The Best Of 2013
A large part of 2013 was given over to expanding the background of my Fumanor campaign by telling the story of the origins of Elves and Orcs. But there was quite a lot of other great stuff along the way! Milestones within the year include the absolutely massive 500th post (so big that it broke the software), and the 5th anniversary special that saw out the year. But for the most part, it was a year of building on past successes and quietly ticking the weeks off the calander, one after another.
By the time of that 5th anniversary, though, some impressive numbers had been racked up. In five years, Campaign Mastery had amassed 444,000 visits; 283,000 unique visitors (so quite a lot of regular readers, in fact more than three times what is typical of most websites’ loyal audiances), and a grand total of over 800,000 pageviews.
All told, it was a good year, and that’s reflected in the number of articles listed below. To get it down to the 24 selections on offer, I cut half-a-dozen items that were initially listed from the “Location, Location, Location” blog carnival; this was possible only because – as host – I could replace them with the article that rounds up all the submissions that were recieved, and – as usual – treated series as a single entry.
But I also had to cull some really excellent articles, like the one that asked whether or not humans were still evolving, and the one that looked at the intellectual-property crisis that continues to rumble on, to this day. I’m still arguing with myself about cutting the article on Hyperreality and its impact on RPGs, and the one on the way Social Media and SEO are changing the internet! These three are easily amongst the most thought-provoking articles of the year, and still current.
The article on Bluffing In The Hero System survived until the very last minute, simply because it’s something that few game systems handle very well (and that specific game system, not at all). And then, there’s the article on institutional secrecy, which I’ve put in and taken out half-a-dozen times while preparing this chosen list.
After some very hard choices, though, the cream have once again risen.
The Best Of 2013
- Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series parts 1-5 [Series] – I’m recommending this entire series-within-a-series because it’s jam-packed with creative inspiration and GM advice, for example the five maxims of campaign design, how I treat official source material that doesn’t fit the campaign concept, how I give each NPC their own set of interactions with each PC, and how I integrate one or more personal quests for each character into the campaign. When I wrote the massive series on creating new campaigns, I got asked how much of the process I actually carried out. This series offers most (but not all) of the actual referance documents that I produced for an actual campaign – that generated a sequel, that in turn generated two more sequels, which are still ongoing.
- Top-Down Design, Domino Theory, and Iteration: The Magic Bullets of Creation
- Game Prep and the +N to Game Longevity
- The poetry of meaning: 16 words to synopsize a national identity
- Creating ecology-based random encounters [Series] –
- Refloating The Shipwreck: When Players Make A Mistake
- Amazon Nazis On The Moon: Campaign Planning Revisited
- Creating The World Of Tomorrow: Putting the SF into Sci-Fi [Series] –
- The Seven Strata Of Story
- Breaking Through Writer’s Block [Series] –
- The Poetry Of Place: Describing locations & scenes in RPGs
- Location, Location, Location! [Blog Carnival] – Campaign Mastery hosted this Blog Carnival and offered a good ten articles on the subject (plus the intro and roundup), more than would actually fit in the month. Of those, eight made the first draft of this list. I saved a LOT of entries by listing this one article which collected links to, and synopses of, all the entries (including, of course, those from other Blogs – think of those as a free bonus)! For the record, the actual “chosen eight” were (not in published sequence):
- Location, Location, Location: How Do You Choose A Location?
- 52+ Miniature Miracles: Taking Battlemaps The Extra Mile
- People, Places, & Narratives: Matching Locations to plot needs
- Adjectivizing Descriptions: Hitting The Target
- Big Is Not Enough: Monuments and Places Of Wonder
- Six Wonders: A selected assortment of Wondrous Locations for a fantasy RPGs
- Five More Wonders: Another assortment of locations for a fantasy RPGs
- Still More Wonders: Fifteen Amazing Locations for a Sci-Fi RPG
- Trivial Pursuits: Sources of oddball ideas
- Quantum Distractions With Dice: Types of Sci-Fi Campaign
- The Bargain Arcane: Selling Magic Items
- Taking Care Of Business: The Corporia Kickstarter Campaign – I need to explain why this article makes the cut. It’s all about how to run a successful Kickstarter campaign, using the [then-current] fundraising campaign for Corporia as an example. Well, the campaign is long-past, but the lessons for others remain.
- A folder for every file: My Document Organization for RPGs
- Gaming In A Crowd: Some Advice
- Fire Fighting, Systems Analysis, and RPG Problem Solving [Series] –
- The Scariest Villain
- Leaving Things Out: Negative Space in RPGs
- The compounded interruption of basic services
- Lessons from the Discworld of Terry Pratchett
Finally, an article that took months to create and that merits special attention. So big that it broke our delivery systems,
is both unworthy of inclusion and – at the same time – more deserving of inclusion than any other article on this list. Unworthy, because it doesn’t actually contain anything new of direct benefit to a GM; more deserving than any other, because it is easily the article that I most frequently consult. Why? Because it’s a list of articles published to date by Campaign Mastery, organized by topic, with a review/synopsis of each article.
The astute may have noticed that I actually intended to publish this in mid-to-late February. But at the time I was hip-deep in two major series – New Beginnings and a four-part Ask-The-GMs – that were consuming all my available time and energy. So why is it appearing now?
This is Campaign Mastery’s
Seven Hundredth Post!What’s more, sometime in the two or three weeks, CM will have our (wait for it!!!)
1 Millionth Pageview!
How better to celebrate?
When will the next in the series appear? Well, the 750th post is scheduled to occur a week before Christmas – just two weeks before Campaign Mastery’s official 7th Birthday – and almost exactly when current numbers forecast our 600,000th visitor! I have something special in mind to celebrate that event, but that would be telling…
Suffice it to say that December 2015 is going to be busy, and that “The Best Of 2014” is currently planned to be part of it!
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