2017 Highlights

I have Google Analytics installed on the blog so I can see how many visitors we get, roughly where you are coming from, what pages you visit most often and that sort of thing.

Posts

Looking back over the past year a few posts in particular stand out.

These are our most commented on posts:

RMU – to infinity and beyond!

‘Well sir, if I were you, I wouldn’t start from here’

Is Rolemaster Worth Saving?

Rolemaster deconstruction: questioning the undead.

Now 3 out of 4 were all about RMU. I think that is really positive. We obviously care about RMU and the future of Rolemaster.

On a typical day we get about 40 unique people on the blog. When I say unique that is Googles term not mine. If you checked the site on your phone and then on your laptop you would count twice as different cookies were set. The day the ironcrown site went down we got 473 unique visitors. That means, in my eyes, that this blog is only reaching 1 in 12 of the active RM community. I think that is a ‘could do better’.

And talking of doing better. The single post that was read the most times was…

Rolemaster Character Creation in 15 Minutes.

Writers

Back in 2014 it was just me putting out 2 posts a week. The very first comment was actually by Spectre771 on December 14th 2014 about three weeks after the blog started.

In 2017 we have had more writers than ever before.

BriH

intothatdarkness

egdcltd

…and most recently…

Brad

I suspect that our most prolific commentator has to be Hurin, but then that is no surprise!

I would like to thank all of you and all the other people who have commented or read the blog last year.

Publications

This was probably the biggest change in 2017. We have published the first 10 of the 50 in 50 adventure outlines. These are also available as a bundle if you haven’t already checked them out. The ones with the hilariously funny/clever/witty titles were written by me (please read that as being humorous and not egotistical). From what I have seen the most popular by sales so far are:

  1. The City of Spiders
  2. Spire’s Reach
  3. Creatures Of The Night!

You can grab the 1-10 bundle from RPGNow.

In addition to adventure outlines we published the first 7 issues of the Rolemaster Fanzine. You can see them all here. This has been a year of experimenting with the fanzine and it is now available as a PDF on the OneBookShelf sites and in print version on Amazon and on Kindle. If you have Kindle Unlimited you can read it for free!

2017 also saw the introduction of two new site sections. Our free downloads section (see the menu above). Project BASiL is by far the most popular download.

The second new section is the monster Wiki. This is still lagging behind reality at the moment. I have created more monsters than are featured in the wiki. I will be setting aside an evening shortly to upload a whole bunch more. There is a suggestion that the monsters should have skills and professions and I think this is a good idea. Any registered blog user should be able to edit the monster entries and add things like that to them. I also want to update the references to the Spell Law lists to point to BASiL lists. That should help keep players on their toes if there are completely new spells coming at them!

So that is my look back on 2017. I think we have both achieved a lot and at the same time barely scratched the surface! The best thing is that even after 3 years I have never once sat down to write a post and thought “I don’t know what to write.” If anything I need 2018 to be a year of completing projects so I can make some more space on my todo list for the crowd of ideas I haven’t been able to work on yet.

(That To infinity and beyond post was not particularly brilliant but it triggered a crystallisation of thoughts from that post and others have have written elsewhere by me and others. I will try and get them all together into something exciting for next week.)