Originally invented as a gimmick that would stop gamers loosing dice that bounced off of the table, inventor Douglas Parker Gray soon realised that his original PopAbles, which were created by cutting the pop-o-matic section out of a Trouble game, could help gamers with missing fingers or with motor problems. But the original version required a Trouble game, to chop up and that made the end price pretty high.

He turned to Kickstarter to get the funding needed to develop his own PopAble mechanism, so that the end price could be lowered. The project has even come to the attention of Tim Kask, who was a designer for TSR, when D&D was being created and the first editor of Dragon Magazine. Back in April, Tim said this:

“This is a good thing. You should support it. One of their intentions is to develop and distribute these for persons with disabilities. I have been involved with another type of adaptive gear for a decade and a half. The idea that this could enable games to participate more fully is exciting. All of you who love rolling dice, think for a minute; suppose you couldn’t, not even to play Monopoly.”

Unfortunately, their Kickstarter project is just over one day away from its end time and the project has only reached $1,214 of the $2,800 goal. It would be great if this project could find the extra funding at the last moment. Please spread word of this project if you think it is a good idea.

Now that website — PelinoreRevived — is being upgraded and has been taken down for maintenance. I first found out about the upgrade in a thread at The Piazza’s forum for the Pelinore Campaign Setting. But you can’t just take down the world’s leading Pelinore fansite, without letting people know when it is coming back, can you? So to keep hungry Pelinore fans happy the administrator has put up a 4DVENTURE-style countdown.

The original 4DVENTURE countdown

For those who don’t know about 4DVENTURE countdown, it was a publicity stunt that Wizards of the Coast used, right at the end of the 3rd Edition era. Anyone going to visit any Dungeons & Dragons page on their website got redirected to a special 4DVENTURE page that told people when the new D&D content would come up…down to the exact second.

The 4DVENTURE countdown certainly did its job. In fact, so many people were talking about what was going to happen, when that counter got to zero, that when the 4DVENTURE website actually went live, the Wizards of the Coast server got swamped by excited D&D fans and crashed again and again and again under the excessive load.

In fact the crash that happened after the 4DVENTURE clock hit zero seemed to get more publicity than the actual content that went up when the website came back.

Until the PelinoreRevied upgrade

The exact details of the upgrade will only be discovered after it returns, but some of the improvements that have been hinted at include: improved menus, rewritten articles, and a cyclopedia that may well be very similar to the sort of thing mentioned in the D&D Nexus story: How canon wikis can multiply the power of D&D fandom.

If you want to find out more about PelinoreRevived and the Pelinore campaign setting, you can visit the following places:

• The Pelinore forum at The Piazza and
• The PelinoreRevived page at Facebook

Here is hoping that all goes well and that PelinoreRevived doesn’t suffer the same fate as 4DVENTURE when it returns.

“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.

The Piazza, in case you don’t know, hosts independent forums for campaign settings for Dungeons & Dragons and other roleplaying games. It also has a section where D&D rules from the very earliest to the latest are discussed.

If you have any problems logging in, please post a message in the Facebook group for The Piazza and one of the moderators will give you advice:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/thepiazza/

Now that his son is older, Bruce has decided to come back to gaming and has started up a blog, called New… and to be improved, where you will be able to see what he is up to now, as well as hearing some of his stories from days gone by.

Bruce is best known for his work Mystara products, many of which were created for the BECMI version of Dungeons & Dragons. Ed Greenwood, creator of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting, recently called Bruce Heard “the heart and soul of Mystara”.

One of the recent entries from the New… and to be improved blog is a list of answers to questions that Bruce got flooded with about, which fans asked after he signed up to the Mystara Reborn group on Facebook. But don’t just read that blog post, as there are plenty of other interesting things going up on the blog.

When I first came to D&D back in 2nd edition, I was enamored with the named spells.  Melf’s Minute Meteors, Tasha’s Uncontrollable Hideous Laughter, Tenser’s Floating Disc, and who could forget the various Bigby spells?  It was a time of discovery for me, before we had the internet, when I first discovered the likes of the Circle of Eight.  This, in turn, led me to learn about the city of Greyhawk and their role in it.

I know some people want to divorce the names from the spells.  That’s something people have done for years.  Want to take those spells into another world?  Then switch out the Greyhawk names with ones from the Realms, Dragonlance, Pathfinder, or whatever world you are playing in.  Or, you can port those wizards into your favorite world.  Coming up with a conversion chart can lead to all sorts of fun.  You may find your world full of a host of new NPCs.

To me, those names led to a greater understanding of the game’s lore and backstory.  Who would know that Drawmij is Jim Ward’s name spelled backwards?  Each of those names has a story, and to take that story away would be to rob D&D of a cherished part of its history.

So I implore the Wizards to keep this rich portion of D&D history.  You’re doing so good at getting the flavor back in the game.  Do not falter now.

Oh, and feel free to add some new ones. Malhavoc comes to mind.

Said to be the first science-fiction RPG, Metamorphosis Alpha was created by James M. Ward and was originally published by TSR in 1976.

The original game has been edited to incorporate error fixes and to add an adventure. The new edition of the original version is 35 pages long.

One thing to beware of with Lulu, is that they do not disclose shipping/postage costs, until you get to the stage where you enter your credit card. So the price you see on their page is not going to be the price you pay.

Metamorphosis Alpha is also available as a PDF via RPG.Now.

Xander212′s forum, is the largest forum dedicated to World of Warcraft: The Roleplaying Game, and was set up after the official WoW: RPG forums were shut down by White Wolf.

Xander212′s forum vanished offline early in November, after free hosting site, Forumer embarked on a program to upgrade all of their servers and migrate any phpBB version 2 forums to phpBB version 3. The forum came back onto its usual URL on the 17th of November, but all the data was missing. Forumer’s own forums were full of support requests and it was nearly a month before they managed to restore Xander212′s forum to its previous state.

At the same time this was happening, the world’s other leading World of Warcraft: The Roleplaying Game forum, the one at The Piazza, was affected by maintenance there. That forum also vanished for a few days, but then The Piazza returned on a temporary URL.

Fans of World of Warcraft: The Roleplaying Game who have not yet hooked up with other fans can find them in three places:

• Xander212′s World of Warcraft: The Roleplaying Game forums
• The World of Warcraft: The Roleplaying Game forum at The Piazza and
• WarcraftRPG The WoW:RPG community page on Facebook.

EDIT: The World of Warcraft: The Roleplaying Game forum at The Piazza is back on its normal URL.

And if you are a D&D fan, who has played WoW: The MMORPG and are interested in knowing more about the game, you might want to sign up too.

You’re facing the Big Bad End Guy, and have him down to just a few hit points. One more thrust of the sword, and he dies. You have been waiting all night for this moment! You thust your sword and…he falls down.

What? That’s it? Epic fail! That’s not the way it should have ended. There should be an epic ending, something straight out of Hollywood.

That’s what “Death…Hollywood Style!” is all about. Now you can add a little Hollywood style action to your game the next time a character dies. But beware, as that character may be yours! Be warned, as well, that the authors who created this chart may not be all right in the head.

So grab those percentile dice and roll. Someone is going down!

Disclaimer: Some adult language and tons of bad puns below. You have been warned.

Acknowledgements:

“Death…Hollywood Style!” was a collaborative chart designed by my college gaming group, with the intention of making character death fun. The document was in its early stages when I joined the group, and saw further evolution as time went on. Later on, I worked on creating what I considered the definitive “special edition” of this chart. It is to my friends, the crew of the Starspeed, that this article is dedicated.

-Trampas Whiteman

Paizo Publishing has announced that it will be developing the new Pathfinder Online MMO in partnership with Goblinworks, a new company headed up by Ryan Dancey. You can find out more information on the Paizo announcement page.