Celebrating Blackmoor Week (Day Seven)

Do you have a copy of The First Fantasy Campaign? Or have you have ever read any of it or seen it? It was first published in 1977 and you can find some information over the The Acaeum First Fantasy Campaign. Although the Acaeum is usually a good source of information, they are in error about the First printing as the first printing is all Black and White including the cover. 

The links to the correct information https://ruinsofmurkhill.proboards.com/post/25030 and https://ruinsofmurkhill.proboards.com/post/26702 are two primary links(you can find all the links in the thread) and below I will post the images. This information was posted at The Ruins of Murkhill by the former Admin The Perilous Dreamer. I believe these are scanned images of his personal copy. The images are posted full size at the forum.

Here is the cover of the real first printing (that is a fire elemental in the background behind the tree.)

The back cover

Inside the front cover (Also note the typo in the copyright statement, instead of First Fantasy Campaign it says First Family Campaign, this typo is not present in the later printing with the color cover. Another thing missed by the experts at The Acaeum. 

The Table of Contents

Celebrating Blackmoor Week (Day Six)

The following is my opinion which I personally view as a statement of fact.

Another question that comes up is should we hold so-called "historians" to account for distorting the record concerning Blackmoor and Dave Arneson's creation of Blackmoor and of Dungeons & Dragons. 

It is a fact that Arneson is the creator of these. Gygax was shown Blackmoor about a year and a half to two years after it began and he immediately saw the publication potential. For that we can give Gygax credit, he was the impetus behind the publication, whereas Arneson was content to share it face to face. What did Gygax do, he wrote it down and changed a lot of Arneson's mechanics (but not the underlying game engine which was solely Arneson's creation), added back in a lot of Chainmail that Arneson had discarded, replaced Arneson's mechanics with the d20 roles. Then playtesting began and both the Twin Cities Arneson group and the Lake Geneva group added things to the written rules as playtesting proceeded. Things that Arneson liked were in a number of cases dropped from the written down game.

So the game engine itself, the concepts, a lot of the monsters, the dungeon crawl, the so-called "end game"/"domain game" (which in Blackmoor was present at all levels, not just high level) and many other things were the creation of Arneson. Gygax wrote it down and swapped out a lot of mechanics for his own and went to great lengths to promote Chainmail and the fiction that Blackmoor/D&D was derived from Chainmail.

Which brings us down to the present day where some so-called "historians" distort the record and will share selected and sometimes partial/censored images of documents to promote the Gygax narrative that developed that falsely claims that Gygax was the prime creative person in the picture when it was really Arneson that is the prime creative person in the creation of D&D.

We have today whole forums, blogs and so-called "historians" who are dedicated to promoting the false narrative about who created what. Should they be held accountable for fabricating a false distorted picture of Blackmoor, Arneson and the creation of Dungeons & Dragons?

It has become a custom to censor and ban anyone who disputes the false narrative and someone should ask the question, what do all these people have to gain from silencing the truth about the real creator of Dungeons & Dragons, namely Dave Arneson? Maybe they think that "Saint Gygax" is going to grant them a boon for their support of distortions that he himself started? I don't blame Gygax for any of that, he was after all human and a self promotor, he was acting in his own self interest. I can forgive that. But all these people who are furthering the falsehoods and the misinformation campaign, should we not call them to account when they are not even acting in their own self-interest, but are acting to the detriment of the hobby and to the detriment of the man who created the hobby, Dave Arneson?

Celebrating Blackmoor Week (Day Five)

As you look into Blackmoor and Dungeons & Dragons you may wonder where somethings came from or how early some ideas were around. Again the blog Hidden in Shadows is a great resource for those things.

Consider the topic of HD and Level for instance.

Infamous Characters, and the history of levels in D&D

Levels are at the heart of D&D, from experience to combat to hit points - not to mention how much the term is used for other things, such as dungeon level and magic level.  Knowing when character levels came to be in the form familiar to us from the 1974 rules would go a long way to really understanding the development of the game.

Did HD equal Level in early Blackmoor?

From my previous post, it is apparent that as Arneson developed early Blackmoor, flunky, hero, superhero did not really function as “levels” as we would think of them today, but more like level titles or social ranks – the sort of things we sometimes call tiers – that were nevertheless very important divisions as far as rule differences were concerned.   Characters also had “levels” of ability within these rankings as either “warrior” levels or “magic” levels, and sometimes in both.  It is the meaning of “level” in early Blackmoor and the interplay of level and title that I want to explore here. 

Celebrating Blackmoor Week (Day Four)

As part of celebrating Blackmoor Week and Dave Arneson Game Day I would like to direct to a great source of information the blog known as Hidden in Shadows written by D. H. Boggs also known as aldarron on many forums. 

He is in my opinion the foremost Dungeons & Dragons historian of our time. I say foremost because he is an honest historian who does research and then talks about possible conclusions. Rather than the ways of most so called "historians" who start with conclusions and then appear to censor their research when they publish so that their original conclusions are always supported.

Here are some links to the good stuff on his blog that are highly recommended reading.

Almost Forgotten: A Published RPG Ruleset older than D&D

Follow up Thoughts on Cinematic Inspiration and the timing of the First Castle/Dungeon Game

Thoughts on the Cinematic inspiration for Blackmoor Castle.

Dungeon in the Womb of Strategos

A Timeline From Braunstein to Blackmoor according to interviews of Major Wesely

These are only a few of the essays written by Mr. Boggs and all of them are excellent.

Celebrating Blackmoor Week (Day Three)

When you think about Dave Arneson and Blackmoor you think about when did it all start and what was it like.

Here is an eyewitness account

The First Dungeon Adventure By Greg Svenson

Celebrating Blackmoor Week (Day Two)

What are you doing to celebrate Blackmoor Week? Are you going to game this week? Work on that new continent of your setting that you have been meaning to get started on? Create some new creatures for your campaign or finish some random generation tables you've been meaning to get to?

Whatever you do this week, do something original in honor of Dave Arneson and his creation Blackmoor. Remind yourself that your campaign world is your creation and unique in all the world and that's the way it should be. Celebrate your right to create things from scratch and create things in accordance with your own vision of how things should be in your world and you don't have to worry or care if everyone like it as long as you like it and as long as you had fun creating it. Don't let the naysayers that want to pour cold water on your ideas get you down, just go have some fun.

Celebrating Blackmoor Week (Day One)

Over at The Ruins of Murkhill we are celebrating Blackmoor Week and  we starting our celebration today September the 24th and running it through Dave Arneson's birthday on October 1st. This is a great time for gaming all because on October 1st 1947 Dave Arneson the creator of Blackmoor and ultimately the creator and co-author of Dungeons & Dragons was born. (yes we know that the 24th through the 1st is eight days)

If you are lucky enough to have a copy of the First Fantasy Campaign you know what an awesome world Dave Arneson created. He and his friends in the Twin Cities in Minnesota were ground zero for the birth of tabletop roleplaying. Yes, David Wesely was involved too with the Braunsteins, but you can't have credit for creating something IMO if you didn't recognize that it was a good thing and thought that seminal moment was a failure. Even more, the fact that the Braunstein event was roleplaying is, according to the tales that are told, solely because Dave Arneson recognized the opportunity and went off the rails of the planned script for the evening and turned it from a "story" into a "roleplaying game." So while David Wesely may have created the conditions for a roleplaying game to occur, it occurred because of Dave Arneson and his "shenanigans" at that event. Dave Arneson started wheeling and dealing with the other players and hijacked the "story" (the script) and something special and unique occurred instead. I say all of this without any disrespect for David Wesely, he was there and he played an important part in things. There was a synergy between David and Dave and magic happened. (Dave Hargrave took Dave Arneson's concepts and more magic happened.)

So that is why we celebrate Blackmoor Week. If you play roleplaying games, thank Dave Arneson!

Old School Star Trek Role-playing

Next up is Old School Star Trek Role-playing a fun little place, that is just plodding along instead of soaring. This forum was started in December 2009 and currently has 166 members, 372 threads and 5,152 posts. The color scheme is not the greatest for readability or for looking inviting. Only three members account for 45% of the posts. This is another unknown little forum, that just sits there in its own little backwater, not advertising itself.

So it is just on life support and it kind of makes me a little mad. There is no reason for this forum to be so mired in the doldrums. Who doesn't like Star Trek? 

It is unlike some of the forums I am looking at, pretty well organized. It has the following sections.

Old School Star Trek Role-playing

Star Trek: The Original Series 

Role-playing General 

Board and Wargaming 

Resources and Links

Game Systems

Space Patrol (1977)

Traveller (1977)

Starships & Spacemen (1978)

Star Fleet Universe (1979)

FASA Trek (1982)

Where No Man Has Gone Before (2009)

The Game Systems section is about playing Star Trek using various systems. Obviously fixing the color scheme and getting the word out would help, but something else is needed that I can't really put my finger on it. Part of it would boil down to this, are these people canon purists or are they willing to strike out on their own and carve out an old school setting in a different time frame so none of the canon characters would be living so that people could reasonably play all the juicy fun roles. Maybe that and picking a game system and then fan supporting the heck out of it. Good luck guys, this is too good to just sit here like this, give each other a swift kick and crank it back up a few notches.

  

Ye Olde Gaming Companye Forum

This next forum Ye Olde Gaming Companye aka YOGC Community Forum is another odd duck. What I mean by that is that they are another one of the mixed message forums. A basic theme for forums is to recruit new members, but a lot of forum are antagonistic to new members in one or more ways. Some forums are very anti-lurker, they think if you join you must also be an active poster, when most people join a forum just to read the posts and make sure they have access to everything and a few might make a post once in a blue moon (mostly what I do most places) and then a very few are high volume posters. 

So this forum has a Hello Thread (IMPORTANT: After you register, post a quick 'Hello' here. Otherwise, it is likely you will be deleted as spam. Definitely the kind of thing that sets your teeth on edge right off the bat. You delete account that are spam or trolls, you don't delete accounts for lurking. That just sends the wrong message.

This forum was founded in January of 2008 and they have 179 members, 585 threads and 6216 posts. In the past 48 days they have added 1 member, 1 thread and 16 posts. The site is dark and uninviting in appearance and is in need of a facelift. This site was created to support a game called the Wayfarer RPG, it is available at Ye-Olde-Gaming-Companye at RPGNow. Change the name to The Wayfarer instead of Wayfarer and you go from a good name to a great name. The game says it is a mix of old and new school elements with an old school feel. Their licensing terms and derivative works terms appear very reasonable. 

So as bad as it looks this is not IMO a lost cause, a facelift for the website, more friendliness towards lurkers, make the pdfs free and the POD copies full price and then focus on a mix of free and for sale support products, would be a good start. Then get active blogging about the game spend some time creating new threads and with a core of people to do a little pushing this could be revived IMO.

This all assumes that the game is a good one, you'll have to decide that for yourself. I had not heard of the game or the forum until I started doing this little project. I hope they do a reboot of their whole thing and breath new life into their forum and their game.

The Wayfarer's Inn Forum

Now we come to the 2nd level forums the Light Flyweights of the RPG forum world.

First up is the defunct The Wayfarer's Inn Forum which ran from about March of 2007 through  December of 2011. There were a handful of posts from December of 2011 through the end of 2015 as three players continued a moribund pbp game. This forum had 122 members that accumulated 565 threads and 8973 posts during it's nearly five year run.  After it came to an end it was subsumed into The Comeback Inn another forum that will be covered later in this series.

There is not much to say about this long defunct forum other than the fact that I was shocked as to how little useful and/or interesting stuff was present. Few of the threads had much in the way of discussion and most of that was inconsequential. It is not surprising that it died, because quite frankly it was a boring place IMO. The forum owner's attitude toward members, I am sure did not help. He says, "Fear me, I am Admin!" Some would be joking if they said that, but it does not appear that this guy was joking, that is IMO the way he felt about his power.

Frog God Games Forum

Now for the last of the 1st level Gnatweight forums

The Frog God Games Forum was founded around Oct 2013 or so it appears. They currently have 687 threads, 4374 posts  and the number of members is unknown. Posting is infrequent and it does not have the look or feel of support from its host. For me this is another head scratcher.

I would make some comments but forum members covered that base back in 2013 saying in the thread Whoo hoo! We have forums!

... but these forums are jarringly non-standard. Such low information density. They don't resize horizontally; my wide browser window dwarfs the width of the tables. The links on the left look like they might apply to the forum, but they don't. No search capability that I can see. And as I see the preview of this post, I see none of the returns/spacing I put in. :(
My heart weeps at the wasted potential. Compare to the old Necromancer forums, the old Swords & Wizardry forums, Dragonsfoot, ENWorld, rpg.net, therpgsite, TLG, K&KA, odd74, Acaeum, etc. There are good reasons those other fora use a more tried-and-true formula/layout/engine.
I cross my fingers that you can make these better! I _really_ want to post on a vital, energetic S&W forum again!

and

While I really like finally having a Frog God forum, I agree with what ________ said.
I also, don't like the layout of the "All Products" page. I realize that it's an alphabetical listing of all products, but I think you should have categories for products like they do on Paizo.
I can see a lot of potential in this site, but right now it feels very disorganized.

It is still non-standard with low information density and a forum that only occupies about a third of my monitor width. I have to agree wasted potential. And I would add that the forum has a washed out unexciting look. Frog God Games, you can do much better than this and IMO you should do much better than this.

Gringle's Pawnshop Forums

That brings us to the Gringle's Pawnshop Forums which is a RuneQuest Forum. It was founded in May of 2010 and currently has 270 members, 385 threads and 4983 posts. Only 18 more posts and this forum will level up from 1st to 2nd, from Gnatweight to Light Flyweight.

It covers Chaosium RuneQuest 1 and 2,  Other RuneQuest Editions and Other D100 Games. It has, however, only 3 total post during 2018.

This forum has three Admininstrators and the only advice I have for them is to jump back in and post. If the staff doesn't post and show that the founder is interested, then other people tend not to post either.

Citadel of Chaos Forums

The Citadel of Chaos Forums is a now defunct forum brought to us by the Internet Archive. It's last post was in November of 2011 with 2,887 posts, 456 threads and 160 members. It was founded around March of 2009 when they moved thread from an old proboards site (sorry I don't have a link for that).

It covered a wide range of games and it could have been good. It looks like the move might be what did it in. With it being in the archive there is not much to learn.

Amber Diceless Role Playing Forum

Next up is the Amber Diceless Role Playing Forum which has been around since about Jul 27, 2007 and yet has only 599 posts with 140 threads and 84 members. Four of those members account for 471 of the 599 posts and 342 are by the Admin alone who has been a player of the game since 1993.

Roger Zelazny the author of the Amber books died in 1995 at the young age of 58 and Erick Wujcik the Father of Amber Diceless was a member of the forum until he  died in 2008 at the young age of 57. Two rounds of really bad luck on both counts. Amber Diceless was mostly written in the 1980's but it wasn't until Erick Wujcik formed his own company that Amber Diceless was published in 1991.

Were it not for these unfortunate occurrences this might be active and vibrant. The forum itself has an excellent layout and has every appearance of a forum that should be active and growing. So what happened? IMO the sudden illness of Erick Wujcik 6 months after the forum started and then his death 6 months after that, just sapped the energy out of everyone at the forum.

A year after Erick Wujcik died the forum Admin had this idea The Voice of Erick  in the thread the Admin says 

Pardon me if this seems creepy, but this is the Voice of Erick Wujcik. 

Erick joined this group a while back and posted occasionally, and I wish he would have been able to post more because of the unique insights he has offered to the gaming industry over the years.

Erick invented the "diceless" genre of RPGs with the creation of Amber Diceless (and perhaps even before that) and has proven himself repeatedly to be a true Master of this style of play.

Over the years I have had conversations with Erick through snail mail, e-mail, and on message boards. Sometimes I was in direct contact, other times he was responding to thoughts or questions that others had posed. As time passed I began to compile a Word doc that had all of the Q&A stuff I could find, and I was careful to copy-paste his exact answers from those boards and other sources.

My plan is to make use of some of these quotes, but not to post them as the Admin but instead as if Erick himself was responding. I thought about taking over his account, but just couldn't bring myself to mislead anyone that Erick was still posting when clearly he was no longer able. That's where my idea came about for The Voice of Erick. Kind of like a narrator in a play, I will speak with Erick's voice on these boards but in a manner to make it clear that these are his ideas and not mine.

I hope this is a plan which others will find to be acceptable and in good taste. I hope that The Voice of Erick will be able to keep his spirit alive and with us.

I do not find this a bit creepy, but it is brilliant and is IMO an excellent memorial to  Erick Wujcik. For reasons unknown the me, this never came to pass. The 27+ pages of materials would have been 500, 1000, maybe even 1500 posts of material not counting all of the discussion it would have generated. Had this project been brought to life this forum might have 20,000 or more posts and at least a few hundred members by now. 

Therefore my recommendation for this forum is that this project be revived and that all of those posts (question in one post and answer in the next post) be made. I would suggest a thread for each topic addressed and not one long Q&A thread, that will make it more user friendly.

In addition, the thread for The Amber Dictionary Project should be split to give a separate thread for each letter of the alphabet.

Since the product is out of print and unsupported, maybe a clone could be written so that compatible material could be produced similar to what is done for D&D. The Admin, appears to be qualified to write such a clone and IMO should.

Infinite Timelines Forum

Infinite Timelines Forum is brand new having started on August 13th, 2018. It is barely underway with two members, two threads and three posts.

It does have promise with the following sections for the forums

Alternate History

Discuss what would happen if historical events took a different path.

The Future

Discuss the future of our world here.

Unexplainable Events

Discuss scenarios that require violations of currently known laws of physics go here.

Alternate Fictional Timelines

Discuss points-of-divergences in the timelines of fictional works, like Star Wars or Harry Potter

Political Games

Games centered on elections go here.

Nation and Map Games

Any games involving controlling nations or modifying a map should go here.

RPGs

Character-centered games go here.

So the promise is there, but will the Admin step up to the plate and create thread and activity that would encourage someone to join? Only time will tell. 

Beggar's Canyon Forums

Beggar's Canyon Forums is an old school forum that concerns itself with 1990's Star Wars (I think it is 1998 and before).  It started off fairly quickly, but at this point seems to be stalling out. Since opening to the public on July 3, 2018 it has 24 members, 69 threads and 508 posts. 

For a forum to grow the Admin (who is not identified by title on the forum) needs to invest in the forum along with a few founding members, but there is no real sign that this is being done. At least three people should step up to at least 2-3 posts per day and a couple of more people step to average 1 a day posting. But it also needs some interesting threads started and then get the word out about it. IMO the forum could use a little reorganization and be updated to show more focus and to made more inviting.

Now I will admit that I am not a Star Wars fan and I find it to be so so to begin with and that is talking about the original trilogy which is by far the best of the lot.

So I may be, being too critical and we'll see what it does over the next year or two. I hope it succeeds and I wish them the best of luck.

Taking a Look at the new WotC Survey

I saw the new WotC Survey that is out and I thought I would take a look at it and see what it asks and what it doesn't ask.

The survey is located at this link below and this is what  was posted with it at their Twitter account.

Dungeons & Dragons ‏ @Wizards_DnD Sep 12 More What are the things that make you play D&D? The open world, opportunities to optimize your character, to tell a shared story with friends, iconic art, or maybe all of the above! Take our survey and help shape the future of what we're working on at Wizards!

The first question asks what your favorite D&D setting is and immediately they get off on the wrong foot by not listing Blackmoor as one of the choices, so I selected other and entered (Blackmoor and my homebrew, why was Blackmoor not listed?)

Next they asked about your favorite character classes and they make two mistakes, one is that they don't let you rank your three answers in order of preference and two is they failed their inclusiveness check and didn't list the iconic Magic-User as one of the choices.

I'm not going to hit all of them, as that would be a very long post.

They ask if you have ever played D&D? If you are not answering yes to that question, you shouldn't be completing the questionnaire IMO.

Then they have a whole slew of questions designed to split the poll takers into categories. They ask

How important are the following to you when you play D&D?

And then they have multiple lists of ten questions at a time and they could have just simplified it by asking the following questions.

Are you a min-maxer? I/E are you only there for the character build and to exploit the character build process?

Are you a power-gamer? I.E are you only there to be superman and kill things?

Are you a munchkin? I.E. are you only there to be the center of attention, be superman, win every time, get all the cool stuff and do it at the expense of everyone else at the table?

If you are one of the above, the odds are high that you are all three. The odds are also high that everyone else at the table hates you.

Are you a normal role-player? I.E. are you there to have fun with your friends and explore a really cool world?

Then they ask questions designed to find out if you want to buy things like miniatures and they ask questions to find out if you like railroads where your decisions don't really matter, in other words are you going to buy their modules and pre-built settings and all of the other non-DIY things they sell.

It is telling that they don't ask any questions to find out if you would buy items that support DIY and it is telling that they have not asked you to tell them what you would like to buy. It is a very tone deaf survey designed to only tell them what they want to hear and not to find out any truly useful information.

They ask all together 80 questions in this vein.

They ask a number of questions that boil down to this, do you do weird unpredictable things, random nonsense things, things that are designed to mess with everyone else at the table and disrupt the game? In other words, they are asking are you the jerk at the table? One of these questions is 

Being disruptive and contrarian to make things more interesting.

That doesn't make things more interesting, that only messes things up for everyone else at the table. Good DM's kick these people out of the game quickly to establish that we are here to have fun and not to just mess with other people.

In many of the questions there is this assumption that people are not role-playing, there is an assumption that there is a story that must be followed and that you are not in a game that grows organically, which is true if you are using their setting and their modules. They assume that you are only playing in a game that consists of one railroad after another. Only a very few of their questions consider that you could be playing in a game where player choices matter.

Then there are many questions about when and how you got introduced to D&D.

Virtually all of their questions should have had a place for comments. For instance instead of just checking the box that it has been over a year since I bought a D&D product I could have told them, I haven't purchased anything since 1982, but if they would make something that would support DIY gaming I would again consider buying from them.

They did have a few spots for comments and I told them

I don't like rules that don't support the original paradigm of open-ended play and modules are of zero interest to me

You don't have any products that I am aware of that support DIY homebrew gaming, and there are dozens, if not hundreds of products you could sell by pdf and POD that would support DIY gaming.

A lot of the remaining questions had only to do with marketing, how much do you already spend with us and do you own this or that and will you buy this or that. But one question I found really strange,

 In a typical week, how many hours do you watch D&D-related video content?

Rather oddly, they never asked the more important questions "In a typical week, how many hours do you spend playing D&D, working on D&D stuff and discussing D&D?"

But then modern D&D is not about playing the game is it? They leave that to the old school crowd.

Swords & Wizardry Forums (both the old and the new)

The next forum up is the Swords & Wizardry Forum  and it's size is a shocker. For a couple of reasons. 

One is that there are multiple Swords & Wizardry RPG's written and published. Two there are IIRC over 20 other retro clones that use one of the Swords & Wizardry as the basis of their rules and three there are numerous products written for the Swords & Wizardry RPG. There are currently 101 products for S&W on RPGNow from Frog God Games alone, and that does not even consider all the other clones and products based on it.

So you would expect that the Swords & Wizardry Forum would be huge. But it's not! Why is that?

Well over on the forum the admin explains it in this post About this Forum.

It seems the official S&W forums were locked down and allowed to die and most of the traffic moved over to a Swords & Wizardry Google+ group.

This current site was founded on January 30, 2016. And this one dedicated fan of the game that got him back into gaming has a forum with 4676 posts, 203 threads and 124 members.

All in all, it is a nice little forum and it is set up well to discuss and support S&W. But without the support of the S&W principals it is not, IMO, going to grow much and there is not much the Admin can do about it.

The Google+ Swords & Wizardry Community does have a link to this forum, but that appears to be the limit of their support.  The Google+ group has 1,762 members. It seems to have about 2 posts per day average with each post receiving an average of 4-5 comments. Were all of those members to be on a forum, it would, I expect, be a happening place with a much, much higher level of posting.

Google+ also has a The Swords & Wizardry Hangout with 420 members. Its newest post is 3 weeks old.

Frog God Games does have a forum with a S&W Section, but I will cover that in a separate post.

There is a copy of the original Swords & Wizardry forums on the Internet Archive and from that it appears there was an initial version that may have been accidentally deleted and then restarted on or about August 30 2008. It seems to have been shutdown as best I can tell sometime in 2013. With a max size of 28,625 posts, 5,209 threads and 1,111 members. That seems like a pretty good showing and I won't speculate on why someone would close a successful forum and move to Google+.

Whatever the situation is with the Internet presence, the product itself is very successful. And maybe the posting here will pick up and the forum will grow. That would be a good thing.

Chirinebakal Forum

Chirine ba kal started a new forum Chirinebakal and it is focused solely on Tékumel and The World of the Petal Throne. Chirine ba kal is the most knowledgeable living expert on Tékumel.  This new forum was founded on August 8, 2018.

See these posts over at  Chirine ba kal's blog (chirine's workbench).

And So It Begins - My Tekumel Campaign, Restarted - Saturday, August 11th, 2018 - The Weekly UpdateI'm also spinning up the meta-campaign, getting all of Phil's NPCs and PCs sorted using my copy of his 1,500+ index cards; it's a lot easier to be running Tony Bath's campaign rules like Phil did on the computer, where one can simply push the 'GO!' button every month and watch the mayhem occur. I got the meta-campaign back up to speed manually in June, for 'Free RPG Day', and the thing runs itself like it always did - adding Dave Arneson's merchant shipping sub-routine was a snap, and I'll look forward to seeing what adventures that generates.
To help with the communications with the players and spectators, as well as relieve some issues with server congestion, I've established a new forum:
chirinebakal.proboards.com
I find that I really like the 'question and answer' format, and this blog does not seem to be a very good platform for that kind of thing. The 'Questioning Chirine ba Kal' threads seemed to be pretty popular, as these things go, but at 911 pages, 9,098 posts, and over 911,967 views the thing was actually slowing down the RPGsite server. So, if you have any questions about what I do, or what we did out at Phil's from 1976 to 1988, please feel free to drop by and join in. 

The Thing Has Legs! - Friday, August 24th, 2018 - The (Delayed) Weekly Update
The new forum, chirinebakal.proboards.com/ , has really taken off and really helped reduce my workload. I'm using the forum to run the day-to-day questions and answers that I get; this blog will continue, and serve as the platform for more in-depth and philosophical musings. As my work week is pretty fixed and stable, it looks like my Saturdays will normally be my 'domestic chores' day and Sundays will be my 'gaming day' - with a lot of writing thrown in. The new game group will be meeting on the Fourth Sunday of each month, in the evening, and that means I'll be back to a regular schedule of working like a fiend between game sessions on miniatures and doing a lot more writing. I used to do this with the old campaign, but on a two-week turnaround cycle, and those were some of the most productive years of my life. 

Dear Phil: You Are Not Going to Believe This! - The Weekly Update - Monday, September 3rd, 2018
I'll be continuing this blog, as a way of talking about the more complex and recondite subjects - I still have to get our version of Gary's 'Appendix N' up, as an example, but I think you'll be both happy and amazed that people looking in at this little confection about the games we played have tripled; I came back from Alabama to find that we'd had over 650 hits on that Sunday, and we're still over 200 a day.
The threads on the RPGsite forum, I should mention, collected over 910,000 views in the two years we were on there, and went to something like 900 pages of posts and replies.
The new Proboards.com forum, chirinebakal.proboards.com/ , has really taken off; in the month that it's been up, we've been getting an average of over 500 'views' a day, and almost forty people have become members on the forum. I'm amazed by that, as it's all been by word-of-mouth, and I think it shows that your creation still has the power to amaze and fascinate people. I am, I think, pretty sure it isn't my doing, as I think that the excellence of your work speaks for itself and is what is carrying us along.

This new forum  is off to a running start and I expect it to be very successful. In 36 days this forum has 663 posts, 57 threads and 41 members with no advertising outside chirine's blog.  I expect that this forum will level up from a 1st level forum to a 2nd level forum by the end of March 2019. I may do more of a review at that time, but right now it is looking very good.

So I don't have any suggestions for this forum other than this, if anyone is disruptive, don't hesitate, just ban them.

OSRGaming Forums

Next up on our list of small forums is the OSRGaming Forums and this one is quite small and oddly so. My impression is that this was started and then was rebooted, IIRC because of software/server issues or some such, but all that seems to have been worked out.

The current incarnation seems to have started in January of 2016. Since that time they have a huge membership in a very short time of 5679 members, but that has not translated into much activity as they have a total of 2846 posts and 518 threads. One would think that in two and 2/3 years they would have at least an average of one post per member.

Reading the forum, it appears that they want to be a hub for the OSR with OSR publishers calling it home and a few are present. They also provide a link of episodes of four podcasts

Save or Die Podcast

Roll for Initiative Podcast

Thacos Hammer Podcast

Save for Half Podcast\

They also have a forum titled  "Community Creations & Kickstarters". There is also a redirect to a Discord server.

Here is my opinion of what I have found
1. The forum is in my opinion under performing and it not reaching its true potential.
2. The site Admin has 395 posts and in my opinion should up his average to at least 2 posts per day. In my opinion the site would benefit from the Admin and the mods being active and showing their own interest in the forum.
3.  I think the discussions areas need to be built up and effort made to build an identity and a sense of community.
4. A little tweaking to make the site easier to read wouldn't hurt nor would a little reorganization.
5. The rules are reasonable and I applaud them for striving to have a family friendly environment, as that is all too rare these days.
6. Linking to the podcasts is a good thing I suppose, but it is generating precious little discussion. Someone on staff or an active member should listen to the podcasts and start some discussion about some of the things that are in the podcasts. Surely something is worth discussing.
7. In my opinion, they have not yet figured out who they are and once they do they should grow. With almost 6000 members, they should have some idea of what brought those people here and what would encourage them to participate.

Tékumel - The World of the Petal Throne Forums

The Tékumel - The World of the Petal Throne Forums is a forum that one would expect to be an active vibrant forum that emulates the world that M.A.R. Barker created starting (IIRC) when he was about 10 years old. One would be wrong in that expectation.

This forum was founded in May of 2005 and over the next 12 years through the end of 2017 it amassed 268 members, 304 threads and 1476 posts in total  or 10.6 posts per month over than time period with no posts in 2018 at all as of today.

So I asked myself why is this forum dead and dormant, when it has every reason on the surface to be 100 times bigger at this point. So I tried to create an account, but registration is disabled. I started reading through the forum, not a long task by any means.

Here is my opinion of what I found

1. The site Admin has only 97 posts in just over 13 years, if the Admin is not excited enough to talk about the world, why would anyone else.
2. No posters that have any appreciable amount of posting for the length of their membership.
3. No one priming the pump with interesting topics and no one engaging anyone in discussion. Most threads have three (3) or (usually) fewer posts.
4. Many posts have had the content of the post deleted so there are many blank posts.
5. Many threads say that they contain a link to fan made materials, but all or nearly all such links seem to have been deleted.
6. My conclusion is that the site is not fan friendly, and  the few people I talked to agreed with that.
7. My other conclusion is that the whole issue of discouraging fan materials is choking the IP out of existence.
8. The current owners need to loosen the choke hold they have on the IP and allow fans to create fan material.

Where are all the fan sites?  IP owners, re-open your forum, jump in and start some conversations, engage with the fans and encourage fan material. Get some games going at conventions, fan friendly and gamemaster friendly games. If you have a lot of hoops to jump through for these things, then get rid of the hoops.

What If Forums Were PC's? What Level Would They Be?

Back at the beginning of August a conversation on a forum caused me to wonder, what if forums were D&D PCs, what level would they be? So I threw out an off the cuff comment using boxing weights classes for the level titles. Doing that made me curious enough to finish the job and you see the results below, with Level, Level Title, Forum Name and the Range of Total Posts for each Level.

I think in the weeks to come I will write a little review of each forum with some pertinent data about each forum. As I review a forum I will update its listing below by adding a link to the forum.

Level	Level Name	Forum Name	Total Post Range
			Beginning	End
1	Gnatweight	Chirinebakal	0	5,000
		Tékumel - The World of the Petal Throne Forums
		OSRGaming Forums
		Swords & Wizardry Forums (new version)
		Beggar's Canyon Forums
		Infinite Timelines Forums
		Amber Diceless Role Playing
		Citadel of Chaos Forums
		Gringle's Pawnshop Forums
		Frog God Games Forum
		Code Monkey Publishing Forum
		Fireside Creations Forum
2	Light Flyweight	The Wayfarers Inn	5.001	10,000
		Ye Olde Gaming Companye Community Forum
		Old School Trek Forums
		The official Metamorphosis Alpha Forums
		Slayers Forum
		Dave Arneson's Blackmoor: The MMRPG Forum
3	Flyweight	Domesday Message Boards	10,001	20,000
		Grognards Tavern
		PurpleWorm.org Forums
		Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea
4	Super Flyweight	The Ruins of Murkhill	20,001	40,000
		The Comeback Inn
		Presposia
		Critical Fumble.net Forums
		SFRPG Forums
		Pied Piper Publishing
		Immersive Ink Forums
		The RPG Haven Forums
		Swords & Wizardry Forums (original)
5	Light Bantamweight	Canonfire!	40,001	70,000
		Basic Fantasy Role-Playing
		Goblinoid Games Forums (1st Iteration) Goblinoid Games Forums (2nd Iteration)
		RPG PUB forum
		The Forge (2nd iteration)
		Alternate Timelines Forums
		Vin's T&T TrollBridge
6	Bantamweight	Strolen's Citadel	70,001	100,000
		Goodman Games Fan Forums
7	Super Bantamweight	Views from the Edge	100,001	150,000
		BRP Central Forums
8	Light Featherweight	Original D&D Discussion	151,001	300,000
		Knights & Knaves Alehouse
		The Piazz
		Harn Forum
		Troll Lord Games Forum
		Ronin Army: The Green Ronin Community
		The Burning Wheel Forums
		Official ICE Forums
		The Forge (1st Iteration)
		Necromancer Games Forums (2nd Iteration)
9	Featherweight	Fantasy Grounds Forums	300,001	500,000
		Cartographers' Guild Forums
		Necromancer Games Forums (1st Iteration)
10	Super Featherweight	Candlekeep	500,001	750.000
		Mongoose Publishing Forums
		Citizens Of The Imperium Traveller Forums
		RPGGEEK Forums
11	Lightweight	Kenzer & Company Discussion Forums	750,001	1,000,000
12	Super Lightweight	Dumpshock Forums	1,000,001	1,500,000
		theRPGsite Forums
13	Welterweight	Dragonsfoot Forums	1,500,001	2,000,000
		Steve Jackson Games Forums
14	Super Welterweight		2,000,001	3,000,000
15	Middleweight	Paizo Forums	3,000,001	5,000,000
16	Super Middleweight	ENWorld Forums	5,000,001	10,000,000
		RPG Crossing Forums
17	Light Heavyweight		10,000,001	15,000,000
18	Cruiserweight	RPGNet Forums	15,000,001	20,000,000
19	Heavyweight		20,000,001	30,000,000
20	Super Heavyweight		30,000,001	50,000,000
21	Dreadnoughtweight		50,000,001	And up