Friday, July 25, 2025

ONE HUNDREDTH POST ON SAVE VS WORM !!!!!!!!

 

This is the 100th POST on SAVE vs. WORM !!!!

(I've been holding off on posting anything else until I make this post so that the timing works out exactly... but then I majorly procrastinated on actually making this for a few reasons, it's now a full month later than I originally wanted it to be out, I'm maybe the worst procrastinator ever, but anyway)

As a result, I reserve the right make one (1) incredibly self-indulgent self-reflective post with a big announcement (stay tuned to the end!) and a look back on ten years of D&D blogging... wait, 10 years? But this blog has only existed since October 2020?
 
Yes, but 2015 was the year that I made my first foray into OSR blogging, over at the very clumsily-named marsworms-rpgs.blogspot.com. I was 14 years old (actually 13 when I first started the blog since it was shortly before my birthday!) and trying to break out of just lurking on blogs like Goblin Punch, Dungeon of Signs, Dreams in the Lich House, and more, and start posting my own adventures and ideas. The original blog was honestly half-baked at times and never got all that much attention, and after three years of posting to it through multiple different phases of the blog's existence (including one where I leaned into a very over-the-top chaotic tone of voice with inconsistent capitalizations for effect while I described more overtly weird settings), I abandoned it and transitioned entirely to writing D&D stuff for my own enjoyment (and for my high school game) in Google docs. Wasn't until fall 2020 that I had the idea for King of Kings and started using this blog, and haven't stopped ever since (a few hiatuses notwithstanding).
 
But, before I share some highlighted posts from marsworms-rpgs (for those who might be interested to see what a teen way too into OSR stuff was up to in the mid 2010s I guess), the most important thing to highlight about my old blog is that its technically the place where the earliest GLOG was posted, kind of, maybe, by a technicality. This is something that came to the attention of the OSR server when I joined that back in 2020, so some of y'all definitely already know this. On August 3rd, 2015, I posted a link to an original Gamma World-inspired ruleset called Mutants & Machines of the Baffling Badlands (MMotBB for short). I took mechanical inspiration for MMotBB from A Rulset of My Very Own, a pre-GLOG ruleset developed by Arnold K. that would later develop into the GLOG! When the GLOGgers in the OSR server found that out, they decided to add this little abandoned ruleset to the big spreadsheet of GLOGhacks as "technically the first GLOGhack" since it came out a full year before the GLOG proper. I guess that's my contribution to the hobby there!
 
Here's links to some of the other more interesting posts from my original blog:
I also figure I could use this as an opportunity to highlight some of the most popular and most underrated (in my view) posts on Save vs. Worm as well!
 
First, of course, I want to highlight having finished the Goin' Through the Fiend Folio series! 17 parts, more than 150 monsters, and several digressions back into the early days of the hobby via the Fiend Factory column in White Dwarf, where many of the monsters originated! Check out the newly-created Goin' Through the Fiend Folio Archive page for a nice centralized repository of links to those posts and anything related to them. I'd also like to highlight the amazing work done by my good friend Nick LS Whelan over at Blogs on Tape, an incredibly valuable podcast-by-way-of-archiving-project to record audio versions of blog posts that represent the OSR blogosphere; two posts of mine, A Forgotten Monster: The Cruel Jackdog and The Dog who Speaks Softly and the Woman who Barks Like a Dog were recently featured over on Blogs on Tape!

Before going into all-time most-viewed posts, here's the graph of the blog's view analytics over the past 5 years.

While there was a very sizeable, and for the longest time all-time highest, peak in late 2021, it's actually kinda notable at least to me that the blog's REAL all-time peak was this year! And seemingly not even that long ago! Save vs. Worm entering its line go up era ??? This is gonna be my elfgame equivalent of the Japanese economic boom.

Anywho, my all-time most viewed posts as of July 24th, 2025 have been:
Genuinely surprised that part 15 is the only Fiend Folio review post other than the first one to get into the top ten. I was going to say something about how the trick for a post to get into the top ten of all time is to just be on the blog for a while but that's not quite true, there's some very recent features on here! What folks seem to really like are things that riff on iconic D&D things (like the ear-covered Listener or the product identity post), everyone likes the Fiend Folio review series, and of my King of Kings posts, the most popular ones are generally monster posts. 
 
However, many of my BEST posts are UNJUSTLY ignored and maligned by the HIDEOUS CROWD... these UNDER-RATED posts receive nothing but CALUMNIES and PERSECUTIONS and IGNORING from people on like. reddit.com/r/OSR or whatever. Anyway, I do just want to take this opportunity to  highlight some posts I personally really think are worth a read, perhaps even worth a comment, but which have less than 500 views (and, ideally on the lower side of that!)
I think I can safely blame the long German title for the low view count on that last one there, but it's genuinely quite good!!
 
But, well, 100 posts in, we aren't stopping now! I've spent plenty of words and plenty of links on reflecting on things I've written, but I'll also use this as an opportunity to touch on plans for the future of the blog. For the most part, I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing. I've got a lot of posts in the pipeline, mostly for King of Kings related things, and I'm about to be restarting the King of Kings campaign after 2 years of hiatus, so look forward to a return of session reports and more late antique Iranian stuff that's really grounded in the needs of the game. I also generally want to start writing and posting more dungeons, since location-based adventure design is so important to OSR play yet often so underrepresented in our online output, myself included. Also keep an eye out for more branching out into other genres, especially my perennial favorites, modern horror and Gamma World style post apocalypse. I still really need to put the notes from that Underneath campaign I ran back in 2023 together to upload to the blog.
 
And, most importantly of all, I've got a BIG ANNOUNCEMENT !
  
I will be releasing a King of Kings adventure location zine! It's been in the works in unfinished form for four years now, because everything takes me ages to actually get around to doing for some reason, but anyway, I'm actually going to follow through now. Here's a couple of example page spreads as a lil teaser visual, since I don't yet have a cover ready:
 


Keep an eye out for MORTUARY ON MOTH MOUNTAIN , an adventure location zine for [x] players of [y] level set in the ancient world of King of Kings! I'm planning on releasing it digital-only via itch.io at first, but a print run will likely follow once I'm able to do that. 
 
Anyway, that's much too many words about me! I'm really glad that even a few people get anything out of my elfgame ramblings and ancient Persian mumblings, so thank you for reading. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming! 
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