{"id":14316,"date":"2014-10-28T01:00:12","date_gmt":"2014-10-27T14:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/?p=14316"},"modified":"2014-10-28T01:00:12","modified_gmt":"2014-10-27T14:00:12","slug":"the-best-of-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/the-best-of-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"The Best Of 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"
This entry is part 4 of 7 in the series The Best<\/a><\/div><\/div><\/div>

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2012 was another big year for Campaign Mastery. By year’s end, I was running the site on my own (with occasional support from co-Founder Johnn, for which I continue to be enormously grateful) and writing all the articles. This necessitated more of those articles containing my own campaign and adventure development – something tricky to accomplish without spilling the beans when your players are amongst the regular readers! There were three huge milestones – the 300,000th visitor, the 550,000th page view, and the 400th post. And, mid-year, the crowning highlight of the year, the ENnie nomination!<\/p>\n

These achievements came on the back of continued strong growth in readers, and they came because the content continued to be very strong.<\/p>\n

The Story Of Selection<\/h3>\n

It only gets harder to cull these down to a reasonable number. This was driven home to me rather forcefully when I examined the list of possible contenders from 2012. After a ruthless pruning, I was down to 46 great articles that I was trying to fit into 20 slots. Unsurprisingly, I just couldn’t do it, but it’s a wonderful problem to have!<\/p>\n

I collected two sets of articles into series just so that I could point to the series’ page instead of the individual posts. I trimmed and culled and trimmed and culled some more, and got down to 32 items. I chose 18 must-have articles and series from that list, and had 14 contenders for the final 2 slots. I trimmed and culled a fourth time, and decided to inflate the size of the list to 25 entries, with 12 articles and series fighting to fit into the 8 remaining slots. And that’s where I got stuck.<\/p>\n

None of the remaining articles was any more worthy of inclusion than any of the others. None were any less deserving, either. It was all, or none.<\/p>\n

I compromised. The original 18, plus one of the 12, went into the official Best Of. And the remaining 11 (plus a ringer) have been placed in an “honorable mentions” sublist that forms a seperate part of the “best of” given below, and which is archived on the “Best Of” page as well, but which did NOT make the list in the RHS nav screen. They aren’t – quite – amongst the very very best of 2012 – but they are all good enough to make a list of “the very best”. If it weren’t for restrictions of practicality, they all would have made the cut.<\/p>\n

So that’s how I split some hairs to achieve the list below.<\/p>\n

Hey – any year with better than two “best of” qualifiers (counting series as individual posts) and more than one almost-as-good honorable mention (ditto) every month – that’s a good year by any definition!<\/p>\n

The Best Of 2012<\/h3>\n

These are the 19 posts I’ve hand-picked as the best of 2012:
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