Happy New Year, everybody! This is my last news post of 2012. The next one will be on Wednesday, the 2nd of January. Scroll down for a "state of EN World" at the end!
[h=3]Dungeons & Dragons News[/h]
[h=3]Pathfinder RPG News[/h]
[h=3]Roleplaying Games News[/h]
[h=3]Community News[/h]
[h=3]About Circvs Maximvs[/h]
[h=3]The State of EN World, 2012[/h]
This year has been a tough, tough year for EN World, both personally and technologically; by far the hardest year I've ever experienced running my little site. It was characterized by continual technical performance issues, and ended with a massive hacking attack on the site which completely destroyed it; for the last month I (with much help - see below!) have been working hard to rebuild EN World from scratch, and I hope you like it so far, but there's a long, long way to go yet (and, as the news item directly above this shows, Circvs Maximvs was just hacked over the weekend, too - a bad year, ending in an even worse month). All this provided an opportunity for introspection, though, and something of a motivation for "rebirth" (that sounds far more dramatic than it actually is), and has prompted me to double down in 2013 on what I consider to be EN World's core strengths - news and community. The year - and in particular some unpleasant public comments about the hacking - means that I'd like to reiterate that I believe this to be the best RPG community on the web, filled with the most incredible, creative, generous people - many of whom have become firm friends over the last decade. I've had some ups and downs, some intense challenges, even opposition - but EN World is still here, still strong, and looking forward to an excellent 2013! There may have been times this year when I've found keeping this ship afloat to be a very challenging mindset to maintain, but I ain't going anywhere!
I expanded into some interesting areas over the year, some of which I'm brand new to; but I'm proud of our fledgling efforts on my YouTube channel which had me and my brother not only covering a UK-based convention with video interviews, but also launching an animated show called The Perturbed Dragon! Additionally, we held the first Battle of the Bards, and RPG-themed music competition which proved immense fun and which was won by Mary Crowell with her song I Put My Low Stat (see the video at the end of this article). I also - finally - started to get to grips with social media; while this was not popular with everyone in our community, it was invaluable while I had no website during what we now call The Great Breach of 2012. In particular, EN World's Twitter account and Facebook page became active (and I'd appreciate it if you'd follow the one and like the other - they both helped keep our little community together even when the website itself had been destroyed).
It's interesting to look back on the year, and in particular on the news and topics which attracted the most attention. Obviously, the announcement of D&D Next was up there, but there were a number of other big things going on. Here's a list of the most discussed news topics of 2012 (I'll note that I would normally expect the launch of the Pathfinder MMO Kickstarter to be in that list, but that happened while EN World was out for the count - I missed it!)
As we recover from not only the Big Hack/Great Breach of 2012, but also a whole year of performance issues and other problems, I feel that now this site is on a stable platform it would be appropriate to set some goals for the year. This list is just me brainstorming for the moment; thinking aloud. Out of it, I hope to be able to select some realistic and concrete aims for 2013 - view this as a list of candidates, not a resolution (yet). These don't include book publishing goals, which are a separate thing.
And what of the RPG industry in general? I don't have any great insight into that; obviously I can see the whole "edition war" thing has had an effect - Pathfinder appears now to be the dominant RPG in the industry, although that sort of statement is prime flamebait on the web, so there's little point going into it. The industry as a whole is shrinking - I say this not because I know it, but because I've heard it: first from Ryan Dancey at the end of 2011, who predicted it ("The effects on the TRPG market are now quite visible. At GenCon 2011, the number of companies that were paying full time salaries for TRPG game designer/developers was reduced to a short list"); followed by Mongoose's Matt Sprange at the end of 2012 who confirmed it ("The current RPG market is miserable. There really is no other word for it.... If the top tier games are selling at these levels, then something is seriously wonky in the market.")
So with the dominant game apparently changing, and the market itself drastically shrinking, it looks like the environment is a very different one to just a short few years ago. I'm no expert; nor do I have any special insight or data (though if there was the usual mass-layoff at WotC this Christmas, I missed it - maybe that's a good sign?) but this seems to be what folks in the industry are saying. Let's hope it's not as drastic as it sounds!
Finally, some thanks are in order. In a year where I've felt very much under pressure and isolated, there have been some stalwarts who helped more than I can possibly ever thank them for. Foremost amongst those is @darjr, without whom we would not have recovered from the hack, and who really doesn't have the time to do the stuff he did. Thanks, man - I seriously owe you. I'd also like to thank those who offered moral support during the year, and my brother (who won't ever read this) who really stepped up when it came to video stuff.
- Morrus, Dec 2012.
[h=3]Dungeons & Dragons News[/h]
- In these final days of the year, we look back the game's most nightmarish monsters: the undead! So, how did these creatures evolve in the game? Read on to find out!
- Defenders of Midgard, a player's guide to the Midgard Campaign setting, Ricj Green, Brian Liberge, Paul Baalham and John Pope is out now. The book is full-colour and contains themes, schools of magic, backgrounds and gear for Kobold Press' excellent Midgard campaign setting, and costs just $4.99/£3.09. If you combine this with the Midgard Bestiary for 4e and the campaign setting, you should be able to run a fantastic Midgard campaign.
[h=3]Pathfinder RPG News[/h]
- Curious how the new Round 1 RPG Superstar voting system is going? Senior Software Developer, Gary Teter has the lowdown.
- The Nerd Machine has reviewed the Pathfinder Beginner Box. "I regret that I have but 5 stars to give; it’s that good!"
[h=3]Roleplaying Games News[/h]
- Fantasy Flight has posted a preview of Final Testament, the first book-length adventure for Only War.
- Part One of an interview Steve Kenson did with Mind of the Geek on designing ICONS and Great Power.
[h=3]Community News[/h]
- 40 Random Encounters is an article by EN World columnist Challenger RPG. A trio of wizards, a lost farmer looking for his pig, a psychotic law enforcer, or the party being shanghaied into being “Ghostbusters” - it's all there!
- End of the Year -- Campaign Mastery looks at the year in retrospect. As has Game Knight Reviews. Geek's Dream Girl has a top posts for 2012 list, and Gnome Stew has a State of the Stew. As does Rite Publishing and Adamant Entertainment. Plus I mentioned similar articles from folks like Paizo Publishing in recent news. Well, everyone has one, but these are the ones I saw myself; my own is below.
- Critical Hits takes a look at a year of Kickstarters.
- Gaming Tonic's Christopher Hackler talks paladins, and their - sometimes difficult - place in an adventuring group.
- Gnome Stew is moving TreasureTables.org (Martin Ralya's old system-neutral GMing advice blog from 2005-2007) into Gnome Stew itself.
- Kobold Press presents Creature Comforts: Frost Giants (Part 4). Additionally, the judges for their Valhalla Calling competition have narrowed entries to a shortlist of five adventure pitches, upon which you can vote. These include:
- Seventeen Steps of the Dancing Master by Jeffrey Erwin - a Pathfinder adventure for 9th level characters featuring the seventeen rooms of the decaying palace, studded with shifting spaces, secret passages, deadly automata, illusions, extradimensional spaces, and thousands of books.
- Poisoned Winter by Michael Lane - a Pathfinder RPG event-based adventure for Level 10 characters with options for Mythic play which provides the GM with a sandbox of events and set pieces throughout the City of the Mermaid weaving a tale of horror and hope over the span of a Krakovan winter.
- The Cursed Collection of the Archmage Moor by John “Ross” Rossomangno in which the party enters Moor’s Museum. As they explore, the party must contend with the security measures designed to keep would-be thieves out and some of the more dangerous exhibits in.
- Hangman’s Hill by Heine Stick - an investigation/horror/dungeon adventure for 5th level characters.
- The Crown of Charon by Sersa Victory - a Pathfinder RPG Adventure in which the characters explore a three-tiered inverted pyramid that rises from an island in the River Styx for Characters of 13th Level.
- There's a new Order of the Stick strip.
- Sly Flourish has an updated version of the article Three Motivations for Your Villains (originally posted in 2009).
- Try these tips in your next game. Marvin the Mage's guide to surviving encounters.
- Check out this awesome GM Game Reference for 13th Age.
- Hall of Bells is a custom playtest dungeon for D&D Next by Jason Romein. You can download it as a ZIP file.
- Savage Mojo has some new free stuff for Savage Worlds.
[h=3]About Circvs Maximvs[/h]
- If you're wondering what's happened to Circvs Maximvs, it's been hacked. Yup, just like EN World at the beginning of the month. We're working on it (while still trying to rebuild EN World). Thanks, hackers. Happy New Year to you, too.
[h=3]The State of EN World, 2012[/h]
This year has been a tough, tough year for EN World, both personally and technologically; by far the hardest year I've ever experienced running my little site. It was characterized by continual technical performance issues, and ended with a massive hacking attack on the site which completely destroyed it; for the last month I (with much help - see below!) have been working hard to rebuild EN World from scratch, and I hope you like it so far, but there's a long, long way to go yet (and, as the news item directly above this shows, Circvs Maximvs was just hacked over the weekend, too - a bad year, ending in an even worse month). All this provided an opportunity for introspection, though, and something of a motivation for "rebirth" (that sounds far more dramatic than it actually is), and has prompted me to double down in 2013 on what I consider to be EN World's core strengths - news and community. The year - and in particular some unpleasant public comments about the hacking - means that I'd like to reiterate that I believe this to be the best RPG community on the web, filled with the most incredible, creative, generous people - many of whom have become firm friends over the last decade. I've had some ups and downs, some intense challenges, even opposition - but EN World is still here, still strong, and looking forward to an excellent 2013! There may have been times this year when I've found keeping this ship afloat to be a very challenging mindset to maintain, but I ain't going anywhere!
I expanded into some interesting areas over the year, some of which I'm brand new to; but I'm proud of our fledgling efforts on my YouTube channel which had me and my brother not only covering a UK-based convention with video interviews, but also launching an animated show called The Perturbed Dragon! Additionally, we held the first Battle of the Bards, and RPG-themed music competition which proved immense fun and which was won by Mary Crowell with her song I Put My Low Stat (see the video at the end of this article). I also - finally - started to get to grips with social media; while this was not popular with everyone in our community, it was invaluable while I had no website during what we now call The Great Breach of 2012. In particular, EN World's Twitter account and Facebook page became active (and I'd appreciate it if you'd follow the one and like the other - they both helped keep our little community together even when the website itself had been destroyed).
It's interesting to look back on the year, and in particular on the news and topics which attracted the most attention. Obviously, the announcement of D&D Next was up there, but there were a number of other big things going on. Here's a list of the most discussed news topics of 2012 (I'll note that I would normally expect the launch of the Pathfinder MMO Kickstarter to be in that list, but that happened while EN World was out for the count - I missed it!)
- Monte Cook Leaves WotC - No Longer working on D&D Next [updated]
- WotC Seeks Unity with a New Edition
- New RPG Company Casting All Women for Genesys
- Seminar Transcript - Reimagining Skills and Ability Scores
- WotC to Release 1st Edition Premium Core Rulebooks Reprints
- Reaper Miniatures Kickstarter
- And Lo, the Fighter Did Get a Shtick of his Own... COMBAT SUPERIORITY!
- How do you feel about the future of D&D after the official announcements?
- Hillside Games, Asheville: The Unfriendly Local Game Store
- Fortress America: When Gaming and Politics Collide
- Gygax Magazine? [UPDATE 3 - Electric Boogaloo]
- Working in the Game Mine
- DDXP Begins Today!
- Too many Kickstarter projects? Is Kickstarter the new d20 glut?
- Monte Cook's new RPG: Numenera [UPDATED]
- Seminar Transcript - Class Design: From Assassins to Wizards
- Prose, Terminology, Fluff, & Presentation: Spreadsheets or Haiku?
- Ed Greenwood to write 5E's Forgotten Realms
- Another D&D Next Playtest Survey
- This One Goes to . . . Ten [Merged four Oct 29 Playtest Package announcement threads]
- Broken NDAs or Elaborate Trolls?
- WotC's D&D Virtual Table Cancelled
- 3.5 Edition Reprints
- Future of D&D Keynote Speech [UPDATE - with video!]
- EN World Interview With Mike Mearls, Lead Designer of D&D Next
- Baldur's Gate Countdown Ends... Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition for Summer 2012
- Jonathan Tweet & Rob Heinsoo: Making their own 5th Edition?
- WotC, DDI, 4E, and Hasbro: Some History
As we recover from not only the Big Hack/Great Breach of 2012, but also a whole year of performance issues and other problems, I feel that now this site is on a stable platform it would be appropriate to set some goals for the year. This list is just me brainstorming for the moment; thinking aloud. Out of it, I hope to be able to select some realistic and concrete aims for 2013 - view this as a list of candidates, not a resolution (yet). These don't include book publishing goals, which are a separate thing.
- Restore missing functionality - OGRE, Campaign Manager, Dice Roller, Gamers Seeking Gamers.
- Double down on the news page. It has lost its luster over the years, and I would like to see it become the best gosh-darn gaming news page on the web. That goal is literally linked solely to my sitting down and doing it thoroughly every single day, consistently. Except maybe Sundays. Of all these goals, this is the one I know damn well how to do; I just have to make sure I do it! A large part of this challenge is that most RPG companies have, by design, become their own news outlets, using social networks as their sole means of information distribution. It will be 2013's challenge to discover exactly what role a news site like EN World can adopt in this environment.
- Publish 52 RPG reviews (one per week- Neuoglyph is already doing that!) PLUS 52 boardgame reviews (one per week - we're already trialling a new boardgame reviewer, whose first review you can find in the reviews section!)
- Continue publishing quality articles. I hired some new columnists in 2012 and they haven't really had a fair shake (though some of them simply vanished without a trace, but that was expected), what with downtimes, and hacks, and layout changes, and Xmas. 2013 will be the Year of the Column!
- Experiment with a foreign language forum for 3 months to test its viability.
- Hold 12 competitions (one per month).
- Run 12 major interviews (one per month).
- Make a second season of The Perturbed Dragon.
- Make a pilot episode of Dave: Half Dragon Space Marine.
- Hold Battle of the Bards II.
- Go to Gen Con with video cameras and provide awesome coverage and interviews like we did for our trial-run at Dragonmeet in December.
- Introduce free Publisher Accounts, which a company representative can use to directly post press releases to a dedicated press page, and which clearly marks company representatives as such in their posts.
And what of the RPG industry in general? I don't have any great insight into that; obviously I can see the whole "edition war" thing has had an effect - Pathfinder appears now to be the dominant RPG in the industry, although that sort of statement is prime flamebait on the web, so there's little point going into it. The industry as a whole is shrinking - I say this not because I know it, but because I've heard it: first from Ryan Dancey at the end of 2011, who predicted it ("The effects on the TRPG market are now quite visible. At GenCon 2011, the number of companies that were paying full time salaries for TRPG game designer/developers was reduced to a short list"); followed by Mongoose's Matt Sprange at the end of 2012 who confirmed it ("The current RPG market is miserable. There really is no other word for it.... If the top tier games are selling at these levels, then something is seriously wonky in the market.")
So with the dominant game apparently changing, and the market itself drastically shrinking, it looks like the environment is a very different one to just a short few years ago. I'm no expert; nor do I have any special insight or data (though if there was the usual mass-layoff at WotC this Christmas, I missed it - maybe that's a good sign?) but this seems to be what folks in the industry are saying. Let's hope it's not as drastic as it sounds!
Finally, some thanks are in order. In a year where I've felt very much under pressure and isolated, there have been some stalwarts who helped more than I can possibly ever thank them for. Foremost amongst those is @darjr, without whom we would not have recovered from the hack, and who really doesn't have the time to do the stuff he did. Thanks, man - I seriously owe you. I'd also like to thank those who offered moral support during the year, and my brother (who won't ever read this) who really stepped up when it came to video stuff.
- Morrus, Dec 2012.
[video=youtube;A-mWtNIOPHg]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-mWtNIOPHg[/video]
