Imagine, if you will, a geek dad who has a lot on his plate who knew that Gnome Stew’s 1,000th article was fast approaching, but kind of lost sight of it over the past few days.

And imagine that on that fateful day that fellow posted a request for Gnome Stew readers to help our book, Masks, get nominated for a Golden Geek Award…and totally didn’t catch that that would be article #1,000.

That fellow was me, that day was yesterday, and while I caught my mistake and quickly swapped in a more suitable article with a note about it being the thousandth, I didn’t feel right about how it went down.

Happy Happy Birthday Birthday!

So here we are: I’d like to wish Gnome Stew a happy 1,000th birthday! Humans like big, round numbers, and 1,000 is a pretty big, round number — a hell of a milestone for any blog, and one I’m thrilled that we’ve passed.

Looking back over our articles, I don’t see an end in sight: System-neutral game mastering advice is a topic that’s both broad and deep, and one that I still find as fascinating and fulfilling as I did when I started the GMing blog that turned out to be a precursor to Gnome Stew, Treasure Tables, back in 2005.

Thank you to all of our readers for making the past three years, 1,000 articles, and 13,000+ comments one hell of a fun ride. Here’s to the next thousand!

Can you help get Masks nominated for a Golden Geek Award?

The Golden Geek Awards are an annual event celebrating the best new games of the year, and I’m hoping that you can help Gnome Stew’s latest book, Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game, get nominated for Best Supplement (and then go on to win!).

The Golden Geek Awards (the “Geekies”) have a pretty specific filter on who can nominate games — essentially, you have to be an active Geekdo user:

Voting is restricted to either supporting users (having a supporter badge from any year is sufficient), voters who pay a one-time 20 GeekGold fee, or users who have purchased an avatar or a geekbadge.

If you meet any of those criteria, please consider nominating Masks for Best Supplement. I’m a big Geekdo fan, and I’d love for Masks to have a shot at winning a Geekie.

The process is pretty simple:

• Log in to Geekdo
• Visit the RPG nomination page
• Click the radio button for Best Supplement
• Scroll down to (or search for) Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game and select it
• In the center pane, click the button under “Click to Nominate Award Category”

If you can throw us a nomination, thank you very much for your support!

A nomination would do two things for Masks: It would help the book reach a wider audience than it already has, which ties right into our mission of providing system-neutral GMing material to as many GMs as possible, and it would provide a boost to the 22-person creative team that worked on the book. That may not sound like much, but it’s important to me and I think it’s pretty cool.

Thanks for reading, and if you’re in a position to nominate Masks for a 2011 Golden Geek Award, I hope you will!