The whole end of the year thing brings us to the inevitable “year in review” posts across the blogosphere. And since I tend to not follow along in the other RPG blogger memes, I figured I could jump on board with this. To be honest, the last 18 months have seen several starts and stops for this four-year-old blog, at first because of surgery and a new romance (now not quite so new, but just as awesome), and then because of financial constraints keeping me and the internet apart. But we’ll get to that in the final part of this update.

Traffic Overall

In the past year, my posting has been erratic at best. If you look at the archives you can see that there are some pretty big gaps (three, four months at a time?) between posts. Thus it is no surprise that my traffic isn’t as awesome as it was during my Post A Day run in the first half of 2011. Although, with all that said, December broke my daily record for most hits not once, but twice, and has the new record for total visits to the site at *just* under 40,000 pageviews.

Biggest Sources of Traffic

(not counting search engines of course, over 1,000 referrals each)

• Reddit
• Goblinoid Games Forums
• StumbleUpon
• RPGBloggers.com
• RPGnet Forums

I’m a big supporter of the community-oriented RPGBA, but it seems that it has never really drawn any traffic to my site, whereas the older RPGBloggers remains a primary traffic driver.

What’s interesting about Reddit and StumbleUpon is that while I am an active member of the reddit /RPG community, I don’t often promote myself there – most of the big drivers I’ve gotten from reddit are from other redditors who post my stuff and are often surprised to discover I hang out there also. And I don’t use StumbleUpon at all, but obviously a bunch of stumblers like me.

What’s Hot and What’s… so so.

My maps remain the main draw to the blog. But aside from them, a few posts have kept the site rolling from google hits – mainly my two articles about Tucker’s Kobolds, and my Top 5 Post Apocalyptic RPGs list (which is insane, because it has been drawing 10k hits a year every year since I posted it). My characters, the original reason for writing this blog, remain the articles with the least hits and interest. But I still expect I’ll post a few every year, basically when I remember a game that I want to blather on about in some way or another.

The Big News

Dyson’s Delves is of course the big news of the site for 2012. I released the Delves on December 12th (12/12/12) and have managed to sell over three-quarters of the limited edition hardcover “I want to pay for Dyson’s Internet” run of the book, and another 50 copies of the softcover release. This means I’ll be able to give my ISP a nice big chunk of money at the end of January (when the sales revenue gets released) and I’ll be online for the foreseeable future. Which is awesome. So thanks to all of you for sticking with me through thick and thin, and doubly so for coming out with the money when I needed it. Dyson’s Dodecahedron will be here for at least another year.

Dodecahedron 2013

This year I’m looking to release my second and third books. The second will be one I’ve been working on for years (long before the release of AEC for Labyrinth Lord) called Magical Theorems and Dark Pacts. It’s a book of magic for Labyrinth Lord style games, currently around the 200 page mark (that will change as I head into formatting, mind you, so it should come down a fair bit) with a bunch of alternate Magic User and Cleric subclasses, most of which have their own spell lists and spells, as well as chapters on spells, magic items and critters. I’ve been posting content from this volume for years on the blog, just dig through the B/X Dungeons & Dragons section on the House Rules page for some examples. In time I hope to follow this up with a non-magical version of said book focusing on fighters, rogues and their kin. However, before I get around to that book, I’m already getting ready for Dyson’s Delves volume 2 – another 150 pages of maps and adventures!

As for the blog, it’ll keep on keeping on. Expect to see a new map every Friday and 1-3 additional posts every week. One of my goals is to produce more adventures to go with the maps, but we’ll see how well I stick to that.