I finally motivated myself to finish putting together the index pages for the (as I am now freshly reminded) prodigious archives here at the Alexandrian. We recently crossed the threshold of 1,500 unique posts, so systematically going through all of them and figuring out how to organize them was a time-consuming project. (Far more time-consuming than I’d been anticipating, honestly.)

The index pages can be accessed through the side bar on the right. Several of these had been spun up previously, but have now been expanded/finalized:

Gamemastery 101: Has all of the GM-focused essays I’ve written about RPGs in general. This includes adventure design stuff like the Three Clue Rule, Node-Based Scenario Design, and game structures; The Arts of the GM essays; open game tables; and Random GM Tips.

RPG Scenarios: This has all the scenarios (for a bunch of a different games) that I’ve posted here at the Alexandrian.

RPG Cheat Sheets: Links to all of the RPG system cheat sheets I’ve written up. There’s about a dozen of these at the moment.

Ptolus – Shadow of the Spire: Includes links to all the campaign journal entries and the Running the Campaign essays related to my D&D 3.5 campaign.

Reviews: Here you’ll find the What I’m Reading series of novel reviews, every review I’ve written on the Alexandrian, and the archive of my old RPGNet reviews. (This latter archival project is one I need to get back to, as there’s still several dozen reviews I haven’t had a chance to reformat and post yet.)

Shakespeare Sunday: Shakespeare Sundays was a series of essays I wrote when I was the Artistic Director of the American Shakespeare Repertory, but I’ve also slipped in some additional Shakespeare-related posts over the years. (I need to finish archiving the ASR performance scripts at some point.)

In addition to these, I’ve now added a number of new index pages:

RPG Miscellaneous: The top section of this index has an archive of old articles, Tales from the Table, design notes from my personal projects, and a miscellaneous collection of essays and other material. The rest of the index organizes the material I’ve written up for specific games like Eclipse Phase, Numenera, Technoir, Ten Candles, and so forth. (Although I’ve generally avoided listing material on multiple indexes, this is the one exception: Reviews, scenarios, and system cheat sheets for specific games are included here with everything else I’ve written for those specific games.)

Check These Out: Collecting every post I’ve made where I’ve recommended checking something out elsewhere on the ‘net. (Many of these include additional discussion and insight.)

Essays: Long-form essays and similar thoughts on any topics that aren’t quite large enough to justify having their own index page.

Thoughts of the Day: All of my little interstitial “thoughts of the day” posts broken down by topic (Roleplaying, Politics, Pop Culture, Technology, Miscellaneous).

Dungeons & Dragons: The biggest index page of them all. This includes classics like D&D: Calibrating Your Expectations, Reactions to OD&D, and my review of 4th Edition. It includes Advanced D20 Rules (including Untested mechanics), cool stuff (feats, magic items, spells, monsters), reviews, scenarios, and miscellaneous essays.

If you’re an old hand in these parts, you might take a moment to poke around and find some old favorites. If you’re new in town, then this project has probably unearthed some lost gems that were lurking under your feet without you ever being aware of them.

Have fun storming the castle!

A couple years ago I posted Doctor Who: The Temporal Masters, a fanciful outline of the hypothetical season of Doctor Who I would create if I wanted to craft a villain suitable for replacing the Daleks as a rival for the Time Lords.

Martin Tegelj has taken that material and is doing something incredibly cool with it: He’s designed an entire campaign based on The Temporal Masters for the Doctor Who Roleplaying Game:

1. A Conversion Before Christmas
2. Something Old, Something New (aka The Doctor’s Granddaughter)
3. Dawn of the Temporal Masters
4. The Riot
Prelude: Donna
5. Fugue State
6. Alliance of the Daleks
7. The Genesis Extermination
8. The Master Plan
9. Black Hole Bluff
10. Andromeda Burns
11. Another World
12. Time Lord Ascendant

Places to Go, People to Be, a French RPG ‘zine, has posted a translation of my review Ten Candles. (The original review in English can be read over here.)

They’ve also done a translation of Opening Your Game Table, which I promptly rendered obsolete by writing the Open Table Manifesto. (Sorry, guys!)

Node-Based Scenario Design has been translated into Hungarian by LFG. (The original for that is located here.)

Actually, I’m not 100% sure the title of this post is true: The last several times I’ve tried to work on Alexandrian-related content, I’ve instead twiddled my time away trying to resolve some site-related headache.

To whit: I was hoping to have content up starting on February 1st, but instead I’ve spent the past week disinfecting some files on the site that a WordPress security hole had compromised. Before that, the post preview images I’d set up broke (and I still haven’t figured out how to actually fix them, so you’re stuck with “A” logos for the moment). And I’ve spent this evening trying to figure out how to deal with the fact that Patreon — without actually informing anyone — has disabled pledges of less than $1. Speaking of which…

PATREON UPDATE: I have regretfully decided to cancel the Curious Item Club. This was previously a bonus for patrons pledging $0.50 per post, but sadly that’s no longer an option. Those who are current members of the Club will have legacy recognition on the Patrons of the Alexandrian page for as long as they remain patrons, but I will no longer be producing the monthly curious items.

One of the things I really liked about Patreon was the micro-payments it made possible. The Curious Item Club reward was originally rolled out as, IIRC, a $2 reward package, but I realized that (a) it wasn’t really worth that much and (b) the content was cool enough that I wanted it to be more widely shared by my patrons. Using the content as a way to encourage $0.10 patrons to bump their patronage up to $0.50 seemed to work okay (all things considered). One of the problems with the Curious Item Club, however, was that the time I spent creating content for that was time I wasn’t creating public content for the Alexandrian.  So I think letting it go at this point is the right way to go.

PATRONAGE GOING FORWARD: Although the minimum pledge is now $1, those who don’t feel they can afford that should remember that they can set a monthly maximum on their pledge.

WHAT’S NEXT: I have scenarios for Eclipse Phase and Trail of Cthulhu that I will likely be posting in the near-ish future. I’m hoping to get the archiving of my old RPGNet reviews restarted. The Art of Rulings has a number of additional installments that need to be written (on topics like the Fourfold Model, Group Checks, Social Skills, Hidden/Open Difficulty Numbers, and more). I’m also looking at a new series called The Art of Random Encounters. Also: Context Collisions for The Strange,  Running a Convention Game, and the Grok Threshold.

… even the smallest of pledges can add up to wondrous things.

I try to limit the number of non-content posts here at the Alexandrian, but it can be useful to occasionally take stock. And we haven’t had one of these updates in nearly a year, so you’ll have to bear with me. I’ve also been getting asked a lot of the same questions lately, and this would be a good opportunity to kind of bring people up to speed.

RATE OF UPDATES: Many of you have noticed the obvious, which is that the rate of updates at the Alexandrian has dropped again over the last six months or so. The primary reason for this is that the Infinity RPG has been chewing up a lot of my creative time. We’re hoping that the core rulebook will be getting delivered soon (although, to be honest, we’ve been hoping that for a long while now). Once that happens, things should loosen up a bit and I’ll be able to dedicate a bit more time to the Alexandrian.

(There’s also another project — this one still top secret — which I’m hoping I’ll be able to make some announcements about shortly. But that’s also been pending for awhile now, so… it’ll happen when it happens.)

You may recall that, when I launched the Patreon for the site back in December 2014, I mentioned setting up the patron options to be for a paid-per-post format for exactly this reason: The Alexandrian won’t always update regularly (although the patrons make it possible to update it a lot more than it would be otherwise), and I don’t want anybody paying for content unless that content actually exists.

As a reminder, this really offers the best of both worlds: If you’d really prefer to make a monthly contribution, set your contribution level to the amount you want to contribute and set your maximum contribution to the same amount. As long as I post something each month, you’ll make the monthly contribution you want to. (When pledging without a maximum contribution level, however, remember that the ideal update schedule for the Alexandrian is Monday-Wednesday-Friday each week, plus bonus content. So if you backed for $0.10 per post, you’d be spending $1.20 or $1.30 per month to support the Alexandrian.)

GOAL LEVELS: Since my last update, you may have noticed that some of the funding levels for the Patreon goals have changed. There’s a couple of reasons for this.

First, because of people setting maximum pledges the amount of money Patreon reports me earning per post is not really accurate. For example, if it says I’m making $50 per post then that’s how much I make for the first post each month. Subsequent posts then drop if people have reached their maximum contributions. In practice, by the end of a full month of updates I’m making a little over one-third the amount per post Patreon is claiming. Goal levels were shifted up slightly to reflect the reality of what I’m getting paid (in large part because the higher funding goals were set with the expectation that I’d be able to pay for graphics, maps, and other elements which are part of them.)

Second, Patreon changed the way that they calculate the amount of money paid per post. Or, rather, they’ve changed the amount they publicly claim is being earned per post. When I first set up the Alexandrian Patreon, they reported the total amount pledged for the first post. They now run that number through some sort of weird, black box algorithm (which they don’t share with anybody as far as I can tell) and then spit out a number which is supposedly a more “accurate” reflection of how much I’m actually earning (supposedly based on how many pledges were declined when they attempted to charge credit cards in previous months, but the math on that doesn’t actually add up). When this happened, goal levels were then shifted down a bit to reflect the fact that Patreon was now routinely under-reporting how much my patrons were actually pledging.

PATRONS OF THE ALEXANDRIAN: When new patrons sign up to support the Alexandrian they receive a message asking them for specific permission to list them on the Patrons of the Alexandrian page. I would love to recognize everybody who helps to make the awesome content here possible! But some people miss the message and then later e-mail me to ask why they haven’t been added to the list. I’m guessing others miss the message and never e-mail me, so this is just a quick reminder for all my patrons: If you want to be recognized as the wonderful people that you are, please send me an e-mail and give me permission to do so!

$0.10? $0.25? $1.00?

… even the smallest of pledges can add up to wondrous things.