The RPG Bloggers Network has been a tremendous success, sparking plenty of cross-blog traffic and comments. I’ve read lots of great articles and discovered a bunch of new sites, but I think there’s one area where the community can improve: game reviews.
Simply put, there aren’t enough of them. There’s plenty of speculation, analysis and debate but there aren’t nearly enough reviews (or, if they are there, they are quickly lost among the flurry of other posts). The RPG Bloggers guys are working on improvements to bring order to the chaos by adding new categories, but even then I think there will be a need for bloggers to knuckle down and review games.
I have as much work to do as anyone else. It shocked me earlier this week when I looked at my own RPG reviews category and discovered that five months had passed between my Battlestar Galactica RPG review and my new one for Star Wars: Threats of the Galaxy. Now granted, my sense of what I’ve written is distorted by all the writing I do for SCIFI, and I’ve certainly posted a bunch of quasi-reviews in the form of playtest reports, but still … there need to be more.
To that end, I’m going to be striving to release one new RPG review a week for the next two months. I’m kicking things off on Wednesday with a review of D&D 4th Edition. It’ll be followed each Wednesday with reviews of other games, including Serenity RPG, Dogs in the Vineyard, Deadlands Reloaded, the Pulp Gear Toolkit for Savage Worlds, Freedom City Atlas for Mutants & Masterminds, and the Star Wars RPG. My goal is to make this the regular feature that I’ve always wanted to be, and hopefully inspire not only some good conversations, but some reviews by other bloggers as well.