Today, Gnome Stew turns one year old — we launched on May 12, 2008.

We’re rocking our anniversary with a contest, which has its own article. Check it out and enter for a chance to win a set of Battlegraph combat tiles.

At the close of 2008, when I did the last State of the Stew, we were going like gangbusters. After 12 months, we’ve passed every milestone I hoped for in the first year, and then some. It’s humbling and crazy-exciting all rolled up into one.

  • 1,100+ registered users (12/08: 625ish)
  • More than 2,100 RSS and email subscribers (12/08: 1,230)
  • Over 188,000 unique visitors (316,000 total visits)
  • …of those 188,000, nearly 128,000 visited more than once
  • 619,000 pageviews
  • The gnomes have posted nearly 400 articles
  • …which have attracted more than 5,200 comments

We’ve also redesigned the site, assembled the top 30 articles page, ramped Gnomenclature: The RPG Glossary up to 290 definitions, written Gnomes Gone Wild (the worst adventure in existence), and written a host of articles based on your suggestions in the Suggestion Pot.

So…quite a bit has changed — but what hasn’t changed is what we’re about: GMing, baby.

We started Gnome Stew because we believe that GMs are under-served in the RPG community. There are few websites and even fewer books dedicated to game mastering — GMs usually get one chapter in a larger work, and that often doesn’t address a lot of what we actually do at the gaming table.

Many of our articles address practical GMing topics from the trenches. We’re all experienced GMs, and we love sharing our knowledge–and learning new GMing tricks and techniques from our readers.

In just one year, we’ve built that mission into what is conservatively one of the largest repositories of game mastering material in existence — in print or online — and one of the best damned communities on the web.

We love GMing, we love to write, and we love giving back to the gaming community that’s given us so much. I know that sounds clichéd, but it’s true: you, our readers, and our love for the hobby are what keep us coming back to write new material every day.

Thanks for a great year. We’re not going anywhere, and we hope you won’t either. From all of us gnomes, we wish you happy GMing.