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.

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?

("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.

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.

"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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Just a small nit-pick, though: The tag is supposed to be "rng_resource", not "rng_resources".

Simplicity

"No, Mister Bond, I expect you to DIE!!!"
— A. Goldfinger

Perhaps sometime you chanced to read
Melodramatic narrative
Of villainy and dastard deed
As full of plot-holes as a sieve
The Hero's trapped in Evil's Lair;
The Villain vows to seal his doom.
He does not kill him then and there;
Instead he simply leaves the room!
What sort of overweening sap
By hubris blind or on a whim
Would make a complicated trap
Instead of simply shooting him?
It happens that long, long ago
There really was just such a man;
He sought to kill his direst foe
But used an over-cunning plan.
He learned life's sad and tragic quirk
Sometimes the death-trap does not work.

Nero, the Roman emperor,
Had a domineering mother.
Nagged him 'til his nerves were sore
And he wished his Mom to smother.
So Nero hired an artisan
To rig her ceiling to collapse
And crush her flat as marzipan
Next time she took one of her naps.
When that lethal architecture
Fell just like a cataclysm,
She was out, ('tis my conjecture)
Sitting on the euphemism.
Outside the bedroom she did lurk
And so the death-trap did not work.

The next plan that Nero approved,
Was to construct a special boat;
It had a plug, which when removed
Would cause the ship to cease to float.
And so with nothing else to lose
He placed his unsuspecting mater
Off upon this deadly cruise
In which the waves would inundate her.
He thought the plan out through and through;
He knew this trap just could not fail;
But he forgot to tell the crew
That they were not supposed to bail.
In vain they labored through the dark
Against the leak which would immerse
Them all — they could not save the barque
But did save all the passengers.
They worked the pumps and did not shirk;
And so the death-trap did not work.

The Mother paddled safe to shore,
Her toga drenched and draped with kelp.
She saw a guard there, armed for war
And asked him for a little help.
The man knew well the emp'ror's dream
To see no more his Mom alive,
And so the guard devised a scheme
To see to it she'd not survive.
He saw no need for all the fuss,
For subtle snares and gadgets dumb;
He simply drew his gladius
And punctured her duodenum.
He did the dame in with his dirk;
Because a death-trap would not work.

The Moral of this doggerel
Is clearly plain for all to see:
The plan that you think is really swell
May fail through it's complexity.
Then friends will laugh at you and smirk:
"I KNEW that death-trap would not work!"

— Kurt Wilcken, (c) 2004

And naturally, I have started a new wiki project where users can submit their creations.

Now here is a thought: If you have access to this tool, how about creating monster writeups for the various Mythological Creatures and Mythological Characters listed in the Arcana Wiki and submitting them to the DDI Wiki? This way, you could link back to the Arcana Wiki in the notes and increase traffic…

However, if someone else calls me "Herr Doktor Hubert", I am no longer obliged to correct them.

Will there be a mythology in the future, they used to ask, after all has become science? Will high deeds be told in epic, or only in computer code?

And after the questing spirit had gone into overdrive during the early Space Decades, after the great Captains had appeared, there did grow up a mythos through which to view the deeds. This myth filter was necessary. The ship logs could not tell it rightly nor could any flatfooted prose. And the deeds were too bright to be viewed direct. They could only be sung by a bard gone blind from viewing suns that were suns.

— R.A. Lafferty, Space Chanty

It didn't really fit the page, but it's a passage I like so I wanted to share it. Space Chanty is a reworking of the Oddessy and other ancient epics translated into space opera. It's fairly obscure, (it was published as half of an Ace Double in the 1960s), but it's a fun romp and well worth looking for.

Oh well. Let's celebrate for real next year. Where do you see the Arcana Wiki on July 8, 2010? How many pages will we have? What kinds of features?

In this article, I've managed to bring everything together, and I'm fairly proud of what I've written so far. But I'm sure that others can come up with their own ideas as well…

Currently, California represents the single state of the United States with the most information and links in it - but it still only qualifies as a stub, as it has neither basic information on California, nor any game and story ideas centered on the state as a whole. Does anyone want to rectify this?

• Does anyone know any history/mythology buffs willing to help out with this?
• Should the Cthulhu Mythos (as well as other fictional myth pantheons) be added to this list?

Does anyone know any other sites like this?

• Illuminated Site of the Week @ Steve Jackson Games
• Zygote Games blog entry
• Cranial Herbs post
• The Escapist Podcast (unfortunately, I can't listen to it at the moment…)

Other pages may include portions of such a hypothetical list, such as the lists of gods and heroes on the Greek Mythology and Roman Mythology pages.

IMHO, the Mythological Characters page should only include links to existing pages about mythological characters, no dead links to pages we intend to make (unless you're about to make it within minutes of posting the link). That way it remains a useful index of characters we've devoted pages to, with a high signal-to-noise ratio. If this page tried to include every possible mythological character, the list would be extremely long, hard to search through, and mostly comprised of characters we have no useful data about on this wiki.

If anyone has a strong opinion (or helpful ideas) please chime in, but the above seems to me to be the best way to structure this topic.

I thought this was the case with the Scry Vs Scry entry when I first read it, because the title seemed to have nothing to do with what we have on our page for it. I mean, from the title, I was envisioning something like Aragorn wresting the Palantir from Sauron's control in Lord of the Rings, but the post seemed to be more of a battle of wits. I didn't see where the scrying came in. Of course it didn't help that when I tried clicking the TV Tropes link, that page was unavailabe.

Okay, now I finally have checked out the original TV Tropes page on Scry vs. Scry and I see where they're coming from. It's not exactly a battle of wits as much as specifically a battle of prediction; trying to anticipate what will happen next, including your opponent's moves, while your opponent is trying to anticipate your moves knowing that you are already anticipating his.

This is the chess master who is always looking several moves ahead; or Vizzini's brilliant analysis of the Iocaine Problem from The Princess Bride.

I think we need to edit our page a little to make this clear.

I've folded them up into a single page, and added a redirect to the singular form of the name.

The Mysterium by Scriabin is probably one of the strangest and coolest ways, but it's only one of many possibilities…

"Do you be wantin' Jones the Baker?" the villager replies, "Or Jones the Mechanic? Or Jones the Barber?"

The contact discovers to his dismay that it seems half the village is named Jones. So finally he describes what the sleeper agent looks like.

"Oh!" the villager says; "You'll be wantin' Jones the spy!"

Ahem. I hope you like my prototype of the Random Nations generator. More details will be added - on government, religion, and economic issues - but I will have to leave that until I have more Procrastination Time.

Though it would help if someone could get started on the various types of government…

*hint, hint*

I suppose I could go open an account there and change that, but I'm already spread so thin.

That said, if someone with more time and an existing TV Tropes Wiki account wants to borrow this meme, you have my blessing. We've certainly stolen enough from you folks.

Unfortunately, there is still lots of stuff to do - including adding all the types of government listed on the government page…

• Use this if you really, really want to disturb your players.

Or anyone reading the page.