TCM Will Go Silent on July 1st

Today, I have some news.

First, I wanted to formally acknowledge my thanks to each every reader who has subscribe to this blog (THANK YOU!!!). Many of you I have worked with in the last year directly on collaborations, many of you are silent "lurkers" whose participation is only marked by webstats and feedburner subscriber counts. All of you, however, have made a major contribution to my motivation level as I have worked hard to keep plugging away at this blog since July of last year. The fervor and general camaraderie of the community has been really incredible and generally a very big positive point in my own life. I don't think without all the support I've received from everyone, I would have been able to finish Open Game Table nor push my blog to wherever it has ended up. Where are we now?

But, all good things come to an end, right?

Between my day job as a research scientist, my family, gaming when I have time, maintaining Open Game Table and The Core Mechanic, and (now, recently) Nevermet Press... you might say I'm a bit over extended. Thus, I've decided that I can no longer support all my extracurricular activities. So, after exactly 1 year of blogging about RPGs at The Core Mechanic; I've decided that TCM will go silent on July 1st.

It's been a fun ride.

This is not to say my days of writing about RPGs are over. Hardly. In fact, I'm closing down TCM so that I can focus my energy on writing more game content. One of the biggest obstacles for TCM was coming up with more or less original viewpoints on topics that have not been covered to any great extent by the rest of the RPG blogosphere. The RPG blogging community has the tendancy to be somewhat of an "echo chamber", as do many social blogging communities. This major problem of topic saturation that has also largely gone unaddressed by the rest of the blogging community, although I suspect that many of the other RPG bloggers out there may have recognized the same issue. The "pillar topics" of our hobby have all been covered ad nauseum by multiple blogs with many, often overlapping, viewpoints. This is not a bad thing; only I don't feel a compelling need to add my one small voice to the cacophony of dozens of others about the same topics. My contribution to the community might be better made by producing usable game content, rather than continuing to blog about GM advice, game reviews, or other oddities of the RPG hobby / industry. I looked at my list of future topics and said "most of these have already been covered by some other awesome RPG blog in the past". What remained were topics of game content and news/journalistic topics about the industry. Both of these are surprising minority topics in our community (if you survey the vast number of RPG blogs out there). So, instead of continuing the trend of topic saturation; I'm going to focus on developing and publishing usable game content (since I'm certainly not a journalist; I'll leave that to The Game).

I'll be doing this by working on getting Nevermet Press off the ground. NMP is a new company, a collaboration, between Michael Brewer (Mad Brew Labs), Quinn Murphy (At-Will) and I. You'll be hearing more about NMP in the next couple weeks as we get everything off the ground and running. Much of what I did with TCM will continue on the future NMP website/blog. In fact, I'm hoping that you will also perhaps be interested in working with us in the future as well. In any case, starting in July, all my writing efforts (in so far as RPGs are concerned) will be focused through the NMP lense. We will also be looking for additional writers and artists to help support all our projects both online and off.

So, in the meantime, for the next 4 weeks, my posting schedule on TCM will be somewhat random. I have half-a-dozen draft posts saved in my Google Doc's; so I'll be sure to roll those out before the months end. I'm also sure there will be some more suprises along the way!

Oh, and there's that survey contest! We still need like 20 or so people to hit our goal of 200. Then all the results will be made public and I'll announce the winner of the $20 RPGNow Gift Certificate! So if you haven't yet answered our survey about Villains; please do so today!

Questions? please leave a comment!