Today it's been six months since Adylheim started. I'm not going to ruminate on the circumstances surrounding that opening and the various things that preceded, I've already written about that in my blog and rehashing it seems fairly pointless. Today is an important milestone though, it's said that the average lifespan of a pbp board is 6 months. The fact that we are still going strong (stronger than ever, in fact) is a good indication. Cue we will not go silently into that long night and such.

At such a point though, it strikes me as fitting to both look back and to look forward. When we started Adylheim we had big plans, we started out with a large opening. Quite a few people joined, lots of posts were made and we were cooking with gas. The first big adventure was named Skies Fall, it was and still remains as fairly simple stuff. Big bang, people go look see what happened about sums it up.

I remember telling Horo that if we kept up posting we could do a huge multi-PC adventure in maybe a month or two. That's fast. I was thinking that perhaps Adylheim would not suffer the same delays as other pbps would. Time, however, has proven me wrong on that count. 6 months later, Skies Fall is still there. Granted, right now it's kind of waiting for me to post, half the PCs that joined it no longer play. In fact, quite a few of all those PCs who joined back then have ceased posting. Player attrition was rather high back then. We had a burst of activity in those first few weeks and it stayed rather silent after that.

Looking at our current playerbase now I can say that only 3 or 4 stayed on. Not including the admins. Some have left and come back, exactly, 2 have been here the whole time. Since then, new people have come here and joined and bolstered our player base.

Together with Clueless Sin/Xin I am perhaps the most developmentally minded of the admins. I checked just recently and one fourth of my posts are acutally in the development forum. So I remember with some delight Ryon's article on the northern barbarians (which he has still left to finish) enter the development forum. It was the first article written by a non-admin and I was happy to see someone taking a part of the world I'd helped create and run with it. That kind of stands out in my mind as a milestone.

It's been a rocky road though, there have been players coming through in droves and leaving when they found out that Adylheim was not for them. I'm not going to blame them for that, at some point you have to realize that Adylheim is not for everyone. Some people like other things in their pbps, I like to think we've tried to cram Adylheim as full of the things we like to see in a pbp as we possibly can. Certainly we set out to make something a little different, without it being totally unrecognisable. I remember a lot of watching the posts per day counter, I always feel bad when it dips below ten or twenty. There is an average posts per day rating thing in the admin panels, I can recall the first time I saw it dip below 24. It was not a day I was very happy with the activity in Adylheim. Whenever the activity goes above 40-50 though, I consider it a good day.

We started out as four friends, making our own little corner in the vastness of the internet, we got those friends we had to come play here with us and in time we have made more and new friends. And while we try to make Adylheim as fun a place as possible to play, it's also important to us that it's a friendly place, where people can meet people with at least marginally the same interests and just have fun without having to worry about anything else. That, that is perhaps the central core of Adylheim. Having fun without having to worry about game politics or anything silly like that. Or perhaps just: having fun.

I would also like to have it noted that we recently applied to have our site reviewed for a couple of awards. The one we got was the Amber Quill from RPGGateway, which marks us as a site of excellent rping. I think we already knew that though. We have all done extremely well in the past six months and I don't think I've ever had this much fun working on a pbp.

To add to this, I've got a few announcements up my sleeve, as written by Clueless Sin (hence the ^_^'s and such):

That’s right. With eminent arrival of our six-month anniversary, the administrators have buckled down to bring you not one but two major announcements! And a few minor announcements too! ^_^

Without further ado:

Tertiary PC’s

Many of you have enjoyed having a secondary PC. We’re now giving the option to have a third (tertiary) PC. Please register your tertiary’s using the same e-mail and PM an admin with the identification of the new character.

Art Commissions

In the past few months, we’ve been able to feature drawings and maps produced by a member of our community like our new map and the beautiful dragon-mascot on our front page. One goal that the Administration team determined early-on was the commissioning of freelance artists to portray characters, races, and images from our game. Thanks to some generous donors, we’re happy to announce that Adylheim has accumulated enough to commission a piece of artwork.

What is going to be commissioned? We haven’t decided yet—and we’d like to get your ideas and inputs in [Insert url here] thread. To help guide the discussion, we have the following general questions:

Who is in the painting? Where are they? What are they doing?

Due to pricing and artistic issues, we’d like to limit the painting at this time to a single character. Please try to keep suggestions for backgrounds simple—no enormous floating city please!

Where should it go on the website?

We can put pictures pretty much anywhere on the website from the Codex to the welcome documents. Where do you think is best?

TMP's Note: Discussion thread here!

Website and Forum Mods

BBcode in profiles: You can now use BB code to spice up the custom profile fields in your character’s profile.

New forum theme: There's been requests for a darker skin--and Horo's been finding a good theme! It's available as a skin choice in the User Control Panel now.

Ask an Admin: Have questions and unable to use chat? Drop a message in the meebo chat box! TMP's note: It's back! Wheee!

Profile Power: You can now see what page people viewed last in their profile. TMP's note: Stalkeriffic!