Over the course of this blog’s sixteen years of life, it typically has received in the range of 5,000 – 10,000 page visits per month. A handful of times a particular post has generated a lot more visits in a single month (the highest until recently was almost 45,000 visits in August 2023). But the tendency towards the 5-10K range has been surprisingly consistent.
To a great extent, ongoing page visits have been driven by my Swords and Sorcery house rules (which were written for Swords & Wizardry, but can be used with most versions of TSR/OSR D&D). Also popular have been some of my writings on the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game. I’m gratified that people continue to find these posts interesting. (My own gaming interests have drifted in a different direction in recent years. But I still like both games very much and expect that I’ll play them again sometime in the future.)
Every so often I’ll check the stats for this blog. When I did so recently, I was surprised to see that total visits to this blog had exceeded two million (at the time of this writing, 2088800), and that was in part driven by a huge surge last August. In that month alone, the blog received 183055 visits – more than four times the number of visits of my previous most popular month. And most of those visits were to my only post that month, which simply noted that playtest materials for the Against the Starmaster (VsSM) game were now available.
Given that I’m a huge fan of Against the Darkmaster (VsD), I certainly hope that its forthcoming science-fiction counterpart is a great success. But VsD is a pretty obscure game, and VsSM is still in its playtesting stage. So I’m baffled as to why this rather minor post attracted so much traffic. There was an Activision game (for the Atari 2600) called “Starmaster” back in the early 1980s. But surely that can’t explain what happened last August.
Hmm…
