#RPGaDay2026 - Day 29 - "Labor"

Four weeks down with #RPGaDay and we're in the home stretch with "Labor."

This September will be the 17th anniversary for the blog.  I've been averaging OVER a post per day for over a decade.  It's certainly a labor of love, especially the role-playing stuff.  I normally post my Top 20 posts for the past 12 months at the end of September, and it normally is chock full of painting, convention AARs, game store reviews, and a few quality wargame recap,   Even well promoted #RPGaDay or #CharacterCreationChallenge posts don't scratch the traffic of the other posts. 

Why do I do it?  Because introducing journals to the groups almost 30 years ago helped play.  Adding experience for writing in the core book around 2001 produced some great entries for my Hackmasters games.  

By 2018, I had catalogued much of my AD&D/OSR time, all the ongoing games Cthulhu and Star Wars games.  

The only thing missing from my ongoing World of Georic campaign, was the early, non-journal years (1989-1997).   The campaigns I kindly label the high school, army, and Sabut Tablesmasher storylines.  There's bits and pieces, fleeting memories, and I either don't possess or threw out the material I ran for those guys.  

The solution was to make a fictional character to wade through the aftermath of these supposed adventurers cause, and with that, the Lost Dispatches of Feraso was born.  Thanks to a scribe who wrote above his station, Elsderth Millsbottom and his accumulated group of friends and allies acted as chroniclers, and sometimes damage control for the wake of destruction my high school group.  It was great, because it filled in the story gaps for 30+ years, it helped the mis-matched accumulation of Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, and Dungeon Magazine adventures all within a few leagues of each other, and they allowed me to map out sections I've barely put together,  

Elsderth Millbottom: scribe, hero, judge, Baron Greyhawk, horrible father, racist witch.

I covered the entirety of high school games, my entire army campaign, and the host of smaller, mini-campaigns I ran for folks.   Eldsderth became a real character by the end of the 100 episodes, gaining titles, losing friends, abandoning his family for selfish reasons, and secretly filling in a ton of plot holes that eased my brain. 

I still keep the sessions for our Gamma World campaign up-to-date, and I do some entries from the campaigns Gazetteer, but the Lost Dispatches is the last true labor of love I'll probably do for the blog.

Alternate Question:  Thing you are most willing to work on for a game