…but since you've made the very reasonable request that we have more than just wikipedia as a source, I just added an entry for the book I can put my hands at the moment that discusses the Cathars. It doesn't really talk at all about the Perfecti, but it does corroborate the notion that the Cathars leadership were exterminated by the Catholic Church. I had listed it as a source for my more general Cathar page. I've seen other references in other things I've read, but none recently enough to be able to list in the bibliography from memory.

Giving it another google search, I did find an interesting site that discusses the possibilities of the Cathar lines surviving. Link to cathar-dot-info. It also mentions "Guilhem Belibaste" being put to death in the fourteenth century, and mentions a few other Cathar lines and enclaves that suffered similar fates… but suggests a secret succession / tradition could potentially have survived. I'll go add Cathar.info to the bibliography on the various pages, as I think it would be of interest to anyone using the Cathars in a game.

I would like to make a statement to the Anonymous poster. If anything in my Cathar pages offended you at all, I'm sorry. I myself am a vegetarian, and was raised Christian but am inclined to believe in reincarnation, so I find the Cathar very interesting. I intended my posts to be respectful, and am extremely sorry if I failed at that intent.

I added this comment to the page as well, since I'm not sure the Anonymous poster will see it here in the Forum.

And no, this is not a call to block Anonymous edits again. I don't think this guy is a troll. But I would like to see more substance from his remarks.

• sigh *. And I thought the year would give it away.

I'm sure it would have, if I'd bothered to pay any attention to the year. Well, to be honest, since I've never seen the series, I probably would have missed it anyway.

I now understand why you thought you could get away with without listing the series, and assumed we'd be clever enough to figure it out. Sorry I had to go and prove you wrong.

On a related note, I'd never before realized that the RPG Space: 1889 had a reference (almost a joke, even) in it's title, so thank you for opening my eyes to that.

If you need me, I'll be over here in the corner. You can't miss me, I'm the one in the pointy cap with the big "D" on it.

It's a reference to the mid- '70s TV series Space: 1999. I should probably edit the entry to make that clear.

My two cents: I'm thinking that on fictional events, we probably need a reference to what it book or movie it's from. That way, if someone likes the idea and wants to incorporate it into their campaign, they'll know where they can go to get more information.

Or is, by chance, the event from a book or movie named Moonbase Alpha, and I'm just not cool enough to have that light a bulb over my head?

Which reminds me of a story.

My grandparents lived in Minneapolis, and they once had a pastor at their conservative Lutheran church who was a liberal. During the election of 1968, he invited Humphrey to speak at that church. When some of his conservative parishioners objected, he said that if Richard Nixon wanted to come to their church, he was welcome too.

On another occasion, a Republican member of the church spotted him with a button reading "H.H.H." and chided him for wearing a campaign button because pastors should not involve themselves in politics. "This doesn't stand for Hubert H. Humphrey," the pastor said innocently; "It stands for 'Holy, Holy, Holy!'"

And call me Jürgen - whenever people call me "Hubert" I get flashbacks to my time in the military. ;)

Must be a weird week for pets and trousers.

("Her Majesty's Page"? Sounds like some kind of footman.)

I understand why Wikipedia follows a format of "REIGN NAME of COUNTRY" for kings and such; it enables the site and us to easily differentiate Henry II of France from Henry II of England. But Queen Blessed Victoria! There is only one Victoria Regina. Still, as Emerson said, "A foolish consistency is better than no consistency at all."

Or something like that.

• Questing GM blog post
• Held Action blog post
• A Cornucopia of Weirdness - Science Made Cool blog post

Maybe it's not displaying right on my computer? The "10 random pages" section has only 8 pages listed, and they're in huge rectangles with just a tiny bit of text in each rectangle - tons of wasted space.

Plus it's listing redirect pages, so several of the boxes are filled with things like "[This template is just for use in setting up automatic redirects to other pages. This is useful when a page you've created has several possible names or spellings, none of which have any functional…"

If you can set it to not list redirect pages, days, years, and stubs, then it might be worth the eyesore of the layout, the conspicuous wasted space, and the way it messes up the flow of the text off to the right. But as is, I really don't like it.

Sorry if that comes off as harsh.

The Four Horsemen send their regrets - A list of failed predictions of the end of the world, including a few current theories that probably won't pan out

All the dates mentioned in the article really need to be added to the timeline…

• Just-in-Time Socialism
• Resilience Economics
• Robonomics

Sometimes you just have the time to aim for the head…

Was there supposed to be a "don't" in the middle of that sentence?

Update: I guess there was.

This article is one of them.

In the interests of making sure that you are properly armed for said flame war, I volunteer the fact that my parents are unwed. If you run out of argument material, you may always fall back on my bastardy.

:)

"It's squished so tight, the electron orbits are collapsing. In some cases, it gets even further, with protons collapsing, and even quarks degenerating."

What's this about degenerate quarks?

Anyhow, I think it'd be a good idea for us to make sure our pages all have at least a tiny bit of functionality even when links die. For example, this page could really use a one-line description (or at least the name) of each of those 9 buildings, so as to give someone a place to start to go looking for more info. Just sayin'.

Unfortunately, they didn't load in the discussion page.

I realize that maintaining link lists can be problematic in the short-lived realm of the Internet. However, often such linked pages have only been moved and not deleted - in that case, it is often useful to search for headline of the article with Google. Often you will find the same article at a new URL.

And if that doesn't work, trying to find it at Archive.Org might be possible…

The various random generators are a good step, and getting them more functional, so that people are attracted to use the site - that'll lead to users contributing more.
The news articles are good too, because they catch things that are hard to find later.

That's also roughly why I started putting "Building This Character" sections on some of the character trope pages, to increase the utility of those pages. Ultimately, I'd guess the answer lies in making this site useful to more players. GMs already have a creative outlet for their thoughts and research - they put it into their campaign. People who mostly play instead of DM have just as cool ideas, but don't always have a place to express them.

Another thing we can do is authoring or compiling pages that are easier to use than it would be for someone else to do the research themselves. The fourth-dimensional lifeform page, if you don't mind me tooting my own horn here for a moment, includes a lot of information distilled from many sources. The information exists at other sites, but those sites don't really mess with the implications for 4-D life, and certainly not what it would be like to be hunted by a 4-D monster. Therefore, our coverage can save someone a lot of research and exrapolation. That's part of why I've been making so many scientific pages lately - because so many scientific sources are really dense, and even wikipedia's pages on science can be really hard to mine the applicable info from without melting your brain.

Eventually, we'll hit a Critical Mass, where there's enough content here it's just naturally self-sustaining. Just be patient, we'll get there.

I enjoy Arcana Wiki and like contributing to it, and will continue to do so, at a more sedate pace; but like Dr. Johnson said, "No one but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

(Need to write an entry on Dr. Johnson).

The best example thus far is the Agent Mulder page.

Eventually, like to make a "Character" Template page, similar to our "Standard Entry" Template, but with the extra section on building characters.

I'm going to wait to implement such a template until I've got a few more under my belt so I know what works and looks good.

They should probably be added to the timeline somehow - if I could figure out what the best way to add them would be…

Provides examples of lots of stuff that really should be in the Technology section.

We have various reasons to want to include pages here for every character concept from the Tropes wiki (most notably because they can feed the random character generator), but I'm always feeling it's weird that we have all these pages that just summarize that other site, often with only a little bit of additional input on our part.

I think it would be really cool to add an extra section to character and characterization pages. Either just before or just after the "Game And Story Use" section, we could have a section on how to build that type of character. We'd keep it fairly basic and simple, in generic terms, because we don't want to wed this site to mechanics from any particular games. But there's a certain body of generic / re-used gaming terminology that could be appropriated for this purpose - lots of games use strength and intelligence, for example. You'd list whether the character type was primarily physical, social or mental in it's focus. Any attributes or traits that they seemed likely to have. Any skills that they'd need (or be likely to have picked up). Don't mention specific feats or edges or spells or the like, but use the more general terms.

I think it would go a long way to making the site more useful to players. Right now we seem to have more of a "GM's toolbox" focus, and I think this could help make Arcana Wiki more appealing to those who play more often than they GM.

What do you guys think?
Good idea or bad one?

The idea hit me while writing the "Game and Story Use" blurb on the Rodeo Rider page - I was writing about what made that character different from other cowboys, and it was real easy to put into gaming terminology.

I put the discussion post here on the Characters page, because if we choose to go ahead with this idea, it'll be nice to have an explanation of it somewhere that's easy to direct people to.

But I also think this page may need more structure or guidance - without it, it's gonna get messy.

Do things like "Witch", "Henchman", "Gunfighter", or "Starship Captain" count as professions? (I'd say "yes" to Henchman and the Captain, not so sure on gunfighter, and somewhat hesitant "no" to Witch since it's not generally a source of income.)

The Western Characters page is fairly long, and probably more than half those entries are professions.
The profession of spy is going to include half a dozen tropes at least.

Since the list is short, it's currently easy to find "Adventurer Archaeologist" under "Archaeologist". Eventually when "Starship Captain" is under "Military Officer" (or whatever) it's gonna be unwieldy.

So, to be constructive rather than just raining on your parade, I'd propose the following:

We could make the Professions page be an index to other subpages (with Professions as the parent page), which are divided by era, setting, or type of profession. It'd be easy, for example, for me to whip up a Western Professions page, mostly culled from the existing Western Characters page. Likewise, a short Time-Travel Professions page could come out of the Time Travelers page. A Magical Professions page could include Court Wizard, Alchemist, Sage, Herbalist, etc. Criminal Professions would include Con Man, Social Bandit, Mob Boss, The Rustler, Contract Killer, Smuggler, etc. The 1920s Professions page would include appropriately-themed versions for the era, etc.

This would be more work, but it's gonna be a lot more thorough and useful.

While you're considering that proposal, I'm gonna post to the page just the professions I know we have pages for. I think just that will illustrate how complicated and messy this will all get if we don't establish a concrete structure early on.

I strongly encourage everyone to add their own professions to the list.

As cool as that tropes page is, it's not very accessible or functional. There's a ton of text there, and you could read for days about superheroes at the Trope site before ever clicking on a link to it.

Rather than one giant page on the topic for all powers, I'd like to work that sort of stuff into the individual pages here as we build out pages on various super-powers, psionics, types of magic, etc. That way our site will be a tiny bit less derivative, and it will also be less likely someone reads up on a power but misses the implications. I more or less imagine that's what we would have done, anyway, as our bigger pages tend to be pretty thorough, but I just wanted to state it directly. That's where I stand in regards to "lumper" vs "splitter" or "mergism" vs "separtism", at least in regards to this sort of thing.

If anyone feels strongly in the other way (or, honestly, either way), please speak up. Pages on powers and magic types are pretty few at this stage in our wiki, so we have time to hash out a policy / process if it's needed.

EDIT: Nevermind, looks like I found it. Time Magazine.

Allegedly lists "thousands" of haunted houses nearly by state and country.

RPGNet thread on "Local Legends" (requires login to read)

Once the list of days is more complete than it is now, I need to add the following Sources to the individual day entries:

• The relevant Wikipedia entry for the same day
• "Today in the History of Religion and Philosophy"
• Hypertext version of Robert Chambers' Book of Days

Since there is still time until I need to revise the calendar - does anyone know of any other useful calendar-related sites? If I do add sources to each and every day of the year, I'd rather do it once…

However, if you do want to go further, this RPGNet thread is an excellent starting point - it discusses resources, fighting styles, and many other India-related topics with gaming potential.