Some Notable Additions to My Blogroll in 2010

2010 saw the creation of a number of blogs that I have found myself enjoying, as well as my discovery of blogs that had been posting for a while that I hadn't seen before. I ended up adding a good number of blogs to my various blogroll categories last year, and I thought I'd point out some of the better additions.

1) Grognardia -- James Maliszewski's "Grognardia" blog is one of the best old school gaming blogs on the internet. James' musings about games of yore, his thoughts on game design, and his commentary about classic SF/F are well worth your attention. James is one of my favorite "indie" game designers, having worked on "Sword, Spell, and Shadow" and "A Thousand Suns." I don't always agree with his opinions, but I always enjoy reading them.

2) Fabled Lands -- This is the official blog of Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson where they share information about their "Fabled Lands" line of Fantasy Game books, as well as examples of their past work. Want to see what a roleplaying game about Feudal Japan using the Warhammer Fantasy RPG rules would look like? Head on over to "Fabled Lands" and find out.

3) Fantasy Game Book -- This is a blog that examines fantasy gamebooks with a bit of academic rigor. I added the blog to my list just the other day based on the strength of recent entries by Andrew Wright. His thoughts on "One True Path" vs. "Multi-Path" gamebooks make for interesting reading.

4) Jordan Mechner's Blog -- Before Jordan Mechner, the terms "narrative" and "video game" would rarely be used in a sentence. That changed with Mechner's "Karateka." Though the narrative of the game was simple, his use of musical cues and dramatic elements hinted that video games could be more than tests of reflexes and memory. They could be interactive narrative experiences, and that experience didn't require the use of a laser disk that linked animated sequences through a decision tree.