Old Files and Transitory Thoughts

When I first started getting into playing role-playing games back fourteen years ago I tended to go online a lot searching for articles that I could use and that would inspire my imagination and improve my games. Often I would copy these into a folder I lovingly called my "DM Toolbox." The thing is that after fourteen years the Toolbox has become more akin to a junk drawer filled with all kinds of odds and ends than anything useful. 

I need to remedy that.

My plan is to explore some of those resources on here every so often and see if the articles are still worth using or if they should be deleted off my hard drive altogether. You'll be able to tell when I'm doing these articles as they'll be indexed as "GM Toolbox" on the blog. This should make it easier for people to search them. 

More later.

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!

1,000,000

By the time you read this my blog will officially have passed 1,000,000 page views!

Thank you guys for reading this strange, little blog and for making me fill like a the coolest kid in the room!

Welcome to 2018 and Year 5 of Dyvers

Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to Year 5 of Dyvers.

As this is the first post of the year, and the first post since I had my health scare back in August of 2017 I would like to begin by catching you up on what's been going on with me. My health scare, for those of you out of the loop, sent me to the hospital half terrified that I was having a heart attack and half convinced that such things happen to other people. Well I did not have a heart attack but it appears that my dependence on Goodies / BC headache powders to relieve my headaches was a mistake - especially since I was taking two or three doses a day. The cumulative effect of taking so many doses of Goodies / BC was that my body began to constantly feel anxious, I was having difficulty breathing, and then chest pains as I started having numbness in my left arm. As you can imagine each of those symptoms alone would have been distressing but all of them together and you're just one step away from a full blown panicked phone call to 911.

I'm okay though.

I've stopped taking Goodies / BC unless I have a migraine that other headache medicines won't touch. I changed my diet; increased my exercise routine; and started getting more sleep. In other words I've made a lot of positive moves in my personal life to get myself back on track. Work-wise, things are going well. I'm happier there than I have been in some time though I am continuing to push myself to improve.

How are you doing?

Excellent.

So now that we've caught up let's talk about what I'm going to be trying to do here on the blog this year. My goals:

• Get any actual play fully written before I being posting it so that people don't have to worry about it petering out as I get distracted by life. 
• Theme my posts better together. This doesn't mean that every post has to be about the same topic in a given week or period of time. Rather I'm looking to make my writing have a better sense of continuity so that readers feel like there's something more substantial going on than just some silly ass chucking words out into cyberspace. 
• I'd like to publish a Best of Dyvers PDF by the end of the year that gathers all of my best content together into a single space so that people can read it. What's held me back from this project is that I want to go through and edit things into a better read and expand my thoughts into something more substantial than they've previously been. That's time consuming and often incredibly difficult as I tend to be a bit of jackass.
• I want to do another blog project with +Mark Van Vlack, +Jens D., and maybe one or two other people. Just something that gets a bit weird and fun where we can all do our own, quirky styles to make a thing that people actually enjoy fucking around with. 
• I'd like to start exploring a new world. Maybe something that I'm making up as I go along. Maybe not. Either way I think that it would be fun to go somewhere new on the blog this year. 
• I've got this funky, little idea about a thing I'm calling "Gamma Dungeon." It's a bit weird and not fully formed yet but I've been enjoying kicking it about mentally and I think 2018 would be a fine year to put it to paper rather than just mentally masturbating. I don't want to Gould this shit. It's too fun for that. Well, at least it's fun for me. 
• I want to write the nastiest fucking goblin encounter that a group of players could ever hope to walk into and publish it on the blog. I want it to be the sort of thing that Game Masters come across and throw their players into on nights when they're really looking for a challenge. I want it to be called on when they've killed dragons already and spit at gods. I want it to be fucking bad ass. Maybe this one's a pipe dream? Maybe not. 
• I think I want to start doing a Best Reads of the Week again this year but if I do I'm going to have to severely limit how many blogs I read during the survey period. I just can't read 700 blogs a week, each publishing an average of four posts a day. It's too daunting. Perhaps I should select a group of 50 blogs at a time? People who are consistently putting out good content would be best. 

That should be enough for right now. Anymore and I'm likely to fuck off and forget completely about them.