Here’s one way that you can tell that our first annual New Year, New Game challenge had some excellent entries: After the first round of secret ballot voting for our favorites, there was a three-way tie. We broke that tie with a runoff vote between those three entries.

Because we received over 50 entries in the contest — the threshold for awarding a second prize — we’ll be giving away two awesome prize packages courtesy of our sponsors: DriveThruRPG, Engine Publishing, Obsidian Portal, and Tabletop Adventures. Here they are!

Our two winners both rocked the house with inspiring, entertaining game ideas that made us want to play these games (and of course they followed the contest rules, too).

Second Prize Winner

I’m please to announce that the winner of our second prize goes to Gnome Stew reader BrownBeard, who will be receiving a $30 DriveThruRPG gift certificate, PDF copies of Gnome Stew’s two GMing books, a 6-month Ascendant membership to Obsidian Portal, and two Tabletop Adventures PDFs of their choice. Congratulations!

Here’s BrownBeard’s awesome NYNG entry:

I’m calling my new campaign “Explorers of the Python River Basin.” It already has a fledgeling wiki on Obsidian Portal. The campaign is basically a jungle-crawling Indy-Jones take on Ben Robbins’ seminal West Marches campaign: the players take the roles of your usual D&D fantasy adventurers exploring a ridiculously dangerous tropical rainforest for fortune and glory. They can look forward to fighting all manner of beasts and giant vermin, making first contact with reclusive tribes of goblins and lizardfolk, seeking out the fabled court of the Gorilla King, spelunking vast cavern systems and abandoned mines, and raiding the ruins of a fallen lizardfolk empire.

I want to run this game primarily at my local hobby store’s weekly board game night for a flexible roster of players: whoever shows up that night gets to send their character out with that week’s expedition. Obviously this sort of sandbox campaign, characterized by convention-style pickup groups, is going to stretch my improvisational talents to their limits – it’s difficult to do all but the most general prep when you have no idea who’s going to show up or where they’ll want to go. But I think Kirin Robinson’s Old School Hack game system is up to the challenge. By all accounts it postively thrives on spur-of-the-moment shenanigans. And practically everything that new players will need to learn, rules-wise, is contained on their character sheets and a few other printable visual aids.

The biggest challenge will be recruiting a large enough player pool so that I can count on having a party of at least 2 or 3 PCs for each session. Since the hobby store’s weekly game night only lasts a few hours, I’ll also have to streamline the pacing as much as possible if I want to get the party out into the bush and back to their home base again so I can start a fresh expedition the following week.

Why am I so stoked for this? Ye gods man, it’s freaking Indiana Jones with dwarves and wizards – dungeon fantasy meets pulp archaeology. What more do you want? If this game doesn’t turn into the most hilarious and breathtaking high-octane hurricane of pulp blockbuster tropes seen this side of Exalted, then I’ll eat my GM screen.

Grand Prize Winner

With further ado, the grand prize winner of NYNG 2012 is Razjah! Congratulations on your winning entry! Razjah will be receiving a $60 DriveThruRPG gift certificate, print and PDF copies of Gnome Stew’s two GMing books, a 1-year Ascendant membership to Obsidian Portal, and three Tabletop Adventures PDFs of their choice.

Here’s Razjah’s grand-prize-winning NYNG entry:

My upcoming campaign for the spring semester is a fantasy noir campaign styled game using Burning Wheel. This game takes place in a grim, dark city where crime rules, even the best citizens are only out for themselves, and everyone has a past. Picture a fantasy Sin City; you need to take big risks for trivial rewards, crime is nearly in the open, and you can’t turn to the corrupt officials or city watch. The city will be similar to Venice with as many liberties as I need to take. It is a sprawling city with traders, craftsmen, nobility, crime, and vice.

Some major players operate here. The noblesse de ancienne or the royal family, the three noblesse d’epee or duke families, the nine noblesse de chancellerie or the count families, and the twenty seven noblesse de letters or the baron families. Crossing even the weakest noble family is dangerous. Other famed groups are crime related, the five families and fifteen street gangs. While magic is feared and dangerous it is suspected that these groups employ them secretly.

I’m excited to be running this because I am finally getting a group of players who enjoy role playing their characters and a system that encourages it. Burning Wheel is about testing characters. Testing them and watching them grow and evolve through the campaign. Most other systems I have used have the characters level in all abilities, regardless of use. Burning Wheel has much more organic advancement.

The biggest challenge is going to be keeping the role play intensity high. Hopefully the group will help fuel each other and the system will support this. I am going to be making sure that I follow a new year’s resolution to eat before the game, and not junk “gamer food”, to keep my energy up and to help me stay focused on bringing the world to life. The only other major challenge I see before character creation is keeping the genre strong. In other games I have run in a non-traditional fantasy setting the players slowly drifted back to their comfort zones and dragged the campaign with it.

Thank you to everyone who entered our NYNG contest, blogged about NYNG and new games as part of our first-ever blog carnival, spread the word about the NYNG movement, and otherwise helped to make the first annual NYNG challenge such a rousing success!

If you’re in need of inspiration, check out the 57 game ideas (for 39 different RPGs!) that are now posted on the NYNG website, as well as the 15 blog posts about running new games that were written for our blog carnival.

Gnome Stew’s first annual New Year, New Game (NYNG) contest and blog carnival both end January 23, a bit less than a week away.

The contest features a grand prize worth over $150, courtesy of our four sponsors: DriveThruRPG, Engine Publishing, Obsidian Portal, and Tabletop Adventures. You can enter it right here on the Stew.

The NYNG blog carnival, also hosted here, is themed around running new games — tips, tricks, accounts of your own experience with new games, and the like.

If you’re interested in either or both of them, don’t wait too long to enter!

That would be because I only NOW figured out that this address is not forwarding properly to my “hub” account and likely has not been for a very long time. I respond to every single legitimate (IE non-spam) email I get from readers, fans, and folks who have something to say about the Stew, so I feel like a HUGE asshole right now.

I’m beginning the painful process of going through unread mail now, and am currently back to November 2011. I’m paying special attention to article proposals, since those have a unique subject line, but it’s entirely possible I’ll miss something.

I’m going to spend tonight working on this, and will go back as far as my sanity allows. If, as of Friday 1/13, you haven’t heard from me and know that you should have, please drop me a line again — and please accept my apology.

I’m so sorry about this! I have tech support holding my hand through whatever process I screwed up to cause this problem, so it should be fixed within 24 hours.

As of today, Gnome Stew has been running for over three-and-a-half years — we launched on May 12, 2008. Today marks our fourth year-end State of the Stew and our third full calendar year of stats.

The Numbers

Here come the digits:

• 4,030+ registered users, 100% growth (2010: 1,990+, 2009: 1,560+, 2008: 625+)
• 3,940+ RSS and email subscribers, 6% growth (2010: 3,700+, 2009: 2,940+, 2008: 1,230+)
• Nearly 156,000 unique visitors (33% loss) and 314,000 total visits (26% loss) (2010: 233,000 unique, 423,000 total; 2009: 182,000 unique, 345,000 total; 2008: 188,000 unique, 316,000 total)
• …of those 156,000, over 81,000 visited more than once (2010: 193,000 of 233,000; 2009: 164,000 of 182,000; 2008: 128,000 of 188,000)
• Over 583,000 pageviews, 21% loss (2010: 734,000, 2009: 680,000, 2008: 619,000)
• The gnomes have posted about 256 articles (1,075+ total; we posted around 260 in 2010, 300 in 2009, and 260 in 2008)
• …which have attracted more than 3,100 comments (13,900 total; about 3,000 in 2010, 4,800 in 2009, and 3,000 in 2008)

My Take: Ouch

First big year-end losses: This is the first time we’ve ended the year with losses, and they’re telling losses: unique visits, total visits, and pageviews are all down. Those are three huge barometers of a site’s success, and they tell me that we’re doing something wrong — I just don’t know what.

It’s not a drop in articles (256 this year vs. 260 last year) or reader engagement (3,100 comments vs. 3,000) or users (up a staggering 100%), so what is it? One other data point: comment volume went down in 2010 compared to 2009 (by 38%), and stayed flat with that number this year; that tells me that whatever we’re doing wrong, it’s likely that at least some of it began in 2010 and continued into 2011.

Not all bad news: Not everything went down: We doubled the number of registered members (and that’s not artificially raised by obvious spam registrations; I checked), which is fantastic, and the number of subscribers went up slightly. We get some single-visit members, of course: contests attract folks who may never come back, as does the urge to post a single comment and move on; that’s not a bad thing in my book. But even that can’t explain how we doubled our membership while losing so big in visits and views.

A huge archive of GMing material: The Stew remains the second-largest repository of game mastering content online. To the best of my knowledge, Johnn Four’s excellent Roleplaying Tips site (online since 1999) takes the number one spot, and my previous GMing blog, Treasure Tables, lands at number three (with over 750 GMing articles). Despite the terrible stats for this year, that still feels pretty damned good — this site is intended to be a free resource for GMs of all experience levels, and I believe it succeeds well at that.

Milestones

Our milestones in 2011 were actually pretty awesome:

• Gnome Stew won the silver Ennie Award for Best Blog: Thanks to you, our readers, the Stew won our second GenCon EN World RPG Award (ENnie) in 2011. As in 2010, we lost out to an excellent site — this year, it was Critical Hits. This feels just as amazing this year as it did in 2010, and we thank everyone who helped us win.
• We moved to a VPS: As of January 9, 2011, Gnome Stew has been hosted on a virtual private server (VPS), where previously it had been on my shared webhosting account. We made this move because we got so much traffic that it was dragging the site down, and asked readers to help pay for it by using the Amazon and DriveThruRPG links in the sidebar. On both fronts, this move was a huge success: The site runs smoothly, with no performance issues, and the cost — about $400/year — has been covered by Amazon and advertising revenue. Thank you to everyone who has helped out with this!
• Our millionth visitor: 2011 also marked our millionth unique visitor. A million people have read Gnome Stew since its inception — my mind still boggles at that.
• We published our second book: One the heels of our 2010 release, Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters, we published Masks: 1,000 Memoranble NPCs to Inspire Game Masters in 2011. Publishing books for GMs is part of our ongoing mission to help GMs have more fun at the gaming table, and we appreciate the preorders and subsequent orders that have helped this book gain momentum and sell well. Even after two books, being a publisher and publishing GMing books still doesn’t feel entirely real to me.

Thank You!

Gnome Stew wouldn’t exist without you, our readers. We’d probably still be writing GMing content somewhere — it’s in our blood — but not as regularly, and not with the focus that knowing people will actually read it brings to the table. We write the Stew for you.

Many, many thanks to everyone who has read, commented on, shared, and used Gnome Stew. You are, as you always have been, awesome.

The Elephant in the Room

The thing that’s nice, though sometimes also unpleasant, about numbers is that they don’t lie. I’m not an expert in statistics, or even remotely a math guy, but even I know that a website that sees the dip in visitors and pageviews we saw from from December 2010 to December 2011 is doing something wrong.

In May 2011, I posted site stats for the preceding year and noted that we had losses instead of growth in key areas. We posed an open question to readers then — “What are we doing wrong?” — and the biggest common complaint was that our posting had dropped off; we weren’t hitting every weekday, our target, nearly as often as we needed to be.

We listened to that feedback, generated our ideas for improving the state of the Stew, held conference calls, and believed that we were back in a good groove. Even though we posted the same number of articles in the latter half of 2011 as 2010, they were more regularly spaced and we hit that every-weekday target virtually every week. We also made other improvements behind the scenes.

At this point, I’m honestly at a loss what to do. I love this site, I love writing GMing advice, and I love sharing that advice with our readers. Although I speak only for myself, I know the other gnomes feel the same way — it’s why we’re here and why Gnome Stew exists. We want to keep the Stew vital, keep it growing, and keep helping GMs.

I’m writing this article today, on 12/31; it wasn’t queued up in advance. And honestly, it’s depressing the hell out of me. This wasn’t how I expected to end the year.

We had two killer milestones in 2011, but the site is clearly not as healthy as it needs to be nor on a healthy path — and I don’t know why. If I’m missing writing on the wall, be it subtle or blindingly obvious, please let me know what you think it is. If you’re not comfortable doing that publicly, that’s no problem — just drop me a line (martin gnomestew com).

Thank you again for reading, and I’ll see you in 2012.

Why post guest articles?

First and foremost, because we have an amazing community of over 3,700 smart, talented GMs of all experience levels, and we want to highlight your work here on the Stew.

Sure, you could all write blogs of your own (and many of you do), but Gnome Stew can be a great venue to showcase your work without the commitment of running a blog, or without diverting from your blogging niche just to post one or two articles on GMing.

One of my goals in running this site has always been to open gaming- and writing-related doors for the authors of Gnome Stew, if they want those doors opened. Personally, my work here was a big factor in getting me the job I’ve held for the past three years, which I love, and I can trace a direct line from running the Stew to starting Engine Publishing. If Gnome Stew can help open doors for more authors, I’m all for it — and running guest articles could do just that.

Guest articles will benefit our readers in other ways, too:

• New voices, new perspectives: This site has 10 authors because we believe diverse opinions and experience levels are a good thing when it comes to GMing advice. Posting articles by guest authors will take that up a notch.
• More content: There are months where we miss a weekday or two, and we’d like to ensure that there’s an article for you to read every weekday; guest articles will help us meet that goal. Depending on interest (IE, number of guest articles), we might even wind up with more than one article per day on a regular basis.
• Exposure for writers: Every writer wants to be read, and Gnome Stew has roughly 5,000 daily readers. An article here could be a stepping stone to more readers for your personal blog, or a confidence-builder on your road to breaking into the RPG industry.
• A potential door to blogging for Gnome Stew: Down the road (I don’t know how far just yet), we’d ideally like to recruit more gnomes to write for the Stew on an ongoing basis. We view guest articles partly as auditions, with the caveat that we may decide not to recruit new gnomes. When I ran guest articles on my previous GMing blog, Treasure Tables, I had no long-term plans related to those articles — but when I conceived Gnome Stew, I went straight to many of the authors who’d written guest articles for TT to see if they wanted to join the Stew.
• No dip in quality: We take pride in our work here on the Stew, and guest articles will be no exception: We’re not going to publish crap just to fill space. As the owner of the site, my policy has always been, “I’d rather have a day with no article than run something shitty just to fill the slot.” That won’t change.

Our guest article program will also benefit the gnomes:

• Breathing room: Over the past three years, most of our lives have gotten busier, and there are days when it’s hard to find the time to write a new article. We’re not burning out (another reason there are so many of us: spreading the load!), but we’d love the breathing room that guest articles could provide.
• New ideas to riff on: Just as the gnomes riff on each other’s ideas (reading an article and being inspired to write a related piece, for example), and on ideas presented in the comments and through our Suggestion Pot, we want to riff on guest articles, too.
• New blood: Like I said above, we’d love to use guest articles as an avenue for recruiting new authors.

Why did you wait this long to do this?

We’ve gotten requests from folks who were interested in writing guest articles for Gnome Stew ever since we launched the site, which is incredibly flattering and gratifying. Our response has always been the same: “We don’t currently run guest articles, but we’re considering it.”

How come? Ultimately, because up until recently I haven’t felt that it was the right approach for Gnome Stew. I trust my gut with this kind of thing, and my gut said “Not now.”

The question of guest articles has come up on our internal mailing list a few times a year since we launched the site, but the gnomes have always been split about 50/50 on this. With a majority, I’d have said, “Screw my gut, let’s give it a shot!” Without one, we held off.

Now it feels like the right approach — and not because we all want to slack off and never have to write an article again! We love writing articles for the Stew, and sharing them with our readers. It’s incredibly fulfilling in all sorts of ways.

But sites need to change and grow to remain vital and retain their forward momentum, and this is a change I believe Gnome Stew needs to make. We’re ready to give this a shot, and we hope you’re interested in giving it a shot as well!

How do I get an article posted here?

Good question! We’ve kept the process as simple as possible. In a nutshell: Send us an email, wait for a green light, submit your article. We don’t offer compensation for guest articles. You retain the rights to your work, but grant Gnome Stew the unlimited, non-exclusive right to post your article here forever.

For the complete details, head on over to our shiny new Write for Gnome Stew page.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you’ll consider proposing an article for the Stew!

Gnomes on Atomic Array

DNAphil and I were just on the excellent Atomic Array podcast discussing the Stew’s latest book, Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game. The hosts, Ed Healy and Rone Barton, put on a professional — and killer — podcast, and Phil and I managed not to embarrass ourselves.

One of my favorite parts was when they put Phil and me on the spot and asked us each to flip to two random pages of Masks and link the first two NPCs we found into a cohesive adventure plot. It’s a nice tech demo of how easy this is to do with Masks.

We’re also offering up a coupon code for $10 off the print edition of Masks, which is at the end of the episode. Here’s the episode.

We’re on Google+, Too

We also recently started up a Gnome Stew Google+ page. We’re still feeling out how to use it, but thus far it’s been a good way to share one-off links and short pieces that aren’t long enough to be articles.

You can also all 10 gnomes on G+ individually. Google+ is a gamer’s paradise, and it’s a fun place to swap ideas and links and connect with other gamers. Here we all are:

• John Arcadian
• Patrick Benson
• Walt Ciechanowski
• Don Mappin
• Scott Martin
• Matthew Neagley
• Martin Ralya
• Kurt Schneider
• Phil Vecchione

Now I’m off to watch the snow come down while I get my inbox down to zero. Happy gaming!

This is the best price we’ve ever offered on Masks and Eureka in PDF, and it will only last until the end of the day

Here are the links:

• Masks + Eureka PDFs for $16.95
• Masks PDF for $9.95
• Eureka PDF for $9.95

Enjoy!

We’ve put together what we think is a pretty awesome package of goodies for this auction:

• One copy of Eureka in softcover, plus the PDF.
• One of the final copies of Masks in hardcover, plus the PDF.
• Be a gnome or command a gnome: Either write the first-ever guest article on Gnome Stew (subject to review), or command us to write a system-neutral GMing article for you which will appear on Gnome Stew, your choice.
• Online game with Patrick Benson: Gnome Stew’s own Patrick Benson will run an online game you and your friends based on Eureka and Masks.
• One black-and-white character portrait by Christopher Reach, the cover artist and one of the interior artists on Masks.
• One black-and-white portrait of your adventuring party by Christopher Reach.

100% of the profits go to the March of Dimes, a great charity that helps moms have full-term pregnancies and give birth to healthy babies. We’re proud to be able to support them, so we pulled out every stop we could think of for this auction.

Shipping anywhere in the world is free, and won’t impact your bid or the money that gets donated to charity.

I hope you’ll take a look, spread the word, and consider placing a bid.

And imagine that on that fateful day that fellow posted a request for Gnome Stew readers to help our book, Masks, get nominated for a Golden Geek Award…and totally didn’t catch that that would be article #1,000.

That fellow was me, that day was yesterday, and while I caught my mistake and quickly swapped in a more suitable article with a note about it being the thousandth, I didn’t feel right about how it went down.

Happy Happy Birthday Birthday!

So here we are: I’d like to wish Gnome Stew a happy 1,000th birthday! Humans like big, round numbers, and 1,000 is a pretty big, round number — a hell of a milestone for any blog, and one I’m thrilled that we’ve passed.

Looking back over our articles, I don’t see an end in sight: System-neutral game mastering advice is a topic that’s both broad and deep, and one that I still find as fascinating and fulfilling as I did when I started the GMing blog that turned out to be a precursor to Gnome Stew, Treasure Tables, back in 2005.

Thank you to all of our readers for making the past three years, 1,000 articles, and 13,000+ comments one hell of a fun ride. Here’s to the next thousand!

Can you help get Masks nominated for a Golden Geek Award?

The Golden Geek Awards are an annual event celebrating the best new games of the year, and I’m hoping that you can help Gnome Stew’s latest book, Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game, get nominated for Best Supplement (and then go on to win!).

The Golden Geek Awards (the “Geekies”) have a pretty specific filter on who can nominate games — essentially, you have to be an active Geekdo user:

Voting is restricted to either supporting users (having a supporter badge from any year is sufficient), voters who pay a one-time 20 GeekGold fee, or users who have purchased an avatar or a geekbadge.

If you meet any of those criteria, please consider nominating Masks for Best Supplement. I’m a big Geekdo fan, and I’d love for Masks to have a shot at winning a Geekie.

The process is pretty simple:

• Log in to Geekdo
• Visit the RPG nomination page
• Click the radio button for Best Supplement
• Scroll down to (or search for) Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game and select it
• In the center pane, click the button under “Click to Nominate Award Category”

If you can throw us a nomination, thank you very much for your support!

A nomination would do two things for Masks: It would help the book reach a wider audience than it already has, which ties right into our mission of providing system-neutral GMing material to as many GMs as possible, and it would provide a boost to the 22-person creative team that worked on the book. That may not sound like much, but it’s important to me and I think it’s pretty cool.

Thanks for reading, and if you’re in a position to nominate Masks for a 2011 Golden Geek Award, I hope you will!

If you’ve been waiting for Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game — Gnome Stew’s second book — to come back into stock, your wait has ended!

You can now order Masks in print (with a free PDF copy) from the Engine Publishing online store.

It’s also available as a standalone PDF, as well as in a package deal with our first book, Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters for 20% off (in print or PDF).

To say that we’ve been blown away by the reception Masks has gotten would be one hell of an understatement. It has sold over 400 copies since preorders opened on July 5th, and the PDF hit #1 on RPGNow, #2 on DriveThruRPG, and #1 Small Press on DTRPG.

Masks has also received rave reviews, and we’ve linked to all 15 of them for your perusal. You can also download a free 17-page preview of the book to check it out.

Thank you for being patient — it took me longer to get these inventoried and ready to ship than I expected.

If you’ve been waiting for the standalone PDF edition of our latest book, Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game, your wait is over!

• Order the Masks PDF directly from Engine Publishing
• Order Masks from DriveThruRPG

We’ve also made the Masks PDF available in a bundle with our first book, Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters, for 20% off:

• Order Masks and Eureka for 20% off from Engine Publishing
• Order Masks and Eureka together from DriveThruRPG

Our graphic designer and layout guru, Darren Hardy, does an amazing job on our PDF editions.

This PDF is DRM-free, so you can easily cut and paste NPCs into your adventure notes. It’s also extensively bookmarked (all 1,000 NPCs are bookmarked by name, as are all major sections) and hyperlinked.

And on top of the utility of Matt Neagley’s three excellent indexes, you also get full searchability: Pick a keyword, like a Trait, to search for, and pull up all instances of that keyword in the entire book. We tested it on a range of devices, and it looks great on all of them; several folks have commented on how well it works on their tablets.

If you’re still on the fence, why not check out reviews of Masks or download a 17-page PDF excerpt from the book that includes 18 ready-to-use NPCs?

Please vote for Gnome Stew in the 2011 ENnies!

Gnome Stew was nominated for Best Blog in the 2011 GenCon EN World RPG Awards (the “ENnies”), and we have our beady gnomish eyes on the gold.

Voting is open to anyone, takes 30 seconds or less, requires no registration or other bullshit, and ends today. We would greatly appreciate your vote!

Here’s how to vote:

1. Visit the ENnies voting page
2. Scroll down to Best Blog
3. Click the down arrow symbol next to Gnome Stew
4. Enter your vote (1 is the highest score you can give us)
5. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the “Submit Ballot!” button

Thank you very much for your support!

Update: Preorders of Masks are now sold out!

I need to make a couple of changes to the preorder process for our newest book, Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game. I’ll explain the changes first, then the reasons behind them.

Here’s what’s changing:

The hardcover edition will now be a limited print run

There will only be two opportunities to buy the hardcover edition: by preordering it from Engine Publishing or picking it up at the Studio 2 Publishing booth (#320) at GenCon 2011. After those copies are gone, the hardcover edition will not be reprinted (barring incredibly unusual circumstances). You’ll be able to buy the softcover edition directly from Engine Publishing, in retail stores, and online in various places.

It’s possible that I may have a few copies left over after preorders, but I can’t guarantee it. If you want Masks in hardcover, your best bet is to preorder it now.

If you want to guarantee that you get a hardcover, preorder by 7/20

In order to have books in hand to ship in early August, I have to order them soon — tomorrow, in fact! If you want to guarantee that you get one of the limited hardcover copies, please preorder by 10:00 pm Mountain on 7/20. We’ll keep preorders open until 7/29 or until we run out of books to sell, whichever comes first.

To be completely clear: If you’ve already preordered Masks, or do so by 7/20, you will receive one of the limited run of hardcover copies. If you wait past 7/20, you might still be able to snag the hardcover, but quantities will be limited to what I have on hand.

Books will ship in early August

I spoke to our printer yesterday, and they are currently backlogged. There’s a good chance I won’t be able to start shipping books out on 8/1 as planned, because I likely won’t have them by then. As soon as they come in, I’ll turn them around as quickly as I can — I want you to get your book as soon as possible!

The softcover edition

We’ve always planned to print a softcover edition for retail sales; the only change here is that this will now become the “main” edition of Masks, and will also be the edition I sell through the Engine Publishing website. It will be available in August for $34.95, and will include a free PDF copy. There will also be a package deal with Eureka (price TBD), and stores should have the softcover edition on their shelves in October.

The PDF edition

We’ve had a lot of requests for the standalone PDF edition of Masks, which will be available once preorders close. It will now be priced at $16.95 (not $19.95, as previously planned). It’s DRM-free and fully bookmarked and hyperlinked. As with the print edition, we’ll be offering this in a package deal with the Eureka PDF (price also TBD).

Eight rave reviews

Since launch day, Masks has received several more rave reviews, the latest from EN World, Obsidian Portal, and Newbie DM. If you’re still on the fence about the book, you can check out all eight reviews in one place.

Why the changes?

Firstly, I apologize for making changes midstream — that wasn’t part of the plan for Masks. And I say “I” because while this book is very much a Gnome Stew team effort, I’m the publisher and this stuff is my responsibility.

Doing Masks in hardcover was an experiment. Even though it’s our second book together, and we have a year of experience selling Eureka, this is all still pretty new.

We knew the hardcover edition would cost more to produce than the softcover, but we wanted to make sure the price was reasonable for as many GMs as possible. For a book of this size and quality, we thought $39.95 was reasonable — even though that price point doesn’t fully cover the difference in cost between the hardcover and the softcover. In other words, to keep the book within reach of more GMs, we deliberately absorbed some of the cost ourselves.

Masks in hardcover should really be $44.95 or more; at $39.95, it doesn’t make financial sense for us to keep the hardcover edition in print. So we’re switching to softcover, and making the hardcover a limited run. The end result will be a nice limited hardcover for those who want it, and a lower-cost softcover for those who don’t.

The reason I can’t guarantee hardcover availability after 7/20 is a bit more inside baseball-y than that, but here it is. The plan with Masks (as with Eureka) was to wait until around this time to order our first print run from the printer. I have enough sales data now to make an informed guess about how many copies we’ll need for preorders, and I can use the revenue from preorders to order additional copies to sell in the future.

…Except that now I’m not using hardcover revenues to order more hardcovers, I’m using hardcover revenues to order softcovers. That means I can’t take a guess and then add extra copies on top of that, because I don’t want extra hardcovers — I want extra softcovers. 7/20 is the cutoff to make that work, and I’ll be ordering our entire hardcover print run, plus our first softcover print run, on 7/21.

Thanks for reading, and hopefully for understanding, and again I apologize for the changes. If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to field them in the comments — and if you want to preorder the limited hardcover of Masks, which I hope you will, don’t wait too long!

Gnome Stew is nominated for Best Blog in the 2011 GenCon EN World RPG Awards (the “ENnies”), and I would like to ask for your support: Please vote for Gnome Stew!

Voting takes about 30 seconds, is open to everyone, and doesn’t require registration or any other fiddly stuff. You can vote in just the Best Blog category, if you like, and voting is open through July 24th.

It’s this easy:

1. Visit the ENnies voting page
2. Scroll down to Best Blog
3. Click the down arrow symbol next to Gnome Stew
4. Enter your vote (1 is the highest score you can give us)
5. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the “Submit Ballot!” button

That’s really it! Thank you very, very much for your vote!

We deliberately try to ask you, our readers, for very little; you don’t need us breathing down your neck asking for stuff all of the time. Your support won us the silver ENnie for Best Blog in 2010, and got our first book, Eureka, nominated for a 2010 Golden Geek Award for Best Supplement — thank you! — and those are the two biggest things we’ve asked for. This is the third.

This award means a lot to me personally, in large part because of the doors it can open. Recognition in the form of an ENnie — in this case, a second ENnie — can lead to freelancing gigs, new opportunities, and more. I want the creative team behind the Stew to have a crack at those opportunities, and winning a second ENnie will help all of us do that.

If you have time, please vote in as many categories as you feel comfortable voting in; this award matters to a lot of people, and can open doors for all of the nominees. If you vote in just one, though, please make it ours!

Every single ENnies vote matters. I know that sounds cliched, but it’s true — past ENnies have been decided by incredibly slim margins.

Got an Extra Few Minutes?

Once nominations are in, the ENnie Awards are a popularity contest — and voting is open to anyone, not just gamers.

If the Stew is your home page, if you visit daily (or read our feed daily), or if you feel a personal connection to the site, please ask your friends, players, gaming group, forum buddies, family, coworkers, and anyone else you think would donate 30 seconds of their time to vote for Gnome Stew. We’ve done the same thing ourselves (thanks, Mom and Dad!), and it’s exactly this kind of outreach and grassroots support that wins ENnies.

You’re welcome to use the voting “script” provided above. We’ve found that it’s especially good for family members and other non-gamers, as well as folks who don’t keep up with the ENnies but want to offer their support.

Again, thank you for supporting the Stew!

(If by some chance you’ve made it this far without voting…please go vote!)

When the 2011 ENnie Award nominees were announced last Friday, we were floored to see that Gnome Stew was one of them. For the second year in a row, the Stew has been nominated for Best Blog.

Congratulations to all of the nominees! I see fantastic products in every category, including a number I’m unfamiliar with and now want to check out.

Special congratulations to our fellow Best Blog nominees At-Will, Critical Hits, Sarah Darkmagic, and Thistle Games! It’s a pleasure to be nominated in great company.

Special congratulations as well to fellow web-dorks and friends of the Stew Atomic Array and The Dungeon Master Guys Podcast, both of which were nominated for Best Podcast.

We greatly, greatly appreciated the support Gnome Stew readers gave us last year, which won the Stew a silver ENnie for Best Blog in 2010 — thank you! We’ll be asking for your support again when voting opens on July 15, and crossing our stubby gnomish fingers that we can take the gold this year.

In the meantime, I encourage you to check out all of the 2011 nominees — this really is a great list.