The Arcana Wiki - Distilling Real World information into gaming material

[Jürgen Hubert]

We've been working hard at the Arcana Wiki to improve on it, and here are some nifty new functions:

• 
  * Random Page
  * Random Characters
  * Random Adventure Seeds
  * Random Crimes

What do you think of these?

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

We've recently started on a Random Animal Hybrid Generator - the idea is that you can come up with ideas for composite monsters (such as griffins, chimeras, owlbears and so on) by choosing the number of animal parts you want, and then the wiki will pick a random number of animals which will serve as the components.

Unfortunately, the generator is not very functional yet, since there are currently only six animals listed in the List of Animals. Would anyone here like to help us out by expanding that list?

I also have some ideas for specifying body parts for animals with different body compositions and elements - so you could come up with a random animal part for the tail, the legs, the limbs, wings and so forth instead of having to decide which animal part sits where. But as long as so few animals are listed in the wiki, there's no point of doing that just yet...

 

[radja]

I just ran into this thread (congrats on the site), and would just like to point you to cryptozoology.com which has quite a bit of info on cryptids, and many weird animal pics.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

I just ran into this thread (congrats on the site), and would just like to point you to cryptozoology.com which has quite a bit of info on cryptids, and many weird animal pics.

Thanks. At the moment, I don't have the time to expand the cryptozoology section of the wiki (my current goals is to expand the timeline by a couple of hundreds of additional news items which I have floating around on my hard disk), but I've added it to the "Sources" section of the cryptozoology entry. Hopefully someone will be able to make use of it and expand on it...

As we three main contributors (currently me, quarkstomper[/utl], and [url=http://www.wikidot.com/user:info/r-b-bergstrom]r_b_bergstrom) have discovered on a regular basis, there is just so much to do there that it is hard to actually finish a single project. I hope that one day we will have as many contributors as the TV Tropes Wiki, but we are still a long way off from that goal...

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

And according to our new counter, we've just reached 1,500 pages!

Quite an achievement...

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

For the last two months I had disabled anonymous editing because we had some problem with vandalism. However, now I have figured out that I can ban anonymous editors from the wiki as well, so I've opened up the possibility of anonymous editing again.

I hope this will encourage more casual contributors to take part in adding material to the wiki...

 

[Jack7]

I really like this idea Jürgen and look forward to reading this Wiki and maybe contributing some.

You know it could be useful for more than just gaming.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

I really like this idea Jürgen and look forward to reading this Wiki and maybe contributing some.

You know it could be useful for more than just gaming.

Yes, I once pitched it to a writers' community - but unfortunately the response wasn't very enthusiastic, perhaps because the content was rather sparse at the time.

But yes, I'm aware that the wiki could be used for more types of storytelling than just gaming - it's just that gaming is the form of storytelling most familiar to me, and gamers were the kind of people I had the most contact with and thus most likely to help out.

But if you know of any writers you could pitch this project to, I'd greatly appreciate it.

 

[Jack7]

Yes, I once pitched it to a writers' community - but unfortunately the response wasn't very enthusiastic, perhaps because the content was rather sparse at the time.

But yes, I'm aware that the wiki could be used for more types of storytelling than just gaming - it's just that gaming is the form of storytelling most familiar to me, and gamers were the kind of people I had the most contact with and thus most likely to help out.

But if you know of any writers you could pitch this project to, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Well, I meant that, depending on the entry, many others (including writers) could use your Wiki for both non-fiction and fictional research and idea generation. But I'll see what I can do about the writers and I'll see if I can't attach a link to it on a coupla blogs of mine.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

I missed it, but the Arcana Wiki turned one year old last Wednesday - the first change to the Start Page was made on July 8, 2008.

And all, I am very pleased with our progress so far - there are now 1902 pages up there, and I am confident that we will hit 2000 before the month is over. We could always use some more regular contributors, but hopefully more folks will come to us over time.

So, how many pages do you think we will have in another year? 5,000? More?