A Blog 2,000 Posts Old

I have now written 2,000 posts here at Monsters & Manuals. I'll let that sink in for a moment: if you laid out all of these posts end to end they would stretch from here to the moon and back thirty-six times; if you put them all in a big pile and squashed them flat they would have a surface area thrice the size of Mauritania; there are as many words contained within them as there are grains of sand on a beach. 

This is very possibly the greatest blog in the history of the universe.

The question naturally arises: what are the posts I am proudest of? What are the real highlights? This is a bit like being asked which of your children is your favourite, and the answer has to really be: all of them, except the one with red hair who looks a bit like the milkman. On top of this, when you have 2,000 children it can be quite difficult to remember what all of their names are and what they look like (just ask Genghis Khan). So any 'best of' list would really automatically be a false premise from the outset. They are ALL THE BEST.

With that said, there are of course some posts that stick in the mind for one reason or another, as a separate category from those that are most popular in terms of page views. On the strict understanding that if you asked me again 30 minutes after writing this post I would likely come up with an entirely different list, here are Ten Favourites, in no particular order:

10. Beware the Were Stuff (November 2008), in which I came up with a method for randomly generating therianthropes, including were-snapping turtles, were-secretary birds, were-condors, and were-gila monsters.

9. Chaos Patrons (September 2008), in which I stole ideas from the Zangband roguelike game in order to systematise patronage of a PC by a chaos god.

8. Being an Illustration of the Contents of 1-Mile Hexes Through Examination of Divers Locations in the British Isles (March 2012), which more or less does what the title says, detailing just how much adventure can be found in a 1-Mile hex. There are similar ideas pursued in my Hexology posts (here, here and here), in which I delived into detail on exactly how much stuff there is in the world.

7. More Thoughts on a Cyberpunk Megadungeon (July 2013), regarding, well, a cyberpunk megadungeon idea. (The comments are well worth reading, too.)

6. The Importance of Shadowrun (January 2015), which concerns the woebefallen status of teenage boys and the possibility of aspiration.

5. Three linked posts on Faerie Knights, Fairie Nobles, and Faerie Commoners (January 2015), from a longrunning project called New Troy, now on the backburner.

4. A Historical Geography of RPG Playing (December 2016), in which I muse on the nature of progress; see also here.

3. The Pacification of the Nerd (May 2017), about how 'geekdom' has lost its subversive edge. 

2. Old Farts Solve Mysteries (September 2017), containg a pencil sketch for a group of PCs in a modern dark fantasy campaign.

1. The first six Tournament of the Gods posts (beginning in April 2021), found here, here, here, here, here, and here).

It is a great pleasure looking back at the archives and reminisce. This blog has been a wonderful creative outlet for me down the years, has really helped me hone my writing ability, and has I am sure developed my imaginative capacities too as I have been forced, several times a week, to come up with new and interesting material. As I once observed, the imagination must itself be trained - (I even came up with a method for doing so) - and this blog has given me a great workout. 

There is no question of stopping, so let's see how long it takes me to get to 3,000. In the meantime, I am going to put together a 'best of' book, compiling perhaps 100 or 200 posts, and put it out POD - watch out for that if you are one my ten thousand-strong legion of diehard fanatics. And I should probably also say: thanks for reading and commenting. Regular readers should not only congratulate themselves on their excellent taste. They should also take some of the glory for contributing to keeping the ball rolling  I would not have got to 100 posts if I'd ever felt nobody was reading. So, for that, thank you.