A Plan Takes Shape

Where Things Stand with the Grognardia Anthologies

First off, thank you to everyone who’s shared their thoughts with me, whether through this newsletter, the blog, or email. Your feedback has been immensely helpful as I work through my own ideas. While I reserve the right to change course, a publishing plan has started to take shape and I’d like to share it with you.

The most logical starting point seems to be the Grognardia Primer, though I’m not yet sold on that title. As a first step, I’m planning to compile an anthology of the 40–50 most popular, influential, and controversial posts from the blog’s history. I’ve heard from many readers who’d be interested in Grognardia collections, but I think it makes sense to begin with a kind of test run. This will help gauge whether the enthusiasm I’ve seen translates into actual support. It’s not quite the same scale as producing a new edition of Thousand Suns, but it’s still a significant undertaking. A solid response will help me decide how best to proceed.

The Primer (or whatever it ultimately winds up being called) will focus on the blog’s First Age (roughly 2008 to 2012), when Grognardia was at the height of its influence within the Old School Renaissance. There have certainly been well-received posts during the blog’s Second Age (2020–present), but I’m not convinced many of them have had the same impact. That’s likely due in part to how the online RPG landscape has shifted over time. Even so, I can’t shake the feeling that the early years were the blog’s defining era. That’s why they’ll be the focus of this initial volume.

If all goes well with the Primer, I absolutely plan to produce a volume dedicated to the best and most substantial posts of the Second Age. But that’s a ways off. There’s still a lot to do before then. For example, some popular features of the blog, like the Pulp Fantasy Library and the Retrospective series, won’t be part of this first book. Instead, each will likely get its own anthology. Both are well-loved and distinct enough to deserve their own dedicated volumes. That means we’re potentially looking at three, maybe even four, anthologies in total, assuming there’s enough interest.

One thing I’ve decided is that I won’t be including comments from the original blog posts. As valuable as many of them are – and I do believe some are every bit as interesting as the posts themselves – there’s just no practical way to include them. The logistics are daunting and space is limited. I want to avoid producing doorstoppers. Something had to give and the comments seemed the most sensible cut.

That said, I will be including new introductions to some of the posts. Not all of them, just the ones that I think benefit from additional context. Some posts make more sense when placed within the broader history of the OSR or RPG discussions. Take “How Dragonlance Ruined Everything,” for example. It didn’t appear in a vacuum; it was written during an early OSR debate about the shift in D&D toward a more “story-driven approach,” something that many old schoolers pushed back against. Without that background, the post might come across differently than I intended and I want to avoid that.

These introductions are all newly written. I hesitate to use marketing terms like “added value,” but I do want to make this collection more than just a reprint of old blog posts. There should be something distinctive about these anthologies that makes them worth owning. At the same time, the original posts remain the core attraction. The introductions are short and to the point, meant to clarify and illuminate, not overshadow.

That’s where things stand right now. I hope to include a full list of the posts slated for the Grognardia Primer in next week’s update.