Online Resources

In the quest to better my gaming I've been looking at how I can streamline certain things about the play experience.  A lot of how that can be achieved is through using more resources to make things easier for me to prep for games and in particular RPGs.

I'm going to touch on just a few things that are out there on that thing called the world wide web.  You know that thing you're using to read this blog.

On the left hand side of this blog is a list of blogs that I read.  I used to read a lot of blogs, forums and online content about the hobby in general but now I tend to stick to only a few.  This is mostly down to available time and probably also a little bit of laziness creeping in.

For Board Games, especially ones that I've bought and played a few times, I tend to go to The Esoteric Order Of Games.  The what?  In a nutshell they take the rules of the a whole host of games and simplify/condense them into workable short hand rules.  Now this isn't simply a case of "ignore page 3, paragraph 4" style condensing this is professionally prepared rules.
Before buying a game, when I plan such purchases at least rather than impulse ones, I will check out this website to see if they have a condensed rules set available.  That's not a decision maker but it's certainly of interest.

For RPGs I tend to read Gnome Stew, Triumph & Despair and Thistle Games.  Again not necessarily to aid in decision making but more to almost gauge the mood of the market on what's hot and what's not etc.
Triumph & Despair in particular has a lot of great Star Wars EotE content.

For more general The Hobby type content whether that be intelligent FLGS related content or more otherwise I look at Black Diamond Games - Quest For Fun!, Starlit Citadel and The GSA.

Lastly I tend to watch my mate John's gaming blog The Varcan Cluster where he posts mostly about wargames which if you've been reading this blog for a while you'll know is not part of my hobby for a variety of reasons.  Doesn't mean I don't like to read about it!

Plus one that I don't have a feed for as I tend to have it as a permanently open tab is the FFG Star Wars EotE Forum where recently a fan has released a character generation app.  A very impressive one at that!

What websites/blogs do you always read?