A year has passed and it is now time to summarize and reflect on what has happened on this blog in 2025.

Statistics

Let's have some fun with some actual stats from my blog. First of we have the categories I posted entries on my blog.

Category	Posts	Percentage
A.D.A.	1	4%
Adventures	6	22%
Essay	19	74%

I mostly put everything in a catch-all category - Essay. Now if this is good or bad, is left to be debated. On one hand it will reduce the visibility of some posts, since they get shoved into a big pile of articles. Conversely I don't have many categories with just single articles. The only article I wrote for A.D.A. was, that I will no longer write articles for A.D.A.

In total we have 26 posts, which is about a biweekly schedule. We will see later, that this is a bit skewed to the beginning of the year.

I wrote a total of 1 new adventure - Beneath the Temple. I wanted to write more, but that's where we are at.

Let's split this up by month and analyse this a bit further.

Month	Posts	Words (Total)	Words (Average)
January	4	8685	2171
February	2	3738	1869
March	5	7550	1510
April	2	3767	1884
May	2	1602	801
June	3	2100	700
July	2	1366	683
August	3	2476	825
September	1	1285	1285
October	0	0	-
November	1	931	931
December	1	669	669
Total	26	34169	-
Average	2.1	2848	-

My longest article with over 3000 words is Solo Hexcrawling (Part 2) and the shortest with just 100 words is Solo House Rules Quick Reference.

We can clearly see a decline in number of words and posts over the whole year. From September on, we just have one article. I took a long vacation in October, so that at least explains the big gap there at least. There was definitely less motivation to write something. Partly because I didn't know what to write and most of my ideas didn't seem good enough.

I lacked some form of long-running project (something I had in 2023). So I should get some ideas for it now and plan accordingly.

When it comes to the length of the posts, I'm actually happier when it goes down. I think 1000 words is about the sweet spot. I don't get burned out too quickly and it is a reasonable length to keep the attention of the reader.

Nothing in this statistic says something about the quality of the posts. This is hard to gauge. I unfortunately don't have any usable data from website visits, that could maybe give some idea. I changed the way how I gather these statistics, so maybe next year I have better data.

Behind the scenes

I did change some stuff behind the scenes, which is maybe not that obvious when visiting my blog.

First of all, I did change the server I'm hosting all of this (and other projects). I have now a bit more space and power. The change should've been very transparent on your end. It still looks the same for you, but for me some things have changed (for the better).

There was also the launch in August of my collection of RPG Tools, that have since then been updated several times. Behind that, there's also a "complex" build pipeline, so I can create further updates with more ease.

I also spend a lot of time, compiling all my house rules and guides into one single place - The Codex. It has been there before, but I did update it with a lot of information. I didn't announce this much. I'd rather highlight some of the articles in there if time comes. Most of the stuff is also feeding directly into the RPG Tools.

Lastly I moved all my earlier episodes of Iron Stories onto my own server (one of the reasons I needed more space).

All of these things mostly happen in the later part of the year, so maybe this is also why we have less blog posts then.

Reflection

Let's also have a look back on what we promised last year.

• Write at least two articles about a new adventure
• Write at least one TTRPG article showing my view
• Minor rebranding and behind the scenes stuff

So I fulfilled all my resolutions for the year. Good? Not really. The resolutions were actually only for January. I wanted to do a check-up in February. Looking over the year, yes I fulfilled it, but maybe a little bit later than expected.

I did for example take 3 Months until I would actually have written two articles for Beneath the Temple. And it took 6 months overall until I finally published it fully.

Still, I'm proud on what I have achieved.

Resolutions

Let's therefore make some new resolutions for 2026.

• Biweekly Schedule - Quality over Quantity. I don't think I'm ready to have a really increased schedule in posts. But I think a biweekly schedule should be feasible.
• More Publications - At least once per quarter I should publish something. Be it a new adventure, some form of hack or tool for an existing system.
• Actual Plays - I want to revive my Iron Stories a bit. But not in an oral form, but more as flash/short-fiction on this blog. This might also include some preparations for other games.

Until next year!