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.
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.
keep em comin!
ReplyDeleteMessage Boards themselves are old-school, are they not? They harken back to the early days of the web and I believe that the only people that really prefer to use them are older folks. They are familiar and easy to understand but they aren't much to look at and they lack that live function which one gets from modern social media. When I stumbled across Murkhill I was excited! My preferred method of interaction always was the web forum, but I didn't think that they were a thing anymore. Maybe we are the odd bunch now?
ReplyDeleteIMO the forums are far superior to Google+ by being much easier to use, to have lengthy discussions, to be able to find things and to refer back to them. Here you have a Google+ group with much, much less activity that you would have on a forum.
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