The Product Boomerang

06 Mar, 2026

What Goes Out

Lightning in a bottle blog posts hit the scene and arc from community to community inspiring a new wave of ideas and what makes a good game. We've seen it happen with all sorts Bullet Points, Point Crawls, Control Panel, Overloaded Encounter Dice, and so on and so on and so on. All the hobbyists go to their workshop and make adventures and systems using these posts. And so the pattern goes of this brand new idea being placed into a whole new generation of games. But of course in our hobby of ONE BILLION hobbyists trying to be a part of the ONE THOUSAND who make decent scratch off of this someone is gonna slap a price tag on the idea and try to sell it to back to the market as the revolution that will change the hobby. With their design you can finally have frictionless fun and prep. Cuz so much of this goes back to making things simpler, faster, sleeker. Can you think of any (successful) innovations in the past while of the hobby that added friction or difficulty? Something that made adventures harder to run or more cumbersome? There has been this endless march to pare down the Original Game to its simplest constituent parts to maintain a viable game with very little overhead; now we are running so threadbare that many of the innovations that we push and pursue are parlor trick vamping that would be more at home in board games. All the fancy greebles drive big money on funders though. The mockups of how all those novel mechanics look and and interlock. Sadly the idea that you'd be perfectly happy with your own imagination and a free game from the 70's does not drive the scene's insatiable hunger for the novel and never before seen.

Let's look at a historical example of a blog post turned into STRAIGHT CASH, the ever present Overloaded Encounter Die. This mechanic has been ever present in the NSR, OSR, and POSR ¹ games to the point where it's probably more understood by audiences than encounter rules in B/X. On its surface it's easy to see why this is so popular, it streamlines multiple spinning plates into one simple die roll. Reducing the amount of variables that can be stressed limits the expression of the game. The post also seems aware of how silly and wasteful this mechanic can be by saying that the results should be treated as a prompt. If the tool is not going to be accurate, why would I use it over a system that is already precise. But these quibbles didn't stop legions of games from adopting it. Knave, Errant, Stay Frosty, and so many others all wave to Necropraxis who must feel very proud to see their work become so popular.

My personal gripes with the Overloaded Die do not diminish how rewarding it must be to see a blogpost of yours get picked up and put into so many different successful games. But Necropraxis isn't the one who threw the Product Boomerang. They had a fun idea and others took it up and slapped a price tag on it. Pilfering blogs for ideas is a time honored tradition nowadays. You're just as likely to see blogposts in Appendix Ns as other game books. And again how great would it be to see your own post used as a core mechanic in a game people are talking about? Now the incentive is there for people to blog for the sake of fame and recognition. I don't think Necropraxis intended for it to be as popular as it became. Reading through their blog it has plenty of posts that seem to be influenced by playing a lot of games. No doubt the Overloaded Encounter Die was a solution to a problem their table had. It did not present itself as a solution to the woes of dungeon crawling either. That arc from post to darling mechanic though is real alluring to a certain kind of person.

Blogging as an Identity

Now the boomerang of productification is swinging back to the blogs that produced the system flood. Many of the most popular blogs serve as an extension of their market. Some bloggers even charge for posts or have put together a dead tree version for the most ardent of thought collectors. (I am not sure how many 10 dollar blog posts I've read, let alone a 40 dollar one.) A lot of us is driven by an urge to have their idea be the next Overloaded Encounter Die and be cemented as REAL, not the transience that blogposts exist under. These posts disappear, but products last forever. So they churn out posts in an attempt to grab legitimacy. And I know that some of you are already feeling that involuntary knee jerk to what I'm putting out there, feel free to dismiss this as another jeremiad about how the hobby continues to pawn off the parts of it that used to be free and DIY. But the damage is being done. Posts that would have used to have been free are behind a paywall or time gated to a Patreon, bespoke blog compilation books come bedazzled in great art to make at home printers envious; more and more of what used to be the domain of the DIY is being taken over by well meaning marketers with "Keep TTRPGs Weird" tattoed tastefully on their forearms.

These sorts love to blog. They love to talk about how much they love blogs and read them. They link to blogs often and maybe if they're feeling gracious curate a list of posts to recommend to their subscribers. Many bloggers in this space treat it as this incredibly noble goal; that one of the best ways to participate and give back to the community is to blog. This call to blog though puts blogs before gaming.

To truly add something worthwhile to the community posts should be downstream from play. The navel gazing of never gamers does not add constructively to the practice of play. Nor should the screeds of design from folks who write systems more often than they play them. Try to imagine what these posts would look like if the "game" was erased from them. Would there still be rambling or pointless interjections? If it's empty then that's good!

Blogger as an identity is utterly useless. It's at best a signifier that someone is more interested in writing than playing the game. There is nothing wrong with that and folks should continue to be inspired to write. Our hobby is about the playing of games and writing is just one of the many legs that support that. To make it the sole focus of a creative body is to demean the reason why we play. The call to arms should not be to BLOG it should be to PLAY then BLOG.

Certain kinds of posts really prosper under the shadow of the boomerang. A lot of them focused on talking about how to play rather play itself. All of them share a confidence in trying to sell their way.

I. New Mechanic for their System Disguised as an OSR Contribution

This encounter dice post is the kind of thing that would get people to TALK about a system. I can see the funder campaign for it now. Youtube videos with clickbait headlines talking about how we have finally merged the tension of dice with a mechanic that models the uncertainty of stress, bespoke dice sets with custom faces to represent the crashing boons and banes: that's where it ends though. This is a kitschy way to have an encounter system stand out from the crowd and be different. People have their hobby horses and their own taste for how their games should be played, but when something is presented as a "revolution" it should honestly do a little bit more than present itself as a fidget toy for half bored players at the table. If people are to adopt this then their content becomes something that is only compatible with a system that uses the dice tower. Which produces more content that will only be read and never used. The farther you go away from B/X and the standard conventions, the more likely your OSR mechanics/content are not going to get used. The amount of translation someone has to do from some obscure 80's D100 game to Bog Standard Dungeon and Dragons is too much for most folks to consider. Another reason why posts like this aren't seeking to add to the community, they're seeking to shunt people away to a specific pattern of design that they benefit from. This scene is built around that game and by sharing an understanding of it we are able to make things to be shared with people that work without conversion.

II. A Retelling of Prior Blog Advice but with an Added Quriky Element

Sometimes the advice isn't just for how to run a game or another OSR tonsil pearl being coughed up for the n+1 time; sometimes advice from creativity writ large gets its OSR Debut. The adage "steal like an artist" can be taken too far if what you understand of art is to just juggle what's been done before and call it creation. This postadvocates for a style of prep that I can only describe as soulless. I don't think I need to explain how the advice offered here is akin to someone saying "You can get huge and strong just by doing calf raises" as copying and pasting stuff from other sources takes about as much effort (many apologies to my leg day heroes in the chat.) The quirky element here is to purchase more product!!! Step 6 outlines it very well with "Buy more games." Again we have a post pushing for readers to engage with the hobby by paying to do so. The intended effect isn't to bury DIY. This is skinning DIY and putting it around the paid part of the hobby to sheepishly hold onto that self-made aesthetic while picking up sales. Chopping up published modules is a time honored tradition in the hobby. We don't need a manifesto to state that nor should cutting/pasting be all the work on its own. Taking things apart and finding out how your own work fits in is a great way to prep! I once used Veins of the Earth/Lowlife to flesh out the dragon's lair near Ruislip in Wolves Upon the Coast, but none of that was "copy/paste." I followed the procedures for a few hours over the course of two weeks and generated a massive cave complex. Copy/Paste isn't enough, you gotta own what you take. Leave an impression on what you run that makes it yours.

Because if all you ingest into your games is what you buy, you're going to have a very anemic game. Read books, watch movies, pick up some kind of active movement (dance, mma, taiqi, jump roping), get out and look at stuff, write your thoughts, write poems, and expand your mind beyond RPGs and of utmost importance PRODUCTS.

III. Gameable Material that is in No Way Usable and Will Never be Used

There are lots of things that people make to be played that probably never will. Half finished dungeons, overpowered items, extremely specific classes... the list goes on and on but the one that offers one of the biggest barriers to actually being useful are the myriad of magic systems. I myself am a violator of this one(though I do try to only write things I have actually used in session, the Glaugust posts notwithstanding hehe.) Magic is usually predefined and measured in most games. Dropping a whole system to be ported in asks a lot of a GM. I've taken to writing spells for pre-existing games to make the barrier to use as thin as possible for folks reading my stuff. Because the Demon Pact Magic is just too much for anyone to just jam into their game without overtooling how things work dramatically in their game. So I have added to the pile of things that will never be used. Not everything you produce has to be immediately usable, but when you are publishing something its vital to think about how much legwork someone might have to do to get it working and if you're not willing to put in that kinda work then the things you make will mostly just be fodder for "Wow, cool" and a smattering of emojis.

IV. Blog Posts about Blogs

This one is self evident if you're in the hobby. This post is guilty, I have other guilty posts too. Your blog should be an extension of you. What you choose to post represents you. For most people in the hobby it is their only look into how you think and who you are.

IV.A Blogs aren't the Game, Bloggers aren't always Gamemasters

There are some bloggers out there who solely tinker at posts and write stuff to be read. They put a lot of effort into it, make it strong, make it thoughtful- only for its ultimate purpose to be posted in a Discord Channel and talked about for a day. They will never run it, use it in a game, and if you measured the amount of stuff they wrote against the amount of stuff they prepped for a game you'd be comparing a mountain to a mole hill. Taking content from people who don't run games actively is harmful to your table. Those folks are not actively developing the craft of making stuff to be played. They are fiction writers (some of them very good!) So all that wonderful prose lacks the lessons of play. For those people keeping a blog is their hobby and maybe they play TTRPGs every now and again. The aims and intentions of their work is to be praised like a novelist or short story writer would (and partially, how clever they are of course! we're a hobby of contrarians.) But like any blogger who gets an audience folks will try to emulate that, and now people are writing impressions of impressions of impressions of magic items and dungeon rooms.

An excellent example of a blog being honest about its intentions as fiction first exercise is Garamondia.They are very open about not gaming very often. And to use our earlier exercise, if you were to wipe away the game from the blog there would still be incredible fiction here to become immersed in.

Look for play reports!!! Even if you don't read them! They are a means to sniff test if the blog you're on is a servant to white room design or actually put the effort in to play.

Friction and Experience

REWRITE BLOGS ARE NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR EXPERIENCE No post can be a substitute for experience. Nothing will make you better at running games and solving the problems as they come up than having time under pressure. You should listen to Nate when he talks about knocking it off with RPGs and going out to get a wide variety of influences.

Blogs are presenting you solutions to problems you may never have. They are giving you inspiration you may lack a physical understanding of to gird your game with realness. And bloggers who continue to post ideas that are divorced from play add to this mass of experience-less advice. The simplifications and board game tricks may not have a place at your table.

Friction might be what you're looking for. Consider a counter-example to the posts above. Scribbles and Horror has posted about their Redux OD&D game and the complex mechanics they have added. Read the in-universe notes from a town meeting in their game. The changes to how hirelings are brought on are worth examing:

Requirement that life insurance policies for hirelings accompanying adventurers to Redux 1) be at least 100 gold pieces, 2) require at least two co-signers to the policy, and 3) the town of Desire shall receive 10gp in addition to such policy

This adds complexity. This goes against the grain of most RPG advice to either simplify or make a meaningless minigames. Now to bring on hirelings adventurers must find co-signers in the town to their hireling's life insurance. This ties them to the town, forces them to have relationships in town, to contend with the sorrow that comes when the dead return home and co-signers must be informed. Stuff like this adds crunch to your game and has no interest in stripping stuff away from the game. Scribbles's players added this to their game because it made sense from the sessions they played. Yes, the lede was somewhat buried that Scribbles's new mechanic came from their table and not from them! Imagine that, a blogger who presents the additions their table brought to the game rather than the dogma they want to put on everyone else's. The rigors of play gave them the experience to add a mechanic like this to their games. This mechanic is tailored to the demands of their campaign and is presented as such. It's not some sort of panacea declaring that it's solved retainers forever.

Solving Infinity

I find it odd how many people in TTRPGs want to solve the problems of prep and play forever. I worry that a newcomer would join what is a creative hobby and see the sea of copy that talks about how they have finally solved the dungeon crawl, or sanity mechanics, or class based games; and walk away from the hobby thinking that they have nothing to add to it.