Wednesday, April 27, 2022

Pipe Dream

So, I've decided I want to write a new book. About how to play Dungeons & Dragons. Well...how to play Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

[just changed the title of this post...fits better]

I am guessing this news will meet with very little fanfare or excitement...and that's okay. My normal blog readers already have a pretty good grounding (I believe) in the D&D game...or even if they don't (or play it in a different style from myself) they are experienced enough and/or set in their ways enough that such a work would be less than truly useful.

Likewise, most of the younger, hipper generation who are all about the 5E, or the Pathfinder, or the Powered by the Apocalypse, or the Into the Odd, or whatever...they are surely likely to find very little of value in such a tome.

That being said...

That being said, posting long essays on my blog about Big Concepts or a New Paradigm or blah-blah-blah...even when linked by some universal theme is...well, it's not the same as throwing a book out into the universe. Hear me out for a second: a book might be read, it might not be, it might be passed around, loaned, borrowed, picked up, stolen, found on a shelf, in a library, in a gas station restroom...anywhere. It's a piece of thought given concrete form that might be useful in the present, or some years down the road when it is discovered at a yard sale or in a used book store. 

This blog...who knows how long it will exist? I blog at the pleasure of blogger. It could disappear tomorrow without a trace, all its content being lost the way everything on G+ vanished into the ethers. *poof* I was never much of a presence (or reader) on G+, but there are other forums / internet thinktanks that carried long spiels written by Yours Truly that have disappeared and (as far as I know) gone forever.

For all its appearance of permanence...Ye Old Blog is more likely a transitory, temporary phenomenon.

SO...a book. On D&D. Advanced D&D. That's my new project. Wrote up a tentative table of contents today...should amount to somewhere between 150 and 240 pages. Which is too long, of course (for this day and age where folks don't read)...but I can always do an audio podcast of the chapters for the literacy-impaired types.

Everyone needs a hobby.

Yeah. Mark it down. 4/27/2022. Started work on the grand opus. I mean, we really don't need another retro-clone do we? Let's just teach people how to play the game that already works.

I promise I'll let folks know when it's done. Just in case they want a copy for their shelf.

6 comments:

  1. I think you just hit an important point about the value of bloggers writing books, even (or maybe especially) if the book is simply an edited-together version of important/popular/themed posts.

    I know bloggers can sometimes catch flack for writing books like that (or books at all), but there's great value in the permanence of that medium.

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  2. You're right to think of this type of project. 21y ago I read that the UK's Atomic Energy Authority concluded that the best way of keeping records of what sorts of waste was stored where and how was paper. A special type of paper which could withstand heat, jnsect attack etc, but still paper!

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