The End of Grognardia

How's That for a Clickbait Title?

Let’s get this out of the way: no, I am not planning to end Grognardia — not today, not tomorrow, and, with luck, not anytime soon.

That said, I do think about the possibility from time to time and the circumstances under which I might decide to bring the blog to a close. After all, Grognardia did go silent for nearly eight years before I resurrected it, impulsively, on August 11, 2020. I’d toyed with the idea of restarting it for years but never committed. Then, one day, after reading Mörk Borg, I found myself jotting down a review I had no intention of posting. And then — well — I posted it. Momentum is a strange thing.

I bring this up because I suspect that Grognardia’s eventual end, whenever it arrives, will be similarly unplanned. Ideally, I’d like to finish with a bang rather than a whimper, something more like the conclusion of my decade-long House of Worms campaign than the innumerable, half-forgotten games that sputtered out within months. But I can’t guarantee anything. Despite having plenty of ideas and enthusiasm for the blog — not to mention this Substack and my Patreon — I can’t shake the suspicion that one day I may simply run out of steam, much as I did at the end of 2012.

Well, perhaps not exactly as I did in 2012. I do hope that, whenever the end comes, it will be less tumultuous than those now thankfully distant days.

Realistically, I imagine one of two scenarios. The first is that I simply run out of things to say. That might sound unlikely, but, trust me, it isn’t. I often struggle to come up with new posts, especially for long-running series like Retrospective. After nearly 5,000 posts, I picked all the low-hanging fruit ages ago. The same is true of many of the topics I regularly address. Old-school gaming is a big tent, but I — and many, many others — have been rummaging around inside it for a long time. Eventually, I might just conclude that everything worth saying has been said, by me or someone else, and that will be that.

The second scenario is intimately related: you’ll stop being interested in what I have to say. Believe it or not, I sometimes wonder if that isn’t already happening. Many posts struggle to get more than a couple hundred views or a handful of comments. And while I tell myself that I write primarily for my own enjoyment, that’s only mostly true. No writer — not even someone as mean-spirited as I like to pretend I am — writes entirely for himself. Without the sense that someone out there is reading and perhaps even caring, my enthusiasm inevitably dims. I don’t expect Grognardia to regain the readership it had in its heyday, but knowing there are still people who follow along matters a great deal to me.

Still, even as I contemplate these possibilities, I’m struck by how little control I seem to have over the blog’s rhythms. If its silence once arrived unbidden, its revival did too, and so does much of its ongoing life. I’ll sit down thinking I have nothing to write, only to be ambushed by a half-memory of a game session in 1983 or a new book that sends me down a rabbit hole. Inspiration is fickle, but it’s also persistent; it keeps showing up, unannounced, and you’re almost always glad that it did.

And that, I suppose, is why I keep going. Not because I expect Grognardia to endure forever or because I believe I’m saying anything earth-shattering, but because the act of writing it continues to surprise and delight me. Even on the days when I stare at a blinking cursor for far too long, I remain oddly grateful for the opportunity to try again the next day.

If Grognardia does end someday — and it will, one way or another — I hope it will feel less like a door slamming shut and more like the last session of a good campaign. The characters retire. The loose ends remain loose. Someone makes a joke that only half the players understands. Everyone leaves a little tired, a little older, but warmed by the knowledge that we shared something worthwhile, even if only for a while.