You may recall that D&D Nexus recently reported that Bruce Heard has come back to the D&D scene. Today I surfed over to Bruce’s blog and read his About the Adventures of the Princess Ark blog entry. The start of his blog entry reminded me of one of the reasons why I think that canon encyclopedias for D&D campaign settings are so important:

“Requests  have come up on Facebook’s Mystara Reborn page, the Piazza, and Dragonsfoot for me to write new adventures about a certain flying ship from Alphatia.  And yes, I’d love to contribute new fun stuff about the swashbuckling wizard. However, after the smoke clears there is the issue of my absence from the D&D scene during the past ten-fifteen years.  I won’t make this a secret that’s it is hard for me to get back to speed on Mystaran Lore.”

One of the big problems I see with campaign settings, is that the more successful they are, the more lore gets added. And the sheer volume of lore can make it very harder for anyone (amateur or professional) to create new material (either fanon or new canon) without accidentally creating something that might clash with existing material.

Roleplaying is something that was invented for fun, but fans take their fun seriously and there is a lot of fan material around that is of similar (and sometimes better) quality than professional material. Part of the professionalism that I see in modern fan material is that people who write the best material put in a lot of hours doing research on the settings they love.

This research makes the best RPG netbooks that I’ve seen into amazing things, but the level of study required for it also creates a barrier that new projects need to break through, to equal that standard. It can take a lot of time to track down books, read them, make notes and then draw your conclusions as to how certain things work.

But there is a solution to the problem of ever growing canon and canon wikis are that solution.

How a canon wiki works

PathfinderWiki - Thousands of articles on the Pathfinder campaign world.

From a technical point of view, a canon wiki works in a very similar way to any other wiki, such as Wikipedia, but the aim of the wiki is to create an online encyclopaedia about the roleplaying world, instead of the real world. And the benefit of that wiki is exactly the same sort of benefit that you get from Wikipedia. Look up an obscure real-world fact and you will often find an article has been written about it on Wikipedia. If fans of a campaign setting work together to build a canon encyclopaedia the fans that follow them can look up obscure fantasy-world facts.

Of course not every Wikipedia article is great, and here is where quality standards come in. Anyone can edit a wiki, and people can throw up unchecked facts. If there are no quality standards, a wiki will end up with a jumble of different editing styles and people with strong views on the presentation of facts will remove content they disagree with.

In order to avoid chaos a wiki can have two things:

• Some sort of mission statement or process for deciding what should and not be included,
• Citations for the facts contained within an article.

For me, the clearest way to arrange a wiki is to decide on one that is an encyclopedia of canon for one campaign setting. You may need to decide what is canon (and what is not canon) but if there are things like computer games that fall into grey areas, they can be marked with a “warning”, so that readers can identify them.

Citations are a more difficult concept for some people to get their heads around. But they are a vital part of the process. A citation is a footnote (one for each fact within the article) that tells the reader the source material used to identify that fact.

If I were to write a sentence that stated that “there is an asteroid called Neshuldar in the Tears of Selune” it might be hard for a reader to know if I was stating a canon “fact” or if “Neshuldar” was something I had seen on a fansite or made up myself. But were I to include a citation let readers know I got the information from page 281 of the novel Corsair, it would be easy for anyone to flip open the book and check it themselves. And it would be easy for another editor to work out that the actual spelling is “Neshuldaar” with two letter “a”s and fix my mistake (as well as fixing that non-standard letter “û” that I don’t have on my keyboard). That is the power of citations on a canon-wiki. They allow for fans to browse both the wiki and the original sources and also allow other fans to chip in and improve things.

The Forgotten Realms Wiki for Neverwinter is a great way to see this process in action. Content from Neverwinter Nights and Neverwinter Nights 2 is flagged up as possibly non-canon and there are a bunch of numbers in square brackets (“[1]“, “[2]“, “[3]“, etc) that jump you down to the “References” section. And, as you can see, not everything is citated, so that article still has room for improvement. But now you know what they mean you can judge what information on the page is most useful to you.

Does your campaign setting have a wiki yet?

Some of these encyclopaedias already exist. I already mentioned Forgotten Realms Wiki, but there are others out there. We have links to the ones we know about on the front page of D&D Nexus. If you know of any we missed, please let us know.

You can also find links to a large variety of wikis at an encyclopaedia about wikis called WikiIndex. WikiIndex has a category for D&D wikis.

And if your setting does not have a canon-encyclopaedia yet, maybe you could be the person to launch one. As D&D fans, you know how hard this stuff is to learn, you know it makes sense to make the process easier. Just imagine how much it would have helped Bruce Heard if I could have pointed him at an online encyclopaedia of Mystara canon, so that he could catch up with things faster.