Articles of 2024

If you've missed the past few weeks, for the month of December, I'm reflecting on my first year in the TTRPG industry. Today's focus is on the articles that I wrote this year. I'll pull out some favorite highlights from the blog, and I'll also reflect on some of the larger arcs of my writing journey and how the blog has evolved over 2024.

The Beginning

From the beginning of the blog back in January, I knew the basics of the formats that I wanted the blog to cover. I knew most of my "series". Those basic first articles were about the products that I'd written (basically product launch updates), reviews, and history articles that made explicit link to how to use that history in TTRPGs.

I'm particularly proud of my first history article on the genre of a Western, and how history was adapted into the media genre of the western. It imparts many of the lessons that I learned from my Wild West themed campaign.

Worldbuilding Elements of a Western
How do you develop a “Wild West” atmosphere for a TTRPG campaign set outside the real American West? This is going to focus around key elements for worldbuilding.

I also really enjoyed writing and researching my post about jesters. This was one of the first major pieces where I had to do real research, rather than just using history that I'd learned or taught. (My real job is as a high school history teacher, for those of you who don't know – and so I pull a lot of my history content from things that I've read in preparation for lessons I teach, or things that don't make it into my lessons). But the April Fool's Day piece involved research exclusively for the purposes of the article and its accompanying products, which made it particularly fun to produce. It also marked a move away from just doing "product launch" pieces, and instead trying to incorporate more content when I talked about a product that I was writing.

Jesters & Fools: History & Myth
Happy April Fool’s Day! This post is about the history of court jesters, and includes a collection of resources for using jesters in your Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

Series

My first article series – a bunch of more back-to-back articles around the same topic – was about Osteomancy and Bone Magic. In part, this was research that I wanted to do for my home game, where I'd mostly improv'ed my way into having my world's goblins conduct their arcane magic through the use of bones. Wanting to flesh that concept out more, I started to read about the history of "bone magic," and then started working on adapting it for TTRPGs: first, for a sort of Year-Zero-Engine-inspired game that may or may not ever get fleshed out; and then, for D&D 5e.

Osteomancy - Veritas Tabletop

The project was meant to end with an adventure--a polished version of the dungeon crawl that I ran with my players about a goblin leader, with a core puzzle about "throwing the bones" to see the future. But when trying to polish up the version that I ran, I hit a roadblock in conveying a lot of the puzzle elements, and that final piece to the series never progressed.

That would become a bit of a pattern with my larger series linked to products. In June, I started my Guide to Goblins series, where I explored a bunch of the folklore behind different goblin stories. The goal was for this to culminate in a major guide that had different goblin cultures and stat blocks for use in your game.

Goblins - Veritas Tabletop

As I talked about last week, that project floundered as the articles I wrote got ahead of actually writing the product. And once the articles were written, that blank page of the project became particularly daunting to actually complete. I'd like to come back to it at some point, and I learned a lot of things about my writing process from it. But I'm also realizing that starting a series, writing the fun parts (the history and the idea generation), and then never whipping the ideas into a polished, publishable product form is a bit of a trend.

The Lull

Also as I wrote about last week, I had a bit of a lull over the summer. I spent a bunch of time traveling (which was great and very fun) during my summer break– the best perk of being a teacher. But that ate up my whole article backlog of stuff that I pre-wrote, and I spent a few weeks scrambling to rebuild the queue after I returned. August and September had a few weeks with no articles, or very short updates.

That said, one highlight did emerge during this backlog. My article on guilds is, I think, some of the better content that I wrote. And people tend to agree, it seems, as that post is the most highly visited page on the website, and a few other people have even linked to the post on their own sites, which is incredibly flattering.

Rethinking Fantasy Feudalism: What’s a Guild?
Thinking about guilds when we’re so rooted in the modern world is tricky. Guilds aren’t dead, they aren’t labor unions, and they aren’t thieves’ guilds.

October Series & Interviews

Two things have really helped get me back in the swing of things. The first is interviews. I've done two of these so far, and I hope to do more in 2025. I've had some great conversations, and it has been awesome learning about other peoples' approaches to integrating history and fiction. Getting these more varied sorts of opinions has also, I think, sparked some fun in the blog by having voices other than my own be present.

Interview: “Tian Xia and Adapting Myth” with Eren Ahn
I spoke with Eren Ahn, a member of the ENnie-award winning team that made Pathfinder Lost Omens: Tian Xia, about how they adapted folklore in the world guide.

The second thing was my October series on vampires. This was actually the first thing that I had planned to do when I started the blog: I knew that for the Halloween season, I wanted to write about the history behind vampires, as inspired in large part by a class that I had taken during my college years.

October 2024 - Veritas Tabletop

While I had not planned all the details for what would be accompanying the series, I also really enjoyed writing a vampire for Vaesen as part of the series. The series got me producing products again, and because I knew pretty strongly what I wanted to do with the series from the beginning, it also helped me build up my queue again, giving me the buffer I needed to edit and revise more and to enjoy writing again without feeling the pressure of a weekly schedule.

I'm really enjoying where the blog is now. I feel like I've mostly kept true to the original format of the blog, and I've expanded it with including interviews. I've learned that a series that culminates in some big product does not really work with my workflow, but a stand-alone series or a series with smaller projects sprinkled across it (like the October series) does work for me. I've loved doing interviews, and I hope to do more in 2025.

Next week, I'll wrap up my reflections, and I'll talk about some of my goals for Veritas Tabletop in 2025.

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Fools of April

The Tusall Gang

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