I have been running the DG scenario database for almost three years now and it has grown a lot in that time. The submissions to the 2025 Shotgun Scenario Contest have pushed us to over 1000 tracked scenarios! This milestone deserves a blog post, so here I present some statistics about the current state of the database.
Basic stats
The total number of scenarios is 1014 at the time of writing. 51 of these are official scenarios, published by Arc Dream (campaigns like God's Teeth only count as one scenario). The vast majority of the scenarios are submissions to the annual Shotgun Scenario Contest, with a total of 661. This leaves us with 302 scenarios in the "Other" category, though most of them were also submissions to one of the many contests that have been run over the years (mostly on the N@TO Discord server).
These 1014 scenarios have been written by around 450 different authors. The exact number is hard to pin down, as the same author might have published different scenarios under different names.
About half the scenarios (510) have been published within the last five years. Here is a histogram showing the development over the years:
Top 5 most prolific authors
The author with the most scenarios in the database is, of course, mellonbread with a whopping 99 scenarios! Second place, but not even close, is ChiefMcClane with 28 scenarios. They are followed by Dennis Detwiller (20 scenarios) and Ross Payton (16 scenarios). The fifth place is shared by Tormsen and Lovecraft's Cat Herder (15 scenarios).
With "only" 14 scenarios I narrowly miss out on a spot in the top 5 (and so does Agent Obtuse). 😞
Most popular tags
Let's look at some of the tags to see what people like to write about. Take the following numbers with a grain of salt, as not all scenarios are properly tagged and sometimes mistakes happen.
Excluding DG itself, by far the most popular human faction to write about is Majestic-12. A total of 70 scenarios feature them in some way. They are followed by their corporate offspring March Technologies, with 32 scenarios. The Karotechia, another classic human antagonist, has 25 scenarios featuring them. PISCES and GRU SV-8 are also quite popular, both as antagonists and as playable factions, with 35 and 29 scenarios respectively.
The most popular Mythos race to write about is the Mi-go, with 41 scenarios featuring them somehow. They are closely followed by the Deep Ones with 38 scenarios and the Yithians with 34 scenarios. The Lloigor are more popular than I expected, with 16 scenarios.
Looking at the most popular Great Old Ones, we have some surprises. First place is Shub-Niggurath with 33 scenarios, followed by the King in Yellow with 29 scenarios. Azathoth is third with 28 scenarios, which means that Nyarlathotep did not make the top 3! He is fourth, with 23 scenarios. Poor old Cthulhu has a measly 8 scenarios to his name.
Looking at popular locations, we have Carcosa mentioned in 33 scenarios. Surprisingly, it is closely followed by the Dreamlands with 31 scenarios. New York is the most popular real-world location, with 25 scenarios.
Other trends: there are 18 scenarios featuring some kind of disease, at least 15 time travel scenarios and 15 scenarios with some kind of AI.
Traffic and costs
The database gets 3000-4000 unique visitors per month, which is much more than I expected when I started this. Some of these visitors are bots, but I hope it's still useful to actual humans.
The website runs on a Hetzner CX22 instance, which is physically located in Finland. Including the cost for the domain name I'm only paying ~5€ per month, which is pretty cheap.
What's next?
I will keep running and updating the database for the foreseeable future. I'm not really implementing any new features right now, but I think a full-text search for easily scrapeable scenarios (those on the Fairfield wiki and those hosted as Google Docs) might be cool.
Adding and especially tagging new scenarios is always a bit of work and unfortunately no one but me is doing it. Training a tag classifier on the existing scenarios would help to automate this, but doing this requires more time than I currently have.
If you have any feedback or suggestions for the scenario database please let me know!
