Last month we had a look at the Top 80 Black Gate Posts of 2014, our most popular articles for all of last year.

The most popular blog posts from February include several that are guaranteed to make the Top 80 Black Gate Posts of 2015, as they garnered enough traffic last month alone to rival those near the top of our 2014 list. At the top of the heap was “The Known World D&D Setting: A Secret History,” Lawrence Schick’s fascinating reminiscence of the early fantasy world he created with Tom Moldvay that became the basis for TSR’s famed Known World campaign setting.

Second on the February list was Howard Andrew Jones’ report on the Star Trek Continues Kickstarter, “Star Trek Kickstarter Warps Ahead,” which more than doubled its $100,000 goal and secured enough funding to make two more episodes of this excellent fan-made series.

Third on the list was M Harold Page’s advice for aspiring novelists, “Writing: Why You Shouldn’t Tinker With the Beginning Until You’ve Written to the End.”

The distinguished Mr. Page had a good month, also claiming the fourth spot with “Hitchhiker’s Guide to Edmond Hamilton: Who did Douglas Adams Really Read?” And rounding out the Top Five for February was Marie Bilodeau, with her look back at classic video games like Final Fantasy II and Dragon Warrior, “Seven Lessons I Learned from RPG Games of Yore.”

The complete list of Top Articles for February follows. Below that , I’ve also broken out the most popular blog categories for the month.

The complete Top 50 Black Gate posts in February were:

1. The “Known World” D&D Setting: A Secret History
2. Star Trek Kickstarter Warps Ahead
3. Writing: Why You Shouldn’t Tinker With the Beginning Until You’ve Written to the End
4. Hitchhiker’s Guide to Edmond Hamilton: Who did Douglas Adams Really Read?
5. Seven Lessons I Learned from RPG Games of Yore
6. Monolith’s Conan Board Game Raises Over $2 Million on Kickstarter
7. The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: The Best I’ve Ever Read…
8. The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series: Figures of Earth by James Branch Cabell
9. Dual Structures in Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser Stories and Robin Wayne Bailey’s Swords against the Shadowland
10. Who You Gonna Play? – Ghostbusters: The Board Game on Kickstarter

     

11. Alien Rats, Apocalyptic Nightmares, and a Horror Worse Than Ghosts: Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Volume One
12. Goth Chick News Catches Up With Our Favorite Comic Horror Crush: Dirk Manning
13. Writers as Barbarian Conquerors!
14. Future Treasures: Temple of Elemental Evil Board Game
15. The Middle Child of Editorial: An Interview with Jake Thomas, Associate Editor at Marvel Comics
16. The Future of Fantasy: February New Releases
17. The Recent Best: The Fantasy Catalog of Prime Books
18. Belated Movie Review #1: 10,000 B.C.
19. The Omnibus Volumes of Jack Vance, Part I: Planet of Adventure
20. Poul Anderson and the Northern Mythic Tradition: An Introduction

     

21. 0El Burgo de Osma: A Medieval Walled City in Spain
22. A Neglected Classic from the Golden Age of Sword & Sorcery: H. Warner Munn’s Merlin Cycle
23. Vintage Treasures: ATTA by Francis Rufus Bellamy/ The Brain-Stealers by Murray Leinster
24. Destination Barsoom, Nehwon, Narnia: A Few Thoughts in Defense of Escapism
25. The New York Times on Andrew J. Offutt
26. New Treasures: The Emerald Spire Superdungeon
27. Who Should Be Writing the Cthulhu Mythos Today? Announcing the Winners of Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth
28. Twenty Years of Smart Science Fiction and Fantasy: The Tachyon Publications Catalog
29. The Art Of Retreat, a.k.a. “Run Away, Run Away!”
30. Vintage Treasures: Starshine by Theodore Sturgeon

     

31. What Price Immortality? In Yana, the Touch of Undying by Michael Shea
32. From Poul Anderson’s Vault of the Ages to the End of All Things
33. Second-hand Magic, Part I
34. Ancient Worlds: Callisto and Arcus
35. Don’t Panic! It’s Nice to Know Douglas Adams Read Beyond Page 10!
36. I, The Sun by Janet Morris
37. SFWA Announces the 2014 Nebula Award Nominations
38. Chaotic and Lawful Alignments in Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions
39. New Treasures: California Bones and Pacific Fire by Greg van Eekhout
40. January Short Story Roundup

     

41. New Treasures: The Dhulyn and Parno Novels: Volume One by Violette Malan
42. Belated Movie Review #2: Apocalypto
43. Galaxy Science Fiction, June 1951: A Retro-Review
44. New Treasures: Cthulhu Lives!, edited by Salomé Jones
45. Fantasy Literature: The Orphans The Peshawar Lancers (2001) and Conquistador (2003)
46. Vintage Treasures: Somewhere a Voice by Eric Frank Russell
47. Vintage Treasures: Pamela Dean’s Secret Country Trilogy
48. Michael Moorcock’s Fantasy Autobiography: The Whispering Swarm
49. The Making of a Dark Fantasy Anthology
50. Book Tour Tips for (Self-Published) Authors

The top categories last month were:

1. New Treasures
2. Books
3. Fiction
4. Blog entry
5. Game Reviews
6. Vintage Treasures
7. Reviews
8. Editor’s blog
9. Magazines
10. Art of the Genre
11. Fashion
12. Music
13. Comics
14. Conan
15. Art
16. Goth Chick
17. BG Staff
18. News
19. Convention Report
20. Pulp

The Top 8o Black Gate blog posts in 2014 are here, and you can see all 111 posts we made in the month of February here.