It’s happening right now! 26 episodes! 8 hours of RPG thoughts, theories, and flavor for your listening enjoyment!

Back up, what is this about?

Blogs on Tape is a podcast with a very simple purpose: we find good blog posts from the OSR and adjacent RPG scenes, and we perform readings of them. Each episode is just one post. Our aim is to make the scene easier for people to dip their toe into. Listen to D&D blogs on your commute, or while you do the dishes, or while you exercise.

When do new episodes come out?

Every weekday (Monday-Friday) a new episode will drop at 8AM (PST). This will continue until all Season 5 episodes have aired. (Last episode will be on November 24th). After that, Blogs on Tape will go back into hibernation until some point in 2023.

Where can I find these episodes?

The Blogs on Tape website is where they will first appear. After that, sandestins carry the episodes off to add them to Apple Podcasts, Podbay, and Spotify. (Though, as anyone who deals with sandestins can tell you, these creatures are sometimes lazy and may not do their job as quickly as you’d like.)

I’ve also got a thread on twitter that I’m updating each morning as new episodes get added. If you’re on twitter, that thread is worth following.

How can I help?

A Ko-Fi donation to help pay our hosting costs would be a big help. As Blogs on Tape grows (134 episodes at the end of this season! A total of 26 hours of audio!) hosting fees may become a greater concern. Getting some or all of it covered by community support would be a load off.

Aside from that, I really appreciate suggestions for which blog posts are worth reading. I also accept recordings from guest readers. In either event please contact me directly at my business email address.

Lastly, you can do all the same sorts of algorithm-feeding stuff that helps any creative project: retweet that thread I linked above. Post about episodes you enjoyed on your social media of choice. Tell a friend. Rate and review the podcast on Apple/Podbay/Spotify.

Honestly though, you don’t owe me anything. I do this because I care about this scene and enjoy feeling like I’m contributing to it. More than anything I’m just happy to have found a project that folks enjoy.

Thank you, very much, for listening!

I wasn’t sure if Blogs on Tape was going to resonate with people. Turns out, you all really like it! We’ve had a ton of vocal support from all over the OSR community. As a result, we will absolutely move forward with making new episodes.

The most common request I heard was that people wanted an RSS feed for the project. So, I’ve set up a site just for Blogs on Tape, which has its own RSS feed for your blog-listening convenience. The site itself is a little bare bones, but I hope to make it into a valuable resource over time. You may also notice there are two new episodes already available. I hope you enjoy them!

I’ve also managed to get Blogs on Tape set up on iTunes, which was a surprisingly nightmarish process. Hopefully it’s stable now, but if you encounter any issues let me know.
If you’re interested in contributing to the project, there are two things we need:

1. Blogs that we have official permission to read from. If you have a blog, and you’re okay with us reading posts from it, please let us know.
2. People who can do the readings and make the recordings. If you’ve got a halfway decent microphone, a quiet environment to use it in, and the ability to speak clearly, I’d love to have your help in getting these recordings made.

Future updates for this project will be mostly show up on the Blogs on Tape website, so I recommend everyone follow that if they’re interested.

Thanks for listening!
 

EDIT: Blogs on Tape in now a full-fledged podcast with its own website. Hopefully Google will eventually figure that out, and stop pointing to this page when people search for it.

Audiobooks are great. The ability to read while I’m driving, walking, exercising, cooking, or doing the dishes has allowed me to absorb so many books. Stuff that I probably wouldn’t have made time for otherwise. By now, I think I’ve actually listened to more books than I’ve read, and I’m extremely grateful that the option exists.  I’d have missed out on some of my favorite stories if it didn’t.

The biggest problem with audio books is that there aren’t enough of them. Too much great writing is trapped in squiggled symbols on a page or computer screen. If you can find the time, reading them is a joy. But, none of us has enough time to read everything we’d like. And a particular issue for me is that there are dozens or hundreds of OSR blogs, all of which have good stuff on them just waiting to be read.

TL;DR, does anybody else think it would be really cool to have a podcast where people read OSR blog posts aloud?

It’s an idea I’ve been kicking around for awhile. And, over the past two weeks, I’ve been getting in touch with people to start the ball rolling on what I’m calling a “pilot series” of episodes. Something to test the waters a bit before anybody decides to really commit themselves to doing this. And so, below are 10 blog posts, read aloud by myself, Sam Jack, and Gregory Blair. Please give them a listen.

The music used is a selection from “Journey of Solitude,” composed and performed by Russel Cox, distributed through OverClocked Remix.

Episode 1 – Structuring Encounter Tables, by Nick LS Whelan
(Read by me, Original post here).

Episode 2 – The Purpose of a Map, by Alex Schroeder
(Read by me, Original post here).

Episode 3 – Tangle Armor, by Brendan S.
(Read by me, Original post here).

Episode 4 – Tests of Skill and Tests of Chance, by John Bell
(Read by me, Original post here).

Episode 5 – An Orcish Prayer, by Arnold K.
(Read by Sam Jack, Original post here).

Episode 6 – Basic Wands, by Brendan S.
(Read by me, Original post here).

Episode 7 – Questgivers are Evil, by Nick LS Whelan
(Read by me, Original post here).

Episode 8 – God Hates Orcs, by Arnold K.
(Read by Sam Jack, Original post here).

Episode 9 – On Erecting a New Campaign, by Courtney Campbell
(Read by me, Original post here).

Episode 10 – Tiki & D: Gary’s Hawaiian Shirts, by Richard G
(Read by Gregory Blair, Original post here).

It was also suggested that we might do periodic “round table” episodes, where folks discuss some of the previous posts. I thought it was an interesting possibility, so I made one of those as well, with Sam Jack and Michael Raston joining me.

Roundtable 1 – Nick LS Whelan, Sam Jack, & Michael Raston [This file is no longer available]

Alright, so, didja listen to those? Didja like them? Didja hate them? I know blog comments are kinda passe here in 2017, but I really want to know how people feel about this. If we go forward, it’s going to require a lot of time, and a lot of bandwdith to keep up with. I had a heckin’ good time with these first 10, but I have to admit the idea of committing myself to doing this long term is pretty daunting. So criticism, detailed ones, would be very welcome right now.

Hopefully, if the series does continue, we can make it into more of a community effort. Sam & Greg both helped the project along quite a bit by contributing episodes of their own. If that could eventually grow into five, ten, or more people all recording episodes, it would make managing the project much less daunting than it is.

So, what do you think?