My Gaming Projects, Part III: The Arcana Wiki

"The Wikipedia - written by gamers, for gamers!"

That was the basic idea when I created the Arcana Wiki six years ago, and that remains the goal to this day. As any veteran game master or teller of stories knows, pretty much anything can serve as an inspiration for stories if you just look at it from the right angle. The trick is then to find the right inspiration for your current needs and start thinking in the right directions. Streams of high-inspiration material like the Suppressed Transmissions Community are useful, but the posts soon vanish into the archives and are forgotten by most readers. Therefore, trying to sort all this inspirational stuff into a wiki only made sense - it would allow proper indexing, cross-referencing, and brainstorming among its readers.

Most entries in the Arcana Wiki have a fairly standard layout. A good example of this is the entry for the Kowloon Walled City, a former slum region in Hong Kong.

As you can see, this page includes a hierarchical navigation bar, which shows that the Kowloon Walled City is within Hong Kong, which is within China, which is within the "Countries" hierarchy, which in turn is within the "Places" hierarchy. Not all pages of the Arcana Wiki - 4380 pages as of this writing - are included in such a hierarchy, but it does making navigation easier.

Though some pages (see the "Love Potion" entry for an example) start with an inspirational quote, most will start with a "Basic Information" section which tries to explain the basic concept of the entry in a fairly factual manner (though not usually as dry as the Wikipedia, and we don't concern ourselves with citations as much, either).

Incidentally, the blue links refer to existing Arcana Wiki entries, while the red links refer to entries which do not exist yet - a good place to get started when writing new stuff!

This includes a short "Sources" section with links where readers can get more information. Often this will only mean the relevant Wikipedia entry, but frequently contributors came across other interesting links that would contribute to the reader's understanding - and inspiration.

Below that, there is a "Game and Story Use" section where both the creator of the entry and others can add their own story ideas in the form of bullet points. The formatting is intentionally looser here, as the ideas can be highly subjective and idiosyncratic - in fact, this part was inspired by the TV Tropes Wiki, which uses the same format when discussing tropes. If someone wants to elaborate on another idea or add variants, they can do that via higher-order bullet points, which can get some lengthy discussions going.

This is the basic formatting for most Arcana Wiki entries. So, what subjects does the wiki cover?

Plenty. While it is nowhere near as exhaustive as the Wikipedia (and how could it be, considering it doesn't have the latter's zillion contributors?), some of the highlights include a Geography section listing real world locations around the world, famous real-world People, Mythological Creatures, a List of Mythologies (which admittedly needs some work, but it does include a basic page for the Cthulhu Mythos), Organizations, sections on Science, Technology, and Magic, a Tropes section loosely based on the aforementioned TV Tropes Wiki, and a Historical Timeline which, especially in newer years, links to all sorts of fascinating news stories (which use a slightly different formatting than the standard entries described above). There are also some tools which use random wiki entries to generate ideas - like the Random Adventure Seeds (which pick three random entries for adventure inspiration), or the Random Nations Generator (I've used the latter to generate villages for my Cold Frontier campaign - see here, here, and here for examples).

But while there is a fair amount of decent material on the wiki, most of the contributions came from a very small number of people. And I'd like to change that - which is where you come in.

The Arcana Wiki needs more contributors on just about any conceivable subject imaginable - and everyone is an expert on something that can be used for gaming. Do you know a lot about fantastic or cryptozoological creatures? Write it up. Do you know about really strange places in or near your hometown? Write it up. Do you have some favorite conspiracy theories? Write them up. Have you studied some particularly fascinating periods of history? Write them up. Inspiration is everywhere, and the goal of the Arcana Wiki is to find it and make it accessible to everyone.

But how do you get started? Well, first of all you need to register - in the beginning I allowed anonymous edits, but sadly the wiki eventually attracted sufficient spammers to force me disable that option. You can register via the link at the top and right.

After that, all you need to do is to click on the edit button at the bottom of the page and start editing.

I would recommend starting small - go to existing pages first and add some gaming ideas of your own. The wiki code is fairly easy to understand - for example, the "Game and Story Use" section of the Kowloon Walled City entry looks like this:

The main code to remember here is:

• Lines starting with "* " are bullet points, and if the "*" is moved further to the right (for example, " * ", these are turned into
• higher-level bullet points.
• Words in //double slashes// are turned into italics.
• Words wrapped in **double asterixes** are written bold.
• Worlds written in [[[triple square brackets]]] are links to other Arcana Wiki entries.
• Words written in single [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_brackets#Square_brackets square brackets] with URLs are links to external (non-Arcana Wiki) pages.

 After a while, you will probably click on one of the red links, which will bring you to a page like this:

Click on the link, and a new page will be generated based on a template of your choosing (the "standard" template is the default, but there are also templates for news stories, calendar entries, and so forth) - you only need to fill in the details and save the results.

After that, the next step is to read the following essays at the wiki:

• What To Add To The Arcana Wiki
• What The Arcana Wiki Is Not 
• Arcana Wiki Style Guide 

Furthermore, the wiki has its own forum on which you can ask questions if anything is unclear.


That's it - for now! I hope to see you there, and I will be looking forward to your contributions.

My Gaming Projects, Part II: Urbis - A World of Cities

After discussing my Doomed Slayers setting in a previous post, I turn to my Magnum Opus: Urbis - A World of Cities.

It all started with the famous Wizards of the Coast "Setting Search" of 2002, where the company was looking for a new D&D setting and opened a submission process where the finalist would receive the sum of $100,000 (though they would have to use some of that money to develop a "setting bible") - an enormous sum in an industry where most authors can't make a living with their writing. I submitted my own idea, and despite rumors to the contrary my submission (like 10,900 others) washed out in the first round (Eberron was the final winner - which I don't begrudge at all, since it really is an excellent setting). But I liked my own idea enough to develop it further on my own from that first, one-page summary, and developed it through a number of iterations - the latest of which can be found in this wiki.

So what are the central ideas of Urbis? Well, at the time I was heavily influenced by the Obscure Cities - a parallel world/comic book series by the Belgian artists François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters. This world conjured vistas of grand, majestic cities that had Mad Architects the way pulp settings have Mad Scientists:

       

This meant that I wanted my own D&D world to have vast cities as well - with populations ranging in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions of inhabitants. This also meant avoiding Medieval Stasis - instead of the usual psedo-feudal arrangements, the basic units of society and government would be independent city-states surrounded by large protectorates.

Since this was supposed to be a D&D setting, I started out with all the usual components of D&D (or the d20 system) - all the races, all the monsters, all the magics etc. - and then added a new element that would drive a Magical Industrial Revolution and thus cause the rise of the city-states. This new element is azoth, a potent universal magical ingredient which allows for industrial-scale production of magic items and which is generated by so-called nexus towers, magical architecture which converts the ambient life energy generated by people living nearby into magical energy.

Of course, this was only the start. I had to describe entire regions in detail, examine how the various D&D races would fit into such a changed world, work out a pantheon, create interesting organizations that could help or hinder the PCs, describe the economics, society, a sample city-state, and much much more...

...and I am still not done.

I still want to publish the setting as a PDF product on DriveThruRPG and elsewhere though (likely using the Pathfinder system, unless D&D 5e offers a new Open License) - but I am beginning to realize that the huge mega-setting book I originally envisioned may be a bit too ambitious. Perhaps it would be wiser to publish a more condensed PDF first - concentrating on the Flannish Cities region, which I consider to be the "heart" of the setting. Each city-state in that region would get a one to two-page writeup, while the other major regions would only get a short overview - and detailing them could be left to later supplements.

Of course, I need to focus my attention to actually get to the publication stage, and I can't do everything at once. So I ask you, gentle readers: What would you like to see published the most (and perhaps buy)? More Doomed Slayers material? A publication of Urbis - A World of Cities? Development of the Dreaming Stars setting? Or something else entirely?

My Gaming Projects, Part I - Doomed Slayers

My interests as a role-playing gamer are varied, and I have a large number of gaming projects going on at any one time. In this series of posts I want to present an overview of the most important ones.

Let us start with the most successful one - "successful" because it has actually resulted in a published product:

It all began with some thoughts about the role of classical fantasy RPG "adventurers" - diverse groups of heavily armed, dangerous people who travel from town to town and kill creatures and people for money and treasure. In recent years they have often been called "murderhobos" and for good reason - from the point of view of the typical, upstanding citizen of a fantasy world they must seem like dangerous sociopaths best to be avoided.

So why do the authorities of a typical pseudo-medieval fantasy world tolerate them at all? Why aren't they seen as a threat to the peace of the land to be stopped as soon as possible before they get out of hand? If you play something like D&D the answer could be "because they are tough enough to take out whole armies once they become experienced" - but that's not a very satisfying answer, because then you need to explain why the adventurers haven't simply taken over.

I then realized that I could make all this make sense if I treated adventurers as their own distinct social caste, analogous to the nobles, priests, peasants and so forth you find in feudal societies - the difference is that anyone could join this caste, but would then be expected to follow this caste's strictures which conveniently justify all the usual behaviors you see in adventurers.

In this RPGNet thread, I worked out the basic duties and privileges of this caste - called "Slayers", as the main reason for their existence is to hunt down and slay dangerous monsters which threaten civilization. The duties are:

• Go where you are needed, help where you can (the duty to slay monsters above all else).
• Do not tarry where you are not needed (don't linger and cause trouble in places where there are no monsters to slay).
• Own only what you can take with you (don't own land or houses which would encourage you to settle down and lower the local property values).
• Fight the monsters, not your kin (basically, "stay out of politics" if it's not involving monster-slaying - though that works out better in theory than in practice).

Of course, Slayers also have some unique privileges to compensate for their dangerous way of life:

• Pay them what you can, appropriate to what you ask of them (pay them a fair wage, if you have the means).
• Do not bar their way (freedom of movement across national boundaries, freedom from tolls and taxes at such boundaries).
• What they find, they keep (right to plunder in monster lairs).

The response in the thread was overwhelming, convincing me that I had a winner. To showcase how such a subculture of Slayers would work in practice, I created a suitably generic fantasy world where all the major tropes of fantasy RPGs would have a place:

Eventually, this was published at DriveThruRPG, where you can pick it up for $3.99 - and since its publication, it has gotten some very nice reviews.

+Bruce Baugh writes:

"Out of all this, and the rest of the concepts laid out, a complete yet highly adaptable social structure emerges. You'll recognize precedents, and it's not like Jürgen would claim otherwise - he explicitly discusses some of them, and how the specifics of D&Doid fantasy might change them. You get a system that is fallible and exploitable in lots of ways, and yet serves a real purpose and is capable of enduring for a long time, if the classic dungeon fantasy conditions continue. You get a genuine moral and social foundation for what could easily be - often is - purely amoral or even anti-moral looting and pillage."

+Colin Ritter writes:

"Doomed Slayers takes on this peculiarity by presenting the caste of “Slayers” who have denied claims to social status, wealth, family and their past to become monster hunters. While a noble’s soldiers are busy protecting the borders and seeing to the interests of law and order Slayers actually do the hard work of hunting the things that the soldiers will not or cannot fight. To fans of “A Song of Fire and Ice” the Slayers represent a group similar to the Night’s Watch, but rather than maintaining The Wall and keeping forts they are bound by an honor code to roam the countryside fighting back monsters that threaten to destroy civilization as a whole."

 +Alexander Osias writes:

"Overall, Doomed Slayers is a good sourcebook -- however I find myself looking for more. I want more examples of different types of Slayer organizations that might have arisen -- some more like the Templars, some more like the Freemasons, and some like Hell's Angels perhaps? The intriguing premise already has me looking for more source material. This doesn't mean that Doomed Slayers isn't satisfying -- it means that it has set me up for the next expansion to this campaign premise, which will hopefully maintain its ability to translate almost all of the material into any D&D setting."

He was not the only one expressing a desire for more source material - and in fact, I have a half-finished sourcebook sitting on my Google Drive. Titled "The Order of the Silver Hart", it describes an organization of Slayers who will only accept nobles into their ranks - who upon becoming Slayers technically aren't nobles any more, though they will become nobles again once they stop being Slayers. And they insist they aren't involved in politics, even though many of their members will later rise to positions of power and leadership in their native countries and often forge powerful alliances with other ex-members...

However, as I said at the beginning I have numerous other gaming projects, some of which could also end up as publications - and I need to decide where I should focus my energies. So far, Doomed Slayers has sold 104 times, which certainly isn't bad for a small-press RPG publication, and certainly for my first RPG publication ever - heck, the revenues even paid for commissioning the artwork (though just barely...).

Still, I am wondering whether my other projects could do better on the RPG market. What are your thoughts on this?