Recall how fresh faced you were in early February of this year. You had a dewy glow and petroleum flowed unabated around the world’s waterways. You had a pep in your step and had only recently fallen off the wagon of your new year’s resolution. Over 80 days have elapsed since then, and in those 80 days this blogger has moved homes and changed jobs. Others have started wars. But all of that shrivels like a worm on hot pavement in comparison to the feat of virtuosic keyboard clapping undertaken by the collective blogosphere!

I issued forth the latest in a string of Blogwagon challenges, this time with the prompt of “maps” and with Amanda Lee Franck art to boot! Over 40 bloggers answered the call to adventure, producing exactly 50 posts by my count.

This Blogwagon had the longest active time. Despite one blogger-friend joking “Ah, my favorite Jules Verne novel, Around 10% of the world in 79 days, then the other 90% in 1 day”, the posts ended up being more evenly spread out than I expected. Yes, 30% of posts did land in the final 2 days, but there was pretty consistent posting, with the exception of one 11-day dry spell in early April. On average, the gap between any posts was less than 2 days, which is impressive over a span of nearly three months. The long period also allowed some bloggers (shoutout to Magnolia Keep and Blog of Forlorn Encystment) really cook and put out multiple posts riffing on the theme. It also seemingly inspired at least 1 blogger to start their blogs, being their first posts (noted with “NEW BLOG” in the roundup below).

I have listed the participants in order of the day they were released and also note the location that Phileas Fogg would have been during his 80-day journey around the world during such post (he spent a shit ton of time in San Francisco but this coincides with the aforementioned 11-day dry spell so it isn’t as egregious). There is a ton of gold in here, and I suggest you begin reading it so you can invest that gold into XP. Posts that made use of Amanda’s maps are in bold and eligible contenders for the “Mappie” Award, given at the end of this post.

February 6 (Days Elapsed: 0) - London

1. Bandwagon: The Map is Not the Territory But It is the Topic (Prismatic Wasteland)

2. Navigation Games (A Knight at the Opera)

February 7 (Days Elapsed: 1) - London

3. Basic Terrain for Pointcrawls (Magnolia Keep)

4. Creating a Dynamic City for Sci-Fi #3: Map thoughts and adventure dev log (The Weeping Stag)

5. Godsmelter - Blog Bandwagon (Cats Have No Lord)

February 8 (Days Elapsed: 2) - France

6. Another gimmick (Bommyknocker Press)

7. Theme Park Pointcrawls Part 1: Magic Kingdom (Random Ape Encounter)

February 13 (Days Elapsed: 7) - Suez

8. The Beauty of NOAA Nautical Charts (Blithe Alewife’s Bog-and-Brew Blog)

February 14 (Days Elapsed: 8) - Red Sea

9. Dungeon Map Notions I’ve Moved Away From (Scribbles and Horrors)

February 15 (Days Elapsed: 9) - Indian Ocean

10. MAPS and how they LIE (ghostlen)

11. Blogging Bandwagon: Maps of Aelwydi (In Search of Treasure)

February 18 (Days Elapsed: 12) - Indian Ocean

12. Whose Map Is It Anyway? (HillTown Studio Longform Content)

13. The Player-Drawn Dungeon Map is a Fast Travel Hack (Blog of Forlorn Encystment)

February 19 (Days Elapsed: 13) - Bombay

14. Stationary & Maps (Traverse Fantasy)

March 4 (Days Elapsed: 26) - Singapore

18. On Maps (WormLikeChain)

March 7 (Days Elapsed: 29) - South China Sea

19. Choose Your Own Direction (Cats Have No Lord)

March 10 (Days Elapsed: 32) - Hong Kong

20. Yellow Spiderhead Cliff (Ye Olde Revivalist)

March 12 (Days Elapsed: 34) - East China Sea

21. Stranger than Fiction: Fun With Maps (Magnolia Keep)

March 20 (Days Elapsed: 42) - Pacific Ocean

22. Earth Resists: Skirmish Map (Luck Roll)

March 21 (Days Elapsed: 43) - Pacific Ocean

23. Circuit Crawls (To Be Resolved)

24. Rescaling encounter maps for Tiny Epics (Seed of Worlds)

March 26 (Days Elapsed: 48) - San Francisco

25. Mapping the Journey Toward Exploration Procedures (Kreggar Wandering)

April 2 (Days Elapsed: 55) - San Francisco

26. The Surreal: Returning to the Darkness (Fellspiral)

April 3 (Days Elapsed: 56) - San Francisco

27. Developing the Sandbox: Prioritizing Points of Interest (Blog of Forlorn Encystment)

April 15 (Days Elapsed: 68) - Chicago

28. Mapwork in campaigns (Seed of Worlds)

April 16 (Days Elapsed: 69) - New York City

29. Chain Stocking the Hex Map (Prismatic Wasteland)

30. The Most Broken Class in AD&D!?!?!? (Magnolia Keep)

31. Rewarding Exploration with Treasure Maps (Carouse Carouse)

April 17 (Days Elapsed: 70) - New York City

32. Blue Prince is a Depth Crawl (The Play Reports)

April 19 (Days Elapsed: 72) - Atlantic Ocean

33. We Cut the Map, and It’s Okay (Inside Wicak Hidayat)

April 24 (Days Elapsed: 77) - Liverpool

34. “Maps” Blogwagon: Maps with Perspective… (Leicester’s Ramble)

April 25 (Days Elapsed: 78) - Liverpool

35. Tracking the Storm (Cats Have No Lord)

April 26 (Days Elapsed: 79) - London

36. My Favorite Map (Mindstorm)

37. Don’t prep hexcrawls, prep hexframes (A shrike for my dreams)

38. The Map Speaks: Communicating Via Maps (Personable Thoughts)

39. Anti-colonial TTRPG Map (Afraid of Encounters)

40. A Sicko’s Guide to Prepping D&D (Valeria Loves)

April 27 (Days Elapsed: 80) - London

41. Against Maps (Among Cats and Books)

42. Freeform Pointcrawls (Wandering Diejack)

43. VTTs, Movement, and Maps (Tychological Anomaly) NEW BLOG

44. Lie with Fictional Maps (The Gem Room Games Blog)

45. Use Tracing Paper (Root Devil)

46. Mapping Noise - A Simple System for Informed Fog of War (Fail Forward)

47. Hex Maps Need Empty Rooms (Table 46)

48. D&D 5E is the TripTik of Tabletop RPGs (XP Rolls)

49. Amber-Powered Dinosaurs in the Time-Displaced Observatory (Artifactotum)

50. Designing Dungeons Part 3 (Monte Cook)

Winner of the Inaugural and also probably Final “Mappie” Gold Medal Award goes to…

Artifactotum, for their Amber-Powered Dinosaurs in the Time-Displaced Observatory! An Electric Bastionland adventure that truly has everything: bureaucracy, tax evasion, electrodance music, dinosaurs!

Honorable mentions: Silver Medal Mappie goes to Ye Olde Revivalist for Yellow Spiderhead Cliff and the Bronze Medal Mappie goes to Cats Have No Lord for Godsmelter. Not enough adventures are first published in rough but free format on the noble blogosphere so I was delighted to see this Blogwagon inspire so many to put out honest-to-godsmelter adventures on their blogs.

To all those who took on the full challenge of this Blogwagon, and to all those who have diligently read all 50 of the posts, we salute you.

Around the Blogosphere in 80 Days (Blogwagon Roundup)