The Arcana Wiki keeps growing, and I have far more ideas for entries than time to enter them. So any help with adding material to the wiki is welcome - I and the other contributors could certainly use any assistance you can give us.

I'd like help with one issue in particular. The Arcana Wiki has accumulated a very large number of "stub" entries - essentially placeholder entries which were created to provide links to more interesting entries elsewhere. Here is the complete list of currently existing stubs:

Active Galaxy - Alaska - Ammunition - Ant - Apostles - Argentinia - Ark of the Covenant - Austin, Texas - Bajang - Bat - Bergen - Bergen Museum - Botany - Brazil - Bridge - Burma - California - Cattle - CERN - Chile - China - Chocolate - Christianity - Cipher - Coat Of Arms - Colorado - Comet - Computer - Corporation - Czech Republic - Death - Demonic Possession - Denmark - Disposal Of Human Corpses - Dragon - Drug - eBay - Economics - Ethiopia - Federated States Of Micronesia - Fiction - Ficus - Fly - Forest - Fountain of Youth - France - Frog - Gang - Genetics - Germany - Google - Greece - Greenland - Gull - Homicide - Hong Kong - Horse - Hundred Years' War - Husavik - Iceland - India - Ireland - Islam - Israel - Italy - Japan - Jellyfish - Kenya - Korea - Kutná Hora - Lagos - Lake - Land Vehicle - Language - Laser - Legend - Lich - London - London Underground - Manta Ray - Mars - Mermaid - Meteorology - Miami, Florida - Moscow - Moscow Underground - Mountain - Murder - Music - Name - National Security Agency - Neptune - New Jersey - New Orleans - Nicaragua - Nigeria - North Carolina - North Korea - Norway - Ocean - Opium - Order Of The Veiled Prophet - Penguin - Philippines - Phobia - Piracy In Somalia - Prague - Ras al-Khaimah - Riot - River - Rodeo Rider - Root - Roswell UFO Incident - Saturn - Sheep - Shopping Mall - Singing Cowboy - Snake - Society - Solar System - South Korea - Squid - St Louis, Missouri - Suicide - Switzerland - Tanzania - Temples Of Humankind - Texas - The Wild West - Thule Society - Tokyo - Tree - Turkey - Turkmenistan - Uganda - Ukraine - Unclassifiable Places - United Kingdom - United States - Uranus - Vampire Bat - Vehicle - Vietnam - Volcano - Wallaby - War - Weapon - Weather - Whale - Wichita, Kansas - Wisconsin - World War I



If you have some knowledge of any of these topics and can write something about them - a better description, a few gaming ideas, interesting links and so forth - please do so. Anything to justify getting rid of the "stub" tag!

Yesterday, the Monster Builder from Dungeons & Dragons Insider became available. And I must say, this is the best piece of dedicated gaming software I have ever come across, and it helps making D&D 4E one of the RPGs with the shortest prep time for running a game. Considering that D&D 3.X was among the games with the longest prep time - especially once you hit higher levels - this is a considerable achievement.

In honor of this release, I've started a new wiki - the DDI Wiki, which is intended to collect user-generated content for the DDI Character Builder, Monster Builder, and any future software tools published by WotC. I have high hopes for this one - after all, I created the d20 NPCs Wiki and despite doing hardly any work for it this it had been one of my most successful wikis so far. Let's see if I can get D&D gamers as fired up about this wiki as they got about the previous one.

Note that the content of this wiki will be useful even for people who haven't subscribed to D&D Insider - it's just that they can't submit any new content since they lack the tools for it.

As an example, here is a stat block uploaded to the wiki which I created in less than 10 minutes:

Hit this page until you have found inspiration.




Yes, I finally did manage to create a proper random page function for the Arcana Wiki...

I just discovered that one of my co-contributors at the Arcana Wiki is working on a Random Crime Generator - which you should all check out, because it's pretty awesome.

It's still a bit in its early stages, though - so feel free to help him out in expanding it. He explains how further down the page.

For those among you who are both gamers and owners of an Amazon Kindle - I present to you:

The Arcana Wiki Ebook.

I'm currently downloading the TV Tropes Wiki. I plan to convert the site into an ebook so that I can read it offline on my Kindle. Perfect for the next two weeks, when I am stuck with a dial-up connection...

Does anyone want to place any bets how big the ebook is going to be?

Well, after nearly a year and a half at Eruvian.Com, I have to admit that the site isn't working out for Urbis as well as I've hoped. While there was an initial burst of enthusiasm and feedback, the site seems to be pretty much dead now.

So now I'm doing what I always do under these circumstances - I'm creating a wiki for it. The Urbis Wiki can be found here. I haven't ported much material over yet - the formatting takes time, and I'm also adding some new material while I am at it. But I think it will be worth it.

The most significant change are the so-called Designer's Notes - where I explain my choices for introducing a particular setting element, and provide some additional resources. You can see some of this in the Races and Solar System sections, which are mostly ported over by now.

Please tell me what you think of this. Is this a useful addition?

Well, it's official. With the Pyramid Changeover from a web to a PDF-based magazine, Kenneth Hite has announced that he his ending his Suppressed Transmission column for the time being.

I cannot say that I am entirely surprised, since the publication schedule of the column has been going steadily downwards during the last few years. Still, it saddens me greatly. The Suppressed Transmissions were, to me, the highlight of Pyramid Online. Each column had an extremely high density of gameable material, adventure seeds, and suggestions for entire campaigns - made even better by the fact that all the material was entirely rules-free.

And the man could turn anything into inspiration for games. He had an essay on Chess. He had an essay on Ebay. He had an essay on Coca-Cola, for that matter, and it turns out that the world's most popular soft-drink has no shortage of mystical associations fit for gaming. And then there are the more obvious game-related matter, such as Spring-Heeled Jack, Emperor Norton, Walpurgisnacht, H.P. Lovecraft, the Queen of Sheba, El Dorado, Le Comte de Saint-Germain, the Frankenstein family, Atlantis, the Sphinx, Rudolf Hess, the Congo, Route 66, Phileas Fogg, the Grand Canyon and so forth and at nauseam. "Hite's Handy Guide to Ultraterrestrials" remains unforgotten, as does "There's More to Faeries Than Their Glamor" and "Ancient Astronaut Texas Steel Cage Death Match".

And then there were all his Alternate Histories - his recurring Halloween essays in the "Clio's Nightmare" series (where history goes very dark indeed), as well as other works, such as his "Six Flags Over Roswell" where the UFO crashes at different points in history and creates some very different worlds. In short, this series was such an enormous font of ideas that I deeply lament its ending.

I bought the printed collections of his earlier essays for the extended footnotes (and nifty art). They might not have sold well, but I throughly enjoyed them. And a few weeks ago, I spent eight hours by stitching all Suppressed Transmission essays in the Pyramid archives into a single document, and then converted it into an ebook readable by my Amazon Kindle - complete with working internal links between the different essays (and no, you can't have a copy unless you can prove you are an SJG staffer or Kenneth Hite himself). Now I'm slowly reading through the archives again and add notes to the document when I find new inspiration for my campaign setting - which tends to happen three or four times per essay.

Well, this proved prescient, as the Pyramid website is closing down soon. I'm glad that I continued to resubscribe for the archives, as I can still download their entire content before they turn off the lights - others, who have waited with resubscribing, are not as fortunate.


And after I have finished reading through them, I will try to follow in the footsteps of these essays - by continuing to expand the Arcana Wiki, which I founded a few months ago in the hopes of also trying to find the strange, the bizarre, and just plain interesting in history and real life, and tying it all together into gameable material. I don't pretend I - and the other contributors - will be able to someday reach the quantity of his works.

And that's why, as of now, I am dedicating the Arcana Wiki to the memory of his column. Good luck with your future projects, Mr Hite!

If you have any good stories to tell from your gaming nights - memorable quotes, spectacular deaths, inspired plots - then I have a place for you where you can tell us all about them:

The War Stories Wiki

So far, three different tales by three different people have been uploaded:

The Trouble With Gankorou
The Marriage of Frisco Flagons
Captain John McCleod

I hope to see your stories there as well!

The Arcana Wiki has been growing nicely since its inception less than two months ago, and it now features more than five hundred entries. By all rights, I should be satisfied.

And yet, it could grow faster still. The overwhelming majority of the entries were written by me, and while gradually new contributors are joining up, it's still not fast enough for my tastes.

With that in mind, does anyone here have any good ideas for finding new contributors? Where could I advertise the existence of the wiki so that I can attract a larger audience?

The Arcana Wiki has grown nicely in the last two weeks - but of course, it could still grow faster. ;)

Here are some news for it:

- The first Arcana Wiki Contest has ended (only two people contributed...). The winning entry was for the Black Shuck, one of the many names of the spectral hounds of British legends. The winner will soon get his $25 gift certificate...

- I've started a new contest which will run for the entirety of August - this one is about "Places of Myth and Legends". Again, the winner will get a $25 gift certificate for RPGNow.

- I've started working on a historical timeline which is intended to showcase all sorts of interesting historical news and events. At the moment, most of the entries are merely "weird" newspaper items (see the 2007 entry for examples), not the sweeping moments of history that I hope for. But give it time...

- I've started a Tropes section, which is intended to mirror the TV Tropes Wiki - a brilliant resource for gamers, no matter what games you play. My intention is to integrate tropes into the adventure seeds provided with each entry - see the new entry for Pilatusstadt, a "sunken city" in Germany, for examples.


That's it - for now. But I'd like to spread the word about the wiki even further so that I can attract more contributors. Any suggestions for how to do that?

If you like researching and writing about mythological creatures, and want to win a $25 Gift Certificate at RPGNow, take a look at my contest.

I've embarked on a new wiki project.

Hands up - is anyone here really surprised by this? ;)

Anyway, my latest wiki is called The Arcana Wiki. The inspiration for it is that the real world can be a never-ending source of inspiration for adventures, campaigns, and even entire campaign settings. When reading a random Wikipedia article, I often thought to myself: "This would make for an awesome adventure seed!" But unfortunately, the Wikipedia does not permit others to add adventure seeds to an entry.

But the Arcana Wiki does - that's the whole point of its existence.

To understand the basic concept, read this entry - it details the Aufhocker, a malevolent spirit from German folklore. It first lists the "factual" information (that is, the information that has been gathered from actual tales and legends), and then adds a number of adventure and story hooks to it.

I would really appreciate it if others would be willing to contribute to this project. For starters, how about writing a bit about your home town? Describe anything of particular interest to adventurers - local legends, cool places for fight scenes, interesting historical tidbits, and so forth - and then try to come up with some adventure seeds for those.

If all goes according to plan, we could end up with a nice communal creative project that will be immensely useful to GMs trying to come up with adventures.

I've discovered that the Art Tutorials Wiki has been linked to from the home pages of two authors of books on digital art: The Artist’s Guide to GIMP Effects by Michael J. Hammel and Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional by Akkana Peck.

Let's see how fast its fame will spread further...

I've added a very short Screentones tutorial to the Art Tutorials Wiki. Not much, but then again it's a simple process...

I checked my memories, and found that I have founded the following wikis:

Art Tutorials Wiki
d20 NPCs Wiki
Eberron Wiki
Private Exalted Campaign Wiki (German)
The Conspiracy Wiki
The Fairfield Project (Delta Green Wiki)
The RPG Graveyard
Urbis Campaign Wiki

I think I also came up with the idea for the GURPS Wiki.

So, what should I do next? ;)

I've added a membership application form to the Art Tutorials Wiki.

More disturbingly, I've also added a module that allows members to send Email invites to the Wiki to other people...

I've added an Improvement Guide to the Art Tutorials Wiki on how others can help out with it. Hopefully, this will convince a few more people to join up - as I've pointed out in it, this task is too much for a single guy...

I've been browsing through the latest tutorials at DeviantArt for a week or so and adding links to them to the Art Tutorials Wiki - and notified the authors of the tutorials of this by placing appropriate comments on the relevant DeviantArt page.

So far, I haven't been able to attract any additional contributors to the wiki. However, I've been making a different kind of progress:

When you search for "art tutorials" on Google, the Art Tutorials Wiki comes up as #10... out of 239,000.

It's not so surprising that the PageRank of the wiki has risen drastically - after all, I've been essentially doing the same thing manually that many spambots do automatically by placing lots of links to my site on other pages. The difference is that my linkage actually is seen mostly as welcome information (after all, most people don't object being linked to), and thus isn't removed agressively as it is normally the case with spam. But I'm still surprised it has risen that far.

Now I need to see to it that the wiki rises to #1 at Google... and then maybe I can think of placing some text ads at the wiki as well. :D

The Art Tutorials Wiki has languished in obscurity since I created it a few months ago. It does get some traffic, but it hasn't attracted any new contributions.

So I have decided to be more proactive. I've been browsing through the most recent tutorials submitted to DeviantArt and linked most of them in the wiki - and then told the authors of the tutorials about it.

After all, the more people know about the wiki, the better - and the creators of tutorials will likely be the ones most motivated to link the tutorial in the wiki.

Let's see how the page statistics develop over the next few days...