Read the whole page here.
Sorry to go dark there for the weekend. These pages about humanoid races are absolutely the worst; they wind up taking two or three days and I feel completely spent when I'm finished them. I try to make each of them unique, and "human" in their motivations and understanding. I understand that some gentle readers will contend that they ought not to be human, since they're not, but I hasten to point out that we have no idea how to express the actions of non-humans; we only know how to pick and choose from our vast and varied behaviours as a species ... which, in fact, narrows the collective opportunities offered by the creature's presence. I know, I know: it sounds like we're stepping outside ourselves, but that's merely a delusion on our part. We can't step outside ourselves in search of a motivation. If you, o reader, can invent it, then guess what: it's a human concept. No way of getting around that.
If you compare the hobgoblin to the kobald that I did a couple of weeks ago, you'll find they're very different from each other (which isn't the case in the source material). Some will read the page and presuppose the hobgoblins are "lawful evil," like a little army of medieval nazis (see the 1977 movie, Wizards), which is another form of narrowing. That's not really it at all, here. Hobgoblins are agrarian. They are extremely family oriented, on an unsettling human level (but, still a human thing in some human cultures, sorry), loyal, even welcoming of strangers. Just don't face them on a battlefield, because they've anticipated Frederick II culturally.
I could write a post about how a significant number of people believe that creating structure is antithetical to creativity. And how these same people believe that by eliminating the structure, eliminating order, is the pathway to individuality. Odd, that all these "individuals" all make the same arguments, with the same vague quibbles, and none of these individuals ever seem to accomplish anything or demonstrate their expressiveness in a concrete way.
My take on the hobgoblin is not to put them in a two-dimensional, predictable box, but to give them guidelines in which they can act believably and rationally. Hobgoblins are going to think first about their tribe, and then themselves. When they think about beating you in battle, they will think about it as their tribe beating you, not from the perspective of their own, personal accomplishment. The worst thing that hobgoblins can imagine would be exile from their tribe; they would rather die; and if they were exiled, that is exactly what they would choose: to be dead, rather than endure it.
That characteristic makes them positively frightening; and yet, at the same time, for reasons that could be role-played and appreciated, if a group of hobgoblins accepted you as a member of their tribe, they could be the best friends you ever had.
Being able to flip this concept one way, then the other, shows how structure provides creativity, rather than the reverse. But I wouldn't expect those who loathe structure to appreciate that.
I totally understand the feeling that your brain has been scraped from the inside out - I'm working on a journal paper with a near deadline and I feel difficulty stringing words together sometimes. But the hard work is paying off, these pages are wonderful!
ReplyDeleteI think it's difficult for most of us to grok the communal psyche of tribal life. I grew up in agrarian communities, reasonably close-knit, but even that is just a glimpse.
I've about gotten to the end of what I can do on the Bestiary without starting to add new pages. If you like, I can begin adding new pages from the MM with the appropriate "needs work" tags. No need to answer me today! Enjoy the time off.
It was really good to get this comment from you today, Shelby, this being my birthday. It's important to me that the pages do look wonderful, that I go the extra step towards that and that I keep in mind that a year from now, I can probably expand on that page again.
ReplyDeleteRegarding further contributions to the wiki. At present, I'm going through a round robin of workload. I put together one post from the "wanted links" page I blogged about a couple weeks ago: https://tao-dnd.blogspot.com/2020/08/class-backward.html Then I find a random page on the wiki, and fix that random page; that's how lately I did work on Lower Water and Quest. Then I take the foremost post on the Old Wiki and remake that (which is why I'm doing so many monsters).
This process seems to be slowly working. If you start making pages for monsters, these won't be seen again until I find them through "random page" ... which might take years. I'd rather leave them in the "pages wanted" category, because as links for those monsters stack up, they will get pushed to the front of the line, where they'll get made.
The disappearance of the old wiki will happen faster and faster, as pages get made or updated through the other two processes.
(cont...)
(...cont)
ReplyDeleteSo, here's the situation. I had other people shifting pages from the old wiki to the new, but as it happened, NOTHING was being rewritten in that shift, and fixed, or even edited. People copied the exact same spelling and grammar errors that the old wiki had. This is no good. As far as I can see, there's no point in copying from the old wiki to the new unless that material is tightened up, properly rewritten and improved, with images and good tables. The table-writing was the best reason to fast-shift the monsters and spells; but the rest of the content needs better work than that. If it gets shifted over quickly, it will just be Bad content on the new wiki (and there's too much of that already), which I won't find and fix until I find it through a random page or coming around to shifting pages from the old wiki myself.
Option two is to hit a random page and fix the material. Correct grammar, add links, highlight phrases that don't make sense or correct them, improve the tables that are showing, find pics for the page as best as one can (and have a good eye for pics, with nothing cartoony or silly, or excessively cliche), and generally make pretty. Correcting grammar and adding links alone would be a huge task and a helpful one, but awfully DULL, and not the sort of thing anyone wants to do.
Option three: make new pages that don't exist on the old wiki. I've been adding indexes full of dead links, such as this one on the subterranean page: https://wiki.alexissmolensk.com/index.php/Subterranean_(range). Define a chamber, define a kennel, define a held portal, define a throne room; the "Traps & Tricks" page is either a very long page with details of fifty or sixty traps, or another links page to other pages, each dedicated to a type of trap. How do vents work in dungeons, what does a observatory look like, what is "flagstone" as a material for dungeons - is it easy to remove or not? I know it seems crazy and silly perhaps to detail these minor things, but a really good 150 words on flagstone might serve to provide concept, restrict people who want to tear down dungeon walls and help define how expensive it would be to make a flagstone corridor running 60 feet. I don't know. I added the link because I figured, I'll figure out how it matters when I get there.
There are now nearly 2,000 wanted links on the wiki, and a great many of them are directed towards really simple subjects. If you're up for that, pick one, I'll make the page and you can expand upon it.
Happy Birthday Alexis!
ReplyDeleteBelated Happy birthday, and thank you for another great post.
ReplyDeleteI'm about 1/2 way through your 'How to Run' book, and find it engrossing.
Would you like some assistance with categorizing the articles on your wiki?
ReplyDeleteCain,
ReplyDeleteThank you, but no.
I spend a lot of time with wikipedia -- a really insane amount of time; not editing it or adding to it, but taking the information there and applying it elsewhere. And I have to tell you, in terms of their use in application, categories are utterly useless. They are valuable for people frittering away their time, reading whatever happens to be listed; and for directionless learning and entertainment, categories are great. But they have no scholarly application.
Moreover, spending a lot of time on wikipedia has shown me that these categories are generally inconsistent and overlapping, including many pages that are obliquely connected to the subject at hand; often, pages that ought to be there are unfortunately absent. It is frustrating if one wants to get an overview of a specific group of things, only to find the categories are inundated with incidental and useless pages, or painfully lacking in what's actually wanted.
Category pages are great work for wiki CREATORS. I have found that it can be relaxing to create list pages, or pages consisting of pure data; I can watch a movie while doing it, passing a lot of time and not having to concentrate too hard to create real, meaningful content. As such, I have already noticed that when people want to jump on board to "help me" with my wiki, what they really want to do is create a bunch of content pages that actually don't add anything of substance, but DO seem like a lot of make-work and navel-gazing.
As I see it, the wiki ought to exist as a help-meet to actual play; in actual play, there's no time to peruse lists of content. You want to look up a specific subject and see what's there. The more that's written there, the better. I'm finding myself doubling the size of posts in my random search phase, because I want the page to have MORE useful, applicable content for game play.
When I make a page full of links, it's to make placeholders for content I need to create, not for the sake of making lists. I'd like to keep the lists to an absolute minimum; otherwise, like wikipedia, they just become detritus that pollutes the real content.
I don't suppose that makes sense to most wiki creators, as they've been propagandized into believing that tags are content. But in fact, they're really not.