Bloggies 2026 - My Nominees
It's the most wonderful time of year, the Bloggies! The RPG Blogosphere all gathers around, has a contest in which we pit the year's best blog posts against each other, and then ritually punishes the winner by forcing them to host next year.
Beyond what I thought were my two best posts, I made quite a few other submissions this year. Most of them I submitted to the Gameable and Advice categories, but I still nominated a few in Critique and Theory. What follows is a non-complete (because I neglected to record for this post as I was submitting) listing of some of my highlights from 2025.
Failure Tolerated - Writing Rooms in Pairs - Linking parts of your dungeon together both makes it feel more alive and makes it more legible to players
MURKDICE - 2 rules for scenario design - A good look at the basic information a scenario should have
Gem Room Games - The Problems Department - What attributes make a problem into something that's interesting for players to solve at the table?
Idraluna Archives - Heartlands, Borderlands, Hinterlands - How do different settlement patterns in a world affect what sort of adventures take place in those regions?
Dungeon Scrawler - Dungeon Room Index - Chock full of both interesting rooms you can drop into your dungeons and thoughts about the why of dungeons
Dice Goblin - Just Use Bears... Or Wolves, Dragons or Spiders - Despite the title missing the Oxford comma, broadening the classic Just Use Bears makes for a bestiary that's still simple but a bit more flexible.
MURKDICE - Dungeon Stocking Overhaul - Writing rooms in clusters is a great development of writing rooms in pairs, and I also appreciate combining rooms so they're informationally denser.
Grinning Rat - Languages and Frictionless Design - As may be obvious from my previous posts, I have a dabbler's interest in linguistics. This is both a usable look at language proficiency and some interesting thoughts on how friction can cause players to engage more completely with the fiction.
Valeria Loves - Promises - a Mythic Bastionland House Rule - Combining Wolves Upon the Coast's Boasts with Burning Wheel's Instincts and then throwing in a reputation system as well was a great idea.
d4 Caltrops - Wilderness Stocking Expanded - A useful set of tables for building and maintaining your wilderness
TRAIPSE - The 10 types of special rooms - What's a room when it's not a monster, trap, or empty?
Grinning Rat - 100 Ways to Improve Your GMing - Full of useful tips, almost certain to contain one or two that you could learn from
The Dodecahedron - The OSR Onion - There are many "What is the OSR?" posts out there. This one might just be my favorite.
Dice Goblin - Stacking the Deck - Mining Fallout: New Vegas for TTRPG Setting Ideas - A great look at how factions interact with each other and the setting's central questions using a classic CRPG for examples
Joy of Dice - LEVERAGE - A Tool for Social Fictional Positioning - So many social interaction systems in RPGs are terrible. This one is good.
Widdershins Wanderings - Play Style Preferences: Character Cultivation, Not Character Builds - As time passes, I am increasingly enamored with diegetic advancement. This explains why it's great.
Beau Rancort - Common Adventure Pitfalls - Beau's exacting reviews are valuable. This is a summation of many common technical writing problems that make adventures harder to parse or run or just less interesting.
Please, go out and support your favorite posts from this year by submitting your own slate of nominations! There's so many great people blogging out there and it's wonderful to see them recognized.