SPALDING WARGAMING CLUB
Wow. Nearly 2020, right? A year ago I was cranking this blog out every week, getting friends and acquaintances to contribute, getting some traction, and then - it all stopped last March. The reason, in case you didn't know, was the Facebook dropped us. The website got categorised as 'spam' and all live links to it were deleted from Facebook. Overnight, taken down. Depressing. A bit of digging revealed that someone had reported the site for "abusive content" which, given its actual content, can only be construed as malicious. But Facebook doesn't offer explanations or redress and provides no court of appeal. And without Facebook Groups to reach out to fellow gamers, it's a bit difficult to maintain a lively discussion. It raises the question, who are you blogging for? Yourself? But 2020 is nearly upon us and I don't think all the thought and research and creativity that went into this site should go entirely to waste, so I'm going to re-launch the blog on a more modest footing: no massive, extensively researched meditations on news articles, chat shows and new products. Let's keep it humble and low key.
I had been feeling the pull of 'old school' dungeon adventures for a while. I'd started running a THE ONE RING campaign, which locates lovely stories in Tolkien's Middle Earth but which is rather short on tactical skirmishing. Then Martin Jackson started DMing 5TH EDITION D&D at the Club on Wednesdays and I knew what I was missing: 10' wide corridors, pit traps, initiative rolls. I decided to start celebrating FORGE and the OSR (Old School Revival) with a website and blog. I decided to start reviewing FORGE in the light of the criticism that it is a 'fantasy heartbreaker' - a game with a few good ideas and a lot of derivative ones that never stood a chance in the marketplace - and offer a bunch of classic D&D scenarios, converted to FORGE to explore its strengths. Please check out the site and the blog: I'll blog a bit more about D&D, fantasy heartbreakers and the Old School Revival next month. First of all, there's a bit more to the story of this new website and blog. RPGForge did pretty well for a few weeks: I reviewed some dungeons and created a couple of my own, digital footfall grew. Then, you guessed it, Facebook blocked that website too. Same reason: violating the 'Community Standards' (objectionable content, plagiarism, false identity, that sort of thing). This time, I persevered a bit further and cloned the blog across to another server. Things went well for another week, then the same thing happened. Facebook blocked the site and all links to it. One of the distressing things about this (besides the general sense of false accusation of wrongdoing) is that Facebook's little algorithms work backwards through time. They don't just forbid you from linking to the website in the future; rather, they go back through the feed and delete each and every link to the site that was ever made and all comments attached to such links. It's as if the discussions never existed. Now I figure that getting burned by Facebook once is unlucky (and vanishingly rare: it didn't happen to Isis!) and twice is one helluva coincidence, but three times is a pattern. So let's not put up with that. Either Facebook's bots, on the cusp of self-awareness, have identified my creative output as a threat to the AI's global takeover plan, or else someone is having a bit of malevolent fun at my expense. My resolution is to continue with celebrating Forge RPG and to re-start this blog and freshen up this website. As far as Facebook is concerned, we're hate speech, but there are other ways of reaching out to people, so let's see how other platforms work. I'd welcome help and advice from anyone more media savvy than I. But in the meantime, I'm putting together the next blog on 5th edition D&D. Watch this space.
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