardry: White Box Editions. It seems that differences between various white box editions remains a popular topic.
  3. Swords & Wizardry: Which Monster Book to Pick. A comparison of all major S&W bestiaries, including a monster index, is still bringing in traffic.
  4. Swords & Wizardry: 400 Pregenerated Characters and 288 Equipment Packs. I love sharing useful material, so I am happy to see pregenerated characters and equipment packs used.
  5. News: Ever & Anon roleplaying APA launched. Following the demise of Alarums & Excursions APA, we started a successor APA named Ever & Anon. The same focus, same contributors, and same dedication to do it for years to come.

Three of the above are posts from 2024, and I am happy to see they are still useful to people. Two were about big news and were circulated and picked up by others, which I believe contributed a lot of views.

After going through all the last year's posts, I would like to highlight the following five as my favourite posts of 2025:

  1. Convention: Preparing for the Cauldron 2025. I pull the curtain on how I prepare for an OSR-focused con, from choice of adventures to why I choose OD&D to preparing supplemental material for players.
  2. Convention: Cauldron 2025 Reflections. I share my thoughts on all three games I ran at the con—including the six hour marathon session with 24 characters and 17 players—as well as general impressions of Cauldron con. Spoiler: it was awesome. Get on the wait list for this year if you can.
  3. 2025 Character Creation Challenge Day 31. 80 fourth-level OD&D characters ready for play.
  4. Wilderlands Hall of Fame 2023. Wilderlands Hall of Fame represents the most legendary gaming situation of the year, as voted by the players in our Conquering the Barbarian Altanis campaign. This one was illustrated by FSF-INK.
  5. Seventy Magical Weapons for Old-School Roleplaying Games. In 2023 year I rolled 70 magical weapons as part of the RPG Blog Carnival: Wondrous Weapons and Damning Dweomers. Since then several people asked me for a print-friendly PDF versions. So I made them!

What about this year?

I have decided not to participate in challenges as usual. I will focus instead on finishing old projects—Dragon Magazine reading list, S&W supplement, and two adventures for Fight On!—as well as supporting good people like Rob of Bat in the Attic Games, Matt & Suzy of Mythmere Games, Calithena & Iggy of Fight On! zine, and Jim of Ever & Anon.

This will be an exciting year.

#Blogging

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Blogger elmcat has created an interactive map of TTRPG blogs, showing relationships between hundreds of blogs. It is quite cool, and I recommend both the blog post and interactive map itself (takes a few seconds to load).

I was positively surprised to see Attronarch's Athenaeum is in the top 5%!

#Blogging

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I launched Attronarch's Athenaeum in March 2022 as a place to document session reports from the Conquering the Barbarian Altanis campaign set in the Wilderlands. Almost three years later and I have published around 500 blog posts. That... was not an initial idea!

Even more amusingly, session reports constitute only one quarter of all published posts! Another quarter comes from annual RPG a Day and Character Creation Challenge challenges. The rest is a mish-mash of resources, news, and whatever happens to be on my mind that I feel is worth sharing.

In April 2024 I have added GoatCounter, ultra-simple privacy-respecting analytics, to the blog so I get an idea if anyone is reading it at all. Since then GoatCounter had logged 12 000 visits. I am happy with that, even if I made a thousand or so of those visits. (I regularly use my own blog to remind myself of what happened in what session or use the tools I shared!)

Five most visited blog posts in 2024 were:

  1. 21 Lessons learned after running 100 sessions. I am happy that my reflections on running a long term campaign resonated with so many people.
  2. Swords & Wizardry: 400 Pregenerated Characters and 288 Equipment Packs. I made these to be used, and am delighted to hear from people who are benefiting from them.
  3. Swords & Wizardry: White Box Editions. Aftering explaining differences between Swords & Wizardry editions one to many time on Discord and Reddit I decided to write a long form blog post that I could link to instead.
  4. Swords & Wizardry: Which Monster Book to Pick. This post is an example of what happens when I wake up with a question and then share a distilled answer.
  5. News: Fight On! issue 15 now available. Return of the legendary OSR zine drew a lot of attention! I hope people will follow new and updated Fight On! website.

Besides the above, I'd like to highlight three posts that haven't received as many visits:

How about you? Did any of the last year's blog posts resonate with you?

Any favourites? Other thoughts?

#Blogging

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