Do Not Go to the Risus Monkey Blog at this Time

I don't know if anyone has attempted to read the Risus Monkey Blog in a while but avoid it entirely at this time. It has been hacked and the site attempts to take over your browser. 

Somehow I'm Getting Ready to Run Two Campaigns for Two Groups of Novices.

So in the last two weeks I've been approached by two separate groups of my friends looking for someone to run D&D for them. One group is going to be all the ladies and will consist of my Wife, our friends R and C - who have not yet met but I think will like each other. The other group involves my friends W and B and a whole passel of their homies. Other than my wife and R not one of these fuckers has played Dungeons & Dragons (or any other role-playing game for that matter).

Kids I am fucking stoked. 

I know a lot of Game Masters aren't really all that excited to run for new players but I think it's fucking boss. There's nothing like seeing someone break that barrier between believing that you're only allowed to do so much and the realization that the only thing you can't attempt to do are the things you can't imagine doing. 

I want so desperately to do them a solid and rock their fucking faces off. 

I'm only really nervous about the group with W and B because they haven't got an experience player to show them the ropes. They're literally standing on virgin soil trying to figure out if how the fuck to open a coconut for the first time in history. That's fucking exciting shit right there!

Do you remember that moment when you're sitting in your den and suddenly it clicked for the first time? That you could do anything your imagination would let you do and the only thing holding you back was a dice? God I'm so excited for these cats! They're about to get to experience one of the best moments in gaming for the first time and all I have to do is give them the right nudge and let them run! 

THIS IS WHY I PLAY THESE GAMES!

Ah, shit. I need to figure out what I'm going to run.

Ratik, as Far as that Goes.

Yesterday my brother was looking at the World of Greyhawk map and he noticed the land of Ratik. He was curious about the little nation, and I'll be honest here, I was too. In my years of running in Greyhawk I never ran across the province as I tend to focus south of the Nyr Dyv and out west towards the Sea of Dust.

Ratik was new territory for me to explore; and the thing is, Ratik appears to be new territory for everyone else too. As best as I've been able to tell it was only mentioned in four places: (1) the World of Greyhawk Boxed Set, (2) in an article in Dragon 57, (3) the Living Greyhawk website, and (4) the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer. That's not a lot of information to go on.

Mounted Knight by Arthur Pyle

In the World of Greyhawk Boxed Set (pg. 32) the Archbarony is revealed to be an offshoot of Aerdi and to be a province ruled by the rather competent Ratik line. They have strong connections with the dwarves and gnomes of the area and are respected by the raiders and nomads surrounding them. When the hordes of humanoids began attacking Ratik not only weathered their advances but drove them out of their lands. Unfortunately this sent the humanoids south into the Bone Marches where they wrecked havoc.

Aside from the prosperous logging industry the only aspect of the Ratik description that I found worth noting was that in the north Ratik woodsmen were armed with bows and patrolled that boarder while in the south "hillrunners" were equipped with slings and watched the southern boarder. 

The article from Dragon 57, Developments from Stonefist to South Province by Gary Gygax, (pg. 13 - 16) is largely a battlefield report. While there are some interesting tidbits here it largely points towards the steady development of the fractious area without anything all that substantive given away. The only thing that I found interesting was that the dwarves in the Rakers (the mountain chain to the west of Ratik) are largely holed up in their mountainous fortresses as they are being besieged by gnolls and like-minded humanoids.

After this all I found on the area is from the Living Greyhawk website and Gazetteer (pg. 88 - 91) which largely express the same information though with the Gazetteer providing more depth to the reader. Our leader is now Lady Evaleigh of Ratik and the barony is now completely divested from Aerdi. To be perfectly honest, while this provides the reader with the most information on the area from any of the sources I have it's largely a mess. This brings up one of the problems that I have with the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer. While it provides players with some of the most current information on the setting as of its publication it also tends to feel a bit like the authors are attempting to throw everything they can think of at the players. It makes things feel rushed and discombobulated at times (especially in less developed areas like Ratik). 

So that's as much information as I have on the nation of Ratik. If anyone else has anything to add from any of the official sources (Living Greyhawk, modules, the magazines, and so forth) please let me know because I would love to continue fleshing out the little nation-state. 

January 2018 in Review

So January is over and I'd like to talk a little bit about how it went because that's what I want to do today. Creatively the month was okay. It started strong but the last two weeks kind of fell off. I've got some things I'm working on for this month so if everything goes as planned this should be a stronger month.

Page view wise this last month was very good. I saw an overall increase of 72,462 page views and nearly 4,000 unique visitors hitting the page throughout the month. I'm seeing about 46% return visitors which tells me that the way I'm writing is having a better impact on my readers. In other words, people are not only reading my blog, but they're coming back and reading more over time. That's something that I've struggled with over the lifetime of the blog and it's cool that things are starting to work more in the direction that I've been hoping for over the last few years.

Let's break down the way that the blog is working over the last month with a bit more detail.

Performance of Posts Published in January 2018

Page Views      Title

128                    Welcome to 2018 and Year 5 of Dyvers

117                    The Most Viewed Posts on Dyvers of 2017

130                    2017 in Review on Dyvers

764                    A Line in the Sand for One of the Oldest Settings in D&D

398                    Reader Mail: Where Would You Start an Adventure in Greyhawk?

107                    1,000,000

409                    Greyhawk as a Post Apocalyptic World

206                    The Book Shelf: Sumerian Mythology by Samuel Noah Kramer

598                     I Don't Believe in the Session Zero

339                     Pre-Written Adventures and Me

392                     Magic in 5e D&D is too Easy

146                    A Research List

Most Viewed Posts of January 2018

Page Views     Title

4,600              The Great Blog Roll Call

1,485              The Great Blog Roll Call 2014!      

570                 I Don't Believe in Session Zero

392                  Magic in 5e D&D is too Easy

323                  Pre-Written Adventures and Me

197                  Some notes on the Great Blog Roll Call

179                  A Line in the Sand for One of the Oldest Settings in D&D

174                  The Book Shelf: Sumerian Mythology by Samuel Noah Kramer

164                  Let's Talk About the Meatgrinder Mode for a Bit

146                  A Research List

Bold post were published in January

Blog Earnings: $1.22 in the January. Essentially this represents a doubling of earnings over the previous month. Thank you to everyone who clicked on a link. I can now buy two lotto tickets off Google AdSense earnings.

At this rate I’ll be able to buy three next month and that’s fucking cool!