Celebrating 10 years of Trollish Delver

I'm happy to be celebrating a decade of this blog today. Over the last 10 years Trollish Delver has grown from a dedicated T&T resource to a small press publisher just shy of 1,000,000 visits.

So it's time for a bit of naval gazing, so I hope you'll indulge me for a bit while I do so.

March 2009 - I was in my third year of university. I'd already been playing roleplaying games for years at this point, but Tunnels and Trolls was a bit of a new discovery for me. Getting involved in the community after a chat with Ken St Andre and Tom K Loney spurred me on to start Trollish Delver. I figure I could talk about T&T solos, rules and make up some of my own shit.

After graduating, I eventually formed a gaming group with old and new friends where we played the brand spanking new 4th edition of D&D. This gave me fuel for more gaming subjects, broader than just T&T.

I always wanted to experiment with the blog, with subjects I covered. I'd go onto talk about comics, videogames, boardgames and nerd adjacent stuff, but the posts that resonated with people were the RPG ones. I also realised that I wanted to try my hand at design.

In March 2011 I published my first pdf adventure for T&T - Forest of the Treelords over on Lulu. This was followed by solo Depths of the Devilmancer. They're both fine - clearly amateur, but fun. But I wanted to continue making game items. Well, I wanted to make a game.

This happened in February 2012 when I set the first iteration USR into the wild to download on 1km1kt. It was pretty well recieved, but I knew not a whole lot of people would be playing it, so I set up on DriveThrurpg as Trollish Delver Games and published USR, along with Depths. This is when things started to get serious for me.

Fast forward to 2019, after 1261 blog posts, an award, 50,000 publication downloads, several freelancing credits and my first big publisher book on its way, I consider Trollish Delver to be a successful endeavour. But even more importantly, I've made some great friends along the way who have helped and inspired me to keep posting and keep writing books.

So I just wanted to say a big thank you for all of you who have read Trollish Delver from the beginning, and those who have joined me along the way. Here's to another 10 years of creation.