The DIY Old-School Blog Randomizer

12 Jun, 2026

or

Metarandomness: OSR Blottery

We live in an era of plentiful and thoughtful RPG blog content. Entire high-quality systems and settings are posted free for the reading: I can run a GLOG in Dyson's Delve while also using a third, other thing ¹.

Perhaps the content is even ... too plentiful ...

... to get into easily, that is!

I started reading OSR blogs as they came into existence, and then stopped for many years ². When I returned, the sheer quantity of stuff was overwhelming. I gradually found things to follow by reading things I enjoyed and then reading things they linked to ³.

But what if this process were quicker? And dice were involved?

This blog post is part of the Random Blogwagon on https://www.prismaticwasteland.com/.

The idea: blog about randomness on a random June day, possibly at a randomly determined length, possibly referencing a randomly determined blog. That last possibility introduces a new possibility.

PW compiled a table of 52 blogs to reference, making it easy to choose one by rolling a simple d52. Or deck of cards, if you've got one. I'll try and copy-paste that table here, just to see if I can figure out how to do so in Markdown. If so, the table is below. If not, the table is not below and I'll just link the blog post again here ⁴.

In the DIY spirit of OSR gaming, you'll have to find your own URLs.

And it gets even more DIY!

Once you've got your blog picked out, navigate to the blog and switch to web view if you're on mobile (in order to see the archives). Then you can roll up your reading material:

By individual post: Best for blogs that aren't terribly prolific or if you don't mind some adding. Count all the posts (by adding up the yearly or monthly totals, unless you're a hardcore sicko). Generate a random number between 1 and the number of posts, count (up or down) to the post you rolled, then read it.

By year/month/post: Best for wildly prolific blogs. Count the number of years. Generate a random number between 1 and the number of years. Roll a d12 for the month. Count the number of posts in that month of that year. Generate a number between 1 and the number of posts (or roll a die if it's low enough).

Here's a random number generator: https://www.random.org/

For this post, I drew a 5 of diamonds, meaning I was headed to the Retired Adventurer blog. There are 437 posts, so I generated a random number between 1 and 437 and got 21.

Post 21 was the last post of December 2020 and was perfect for this exercise:

https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2020/04/trapplications-ii.html

It's a chart for generating random traps and tells/qualities of those traps. And a bonus! It updates this older post:

https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2015/02/trapplications.html

It's information I can use. Without having jumped on this bandwagon I'm not sure I would have ever seen this post.

About halfway through writing this, I realized that some blogs might have a "click for random post" button (as most webcomics do these days) and that all of this might be utterly useless but my extremely lazy research only turned up methods for inserting one rather than the feature itself being used.

But if there's a random post button, just use that.

I'm actually going to post again about the post because it's getting buried in this post. Post!

Thanks again to Prismatic Wasteland. These things are fun.

12 June 2026, 9 on the 2d6 table, 5 of diamonds.