Give Me Your Campaign Wiki Advice!

[Zephrin the Lost]

Hey all,

I'm starting up a wiki for my new 4e campaign over at Obsidian Portal. I've never built or even edited a wiki before so please, give me the benefit of your experience so I might craft something good!

-Z

 

[DMingNicholas]

As you write stuff about your campaign world, fill it up with potential links. Anything you think they might ever want to develop further. They might remain red for a while, or even forever, but having them there flags it as something to do.

A page full of red links is much more inspiring than having to go back later and trying to remember everything you wanted to say more about.

 

[Scribble]

When you make a page that you will probably do many similar pages of: cut/paste it (along with the code) into a word doc so you can save it as a template to use later.

I have one for my towns/cities/countries/ , my NPCs and groups, etc...


Also I'm not a huge fan of the NPC tracker they have. I just use the regular wiki and my own template for my NPCs.

 

[TarionzCousin]

Put some time into thinking how you want to organize your site before creating everything. It's easier to continue to build from a good framework than it is to go back later and re-organize everything.

Also, a picture is worth a thousand words. If you can find at least one image to put on your front page that represents your campaign, it will have much more impact than a page full of just words.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Images are the crunk, but keep them mid-sized.

Don't be afraid to let your players edit stuff.

The template idea is fantastic: it saves SO MUCH TIME to just copy/paste your blurb in and replace the details.

 

[Ktulu]

Organizations/religions and what they think of eachother. If you've only got 4 gods in the campaign world, then explain what the followers think of eachother (obviously harder if you use a very large pantheon), same goes for what the "class" archetypes think of eachother (martial classes VS divine VS arcane, etc...)

The picture comments are spot on. Good pictures do wonders for sparking imagination and understanding for your players.


My favorite, though, is the easter-egg. Spot your wiki with other campaign information; historical stuff that the readers can find out for themselves (I filled my campaign wiki with information about the BBEG through various parts of the Wiki. The players were able to learn about him without too much time spent on in-game exposition). I do this for all sorts of stuff. In an upcoming session the party will deal directly with a church vs state issue. Much of the backstory on that has already been put up on my wiki and one of the players has already started piecing it together.

hope that helps!

 

[Zephrin the Lost]

All of this is good- anyone who wants to send me to their wiki so I can see an example, please consider yourselves invited.

 

[ShadowDenizen]

Our Age of Worms wiki is here... (AgeofWorms » home)
It's relatively easy to maintain and update, but took some time to set up initially.

 

[Daern]

Its pretty easy to learn as you go. !picture! for pics and <br> for paragraph breaks are key.
I think pics are great. A good excuse to scour the internets. This means you'll want a photobucket account as well... I think the comments sections are a great resource as well... and encouraging player participation with xp incentives!

 

[tylerthehobo]

I second the 'preparation is everything' motif from above. Learning as you go will be necessary, but the more thought you can put into your document structure up front, the better. Good Wikipedia articles, for instance, have a table of contents so to speak, that breaks the article out into hyperlinked sections. That will be handy on larger articles, but think of the whole wiki like that, too - what general topics do you want to cover? what things will people want to read?

recommendations
1) World - Nations
2) World - Cultures
3) World - Races
4) Major NPCs
5) New Monsters
etc.