Welcome to my mockup of the RPGme main page as designed by Christopher P. Smith. RPGme ran on an online store application that I (Myles L. Skinner) wrote from scratch in JSP. The links on this page have been disabled, but you can get a good idea of what used to be available. The tool boxes in the sidebars could be reconfigured and placed in either the left and right sidebar; different tools were available for logged in users and for admins.

It's a shame that the store is no longer operating. The new owner decided to rewrite the code because "it wasn't object-oriented enough" and, in the process, ended up dismantling it. While I understand his point, and years later, I would certainly have designed the store differently—for example, I would be much more strict about separating the business logic (model) from the display (view)— but I think RPGme had some pretty robust characteristics: it was modular, configurable, and scalable. And more to the point, it worked. I kept revisiting the site after it was sold in 2003...throughout most of 2004, whenever I'd drop by, the sidebar tools kept throwing JSP exceptions (I mean, come on, at least catch those and do something with them!) and without my careful stweardship, the whole thing kind of went downhill from there.

Writing the codebase for an online store at the dawn of e-commerce was a tremendous learning experience. Even five years ago, I would have considered converting the old RPGme codebase to a common language like PHP. Today, however, I'd use everything that I've learned developing web applications full time and start from scratch in Rails.

Yes, we have finally completed enough of our site functionality to consider ourselves open for business. We are extremely pleased to have come as far as we have, and now it's up to you to let us know we are on the right track. Please browse our somewhat limited product offering, and rest assured that we are busily researching what products we will be bringing you.

The Gaming Tools section is still under construction. The links to that area of the site are dead, however, this isn't a bug. We are researching the tool box we are going to be bringing you. The ideas we've already developed are going to be great and those yet undiscovered may even be cooler!

The site forums are now open! Please stop by and say a few words. We are looking for experts in the various systems we have listed within the forums. If you fit the bill, drop a note in the category you'd like to be an expert in, and we'll promote you. Easiest promotion you're likely to ever get.

The Wizards of the Coast open call for fantasy settings closes today. Hurry and finish up your masterwork and rush it to the post office—it must be postmarked by today! The flood of entries will likely overwhelm even the folks at WotC—estimates of the number of entries received has been as high as 5,000. So, who wants the job of reading all those entries? RPGme.com will continue to follow this story closely; after all, we submitted an entry ourselves!

Necromancer Games will publish the Tome of Horrors! Negotiations completed with Wizards of the Coast and Necromancer Games will publish this d20 and Open License supplement. It is reported that the supplement will detail over 400 creatures from 1st Edition D&D. Don't get this supplement confused with Tomb of Horrors, the famous character slaying adventure scenario by Gary Gygax. More information on this product can be found at the Necromancer Games site.

Lunamancer asks: GMs, how much time do you typically spend preparing your adventure scenarios for play?