I've attached this to ritual tool as I don't think we have a stupid ideas page.

But we may as well leave it where it is for the time being - I've reparented it to chemical weapons. I guess you could call it a weapon against plants or something…

Insertion makes no sense for a contribution…

Another example of spammers who are likely to do their clients no good at all.

Don't know how to solve this; other than create a bunch of pages to turn those Red Links into Blue Ones.

On a totally unrelated note, the "Professor Riley" mentioned (and quoted) repeatedly in the original article is a buddy of mine in Chicago that currently plays in a Continuum game I'm running on Skype. He's been teaching classes on zombies in the media for several years now, and ends up mentioned in news articles quite often because of it. "In the future, everyone we game with will be famous for 15 minutes." :)

I used Relic as the home page; although his skull was a scientific curiousity rather than an object of veneration. I suppose I could have used Grave Robbing or Decapitation instead.

Any thoughts?

I also note that there are no links to this page from anywhere else. (You can test this by clicking "+ options" at the bottom of the page, and then "backlinks" on the menu that that creates.) Which means the only way someone will stumble across this page is if it comes up on the random page list (given 3400 other pages, that's not gonna happen too often) or this week while it's still on the short list of recent pages. Colonel, was there a specific page or topic that made this concept come to mind? If so, we should link here from there. If not, then we should at least figure out where it belongs on the big trope lists and link from them.

I'm busy with other things at the moment (and only have a little bit of time to work on the wiki this morning), or I'd do it myself.

(Wait a sec. Charlie is more like the Flying Dutchman, which is a completely different story).

Quick formatting observation though if I may … text inside those instruction brackets that you get on opening a new page is hidden - you need to delete the brackets to make it appear.

Anyone know how to fix it?

One of the direct inspirations for the Arcana Wiki were the Suppressed Transmissions, a gaming column written by Kenneth Hite for the previous incarnation of Pyramid Magazine. In these columns, Hite discussed an amazing variety of subjects, as well as how to connect and filter them for gaming, and they have probably the highest number of gaming ideas per paragraph than pretty much anything else written for gaming.

Two print collections of the early columns were published with added footnotes and explanations (and last year they were released as PDFs as well), but unfortunately they never sold well enough to justify further collections. Thus, when Pyramid moved to a PDF-based magazine, 234 columns suddenly became unavailable to anyone who wasn't a subscriber at the time.

I was a subscriber at the time, and as it happened I had already converted the first 300 of them into a Kindle ebook a few weeks before. However, I always deplored it that the Suppressed Transmissions never got more exposure, and after the latest exchange on RPGNet where Steve Jackson Games representatives had to explain the sad economics of the situation, I decided to do something about it - I would read through all 300 columns and post my thoughts on them into a single RPGNet thread. This way, more gamers would hear of them and buy them - and perhaps, give SJG enough incentives to publish more of them.

The thread is here. So far, I have reached the 42th transmission and seem to be making some progress - since the thread was started, the PDF versions of the collections have been sold an additional 66 times (and the print versions might have seen even more sales). What's more, since the Suppressed Transmissions and the Arcana Wiki pretty much have the same goals, I also dropped in links and references to this site whenever appropriate.

So check out the thread, add your own comments - and buy the collections. Once you see them, you will immediately understand what the impetus for the Arcana Wiki was, and there is no shortage of topics in these columns that would make excellent Arcana Wiki entries as well…

But then it's not a particularly savoury trope - most of our mythopiea, ancient and modern, treats the disabled, insane and even "Hollywood Ugly" very badly. We learn a lot about our culture(s) by examining that, and whilst I wouldn't want to offend anyone with a deformity the way deformed people are usually treated in fiction is worth examining.

Obviously if anything grossly insulting can be trimmed without getting all mealy-mouthed that would be a good thing.

If the speculations at geekosystem are correct, we may just need to put up a new page on Arsenic-based life and add some data to Shadow Biosphere and Shadow Life in the coming weeks. That would be super cool.

Of course, even cooler would be if the press conference were to announce that we were in contact with intelligent aliens… but I'm not gonna hold my breath on that one.

Wanted Pages seems not to be working.
Every time I try to access it, I keep getting a 500 "Internal Server Error" message.

Is this a problem with the board or do we need a tool of some kind debugging¹?

• Imagine a large fantasy nation with a large number of different faiths and denominations. What if a specific religion attempts to infiltrate the military in large numbers so that they can be sure of its assistance in future times of crisis?
  • This would obviously a vital first step in a military coup in order to establish a theocracy.
• There is nothing inherently sinister about proselytization … it's an entirely normal feature, and indeed a duty in many religions. Whipping up paranoia against innocent, everyday activities is a normal part of the demonization of enemies popular amongst totalitarian regimes.

I'm not quite happy with the last one, as it reads less like an adventure seed and more like a suggestion that the previous ideas are BadWrongFun. Maybe it could be rephrased somewhat? I'm thinking of something on these lines:

• Alternatively, perhaps innocent missionary activities by off-duty soldiers are blown out of proportion by local religious establishments into a meme about a wide-spread sinister conspiracy to whip up protests and resistance movements against the military.

How does that sound?