Work and job-related stresses have unfortunately made it difficult for me to contribute meaningfully to the Arcana Wiki in recent months. However, I haven't been completely idle, and recently I've started on a project which will hopefully (among other things) give the Arcana Wiki some more exposure.
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…
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