The Best Of 2011
2011 was an absolutely huge year for Campaign Mastery. Not only were there some major article series, plus the publication of The Empty Chair by Johnn (with a few contributions from myself), plus the publication (at last!) of our Magnum Opus on Assassins (Assassin’s Amulet), but we had our 150,000th visitor in early February, and put up our 300th post in September – by which point we had topped the 200K mark in visitors, a landmark we didn’t expect to hit until 2012!
But you can’t enjoy the sunshine without a little rain falling now and then, and toward the end of the year, Johnn began to focus his energies in directions other than Campaign Mastery. While it took a while for him to finally withdraw completely, this was when the balance between our contributions began to shift.
This is also when the Ask-The-GMs series began to bog down, caused by the distractions of a number of lengthy series, Assassin’s Amulet, Johnn’s distraction, and a number of questions that were quite hard to answer. And with each addition to the “unanswered” pile, the scale of the problem grew from molehill to foothill to mountain to everest to Olympus Mons and beyond. Around the middle of the year, we started answering queries directly because of the growing backlog, and I still have those answers on file so eventually I know that the backlog will wilt if I keep trimming it down. But that’s why there are no ATGMs in “the best” this time around – an entire year rolled past without us realizing that we hadn’t posted any entries, we were so busy.
As you might expect, it was harder than ever to keep the list of Best Posts down to a manageable number. I was helped a bit by being able to point at series, but even so, this was a hard list to prune! Hardest of all was the decision to cut all the content excerpted from Assassin’s Amulet, but most if not all of that content is available through the free preview. And if you like what you find there, you can buy Assassin’s Amulet – and get all the bonus content that was produced for it at the same time – by clicking on the image to the right, or the link above, or the image below. That, and some ruthless pruning, and grouping series together, let me cut this down to a bare minimum 26 entries…
The Best Of 2011
- Lessons From The West Wing III: Time Happens In The Background
- City & Government Power Bases [Series]
- Reinventing Pulp For Roleplaying [Series]
- Experience for the ordinary person
- The Nth Level Of Abstraction
- Taming The Time Bandits: Some time-saving combat techniques
- Directed Plots, Undirected Narrative, and Stuff That Just Happens
- The GM’s Toolbox [Series]
- Creating Alien Characters: Expanding the ‘Create A Character Clinic’ To Non-Humans
- Missing In Action: Maintaining a campaign in the face of player absence
- Objective-Oriented Experience Points
- A potpourri of quick solutions: Eight Lifeboats for GM Emergencies
- By The Seat Of Your Pants: Adventures On the Fly
- By The Seat Of Your Pants: Six Foundations Of Adventure
- Fascinating Topological Limits: FTL in Gaming
- Forging Unexpected Connections: Putting PC Dossiers To Work
- Theme vs Style vs Genre: Crafting Anniversary Special Adventures
- Making The Loot Part Of The Plot: Loot as a plot mechanic
- Loot As Part Of The Plot: Making, Earning, Finding, Analyzing, Using, Selling, and Destroying Loot
- Making The Loot Part Of The Plot: The Value Of Magic
- Gaming With The Family – Lessons from yesteryear
- Back To Basics Part 1: Adventure Structures
- Back To Basics: Campaign Structures
- Pieces Of Creation: The Hidden Truth Of Dopplegangers
- Taking everyman skills to the next level: The Absence of an Alibi
- The Nuances of computer use in a simulated world
Extra: The Assassin’s Amulet articles
Okay, I’ve had my arm twisted. Below is a list of the articles that would have been in the list of “The best of 2011” if I hadn’t cut them for reasons other than their being good enough. Any entry in Italics is available in the free preview version; as you can see, that’s most of them.
- An excerpt from ‘A player’s Guide to Legacy Items’ – Part 1
- An excerpt from ‘A player’s Guide to Legacy Items’ – Part 2
- Roleplaying Assassins: An excerpt from Assassins Amulet
- Five (Plus One!) Effective Combat Tactics for Assassins
- Dark Shadows In The Night: Lessons from the writing of Assassin’s Amulet
- The Creation Of A Deity: The Origins Of Cyrene
- Cyrene Revealed: an excerpt from Assassin’s Amulet
Of course, rolling out “The Best of 2011” means that “The Best of 2008-9” needs to give way from the sidebar to make room. You can still find those “Best Of” entries by clicking on “The Best” Button at the top of the page, or by following this link.
In the next part, about three months away: The best of 2012! Why two months? This is mid-July. If I put “The best of 2012” out in early-to-mid-October, I can do “The Best of 2013” about four months after that, in February 2105, and “The best of 2014” in mid-2015, after another 4 months. The plan – at least at the moment – is to always have the “Best of” from a year earlier and the year before that, on display, changing annually in mid-year.
I wish I knew of a widget that would let me randomly select from the different time periods and put two of them up with each different visit, or even just randomly select a dozen or so from the collective list each time. But so far as I know, there’s no such beast – probably because no-one saw a use for one!
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