Forum:Living Forgotten Realms -- new wiki or host it here?

WotC's RPGA network is launching the Living Forgotten Realms campaign to coincide with the launch of 4e. This new world-wide D&D campaign is replacing Living Greyhawk, which has a membership of over 3000 people.

In the past, RPGA-run campaigns were run and managed by a number of different methods, including a combination of Yahoo Groups, articles on the RPGA web site, and content hosted on several different web servers (ex.: PoU region). That's primarily because RPGA-run campaigns predate Wikis, and now with the launch of Living Forgotten Realms (henceforth I'm calling this "LFR") I fully expect that a LFR wiki would be very popular.


 * ( In fact, a non-wikia LFR has already been created. However, it does not use a MediaWikia engine and some of their policies are ill-advised. )

I spoke with fw190a8 in the IRC wikia gaming channel, and he made the suggestion that instead of creating a new Wikia-gaming site for Living Forgotten Realms, that it would make sense to host it in this wiki. There is certainly a lot of overlap and ties between the two.

As an overview, the following would be the kind of content that needs to be hosted somewhere:
 * 1) An overview page explaining what LFR is, how it relates to RGPA/WotC, who the admins are, etc...
 * 2) A list of all the LFR "regions", with (at least!) one article for each LFR region.
 * 3) LFR divides Faerun into 12 playable regions.
 * 4) For management reasons, each real-world region (ex.: SE USA) maps to one of those regions. For example, SoutEast USA is the Aglarond region.
 * 5) Each region has three administrators and a host of ancillary helpers (scenario writers, meta-play coordinators, volunteers, Con staff, etc...)
 * 6) An example of a Living Greyhawk region, and the kind of content that is hosted, can be viewed here.
 * 7) A page with the history, people, and geography of each playable and non-playable region.
 * 8) This overlaps quite a bit with the existing content in this wiki! :-)
 * 9) This will diverge over time though... though WotC does approve all LFR scenarios (and NPCs, etc...), it's not likely going to be "canon".
 * 10) With 60+ or so new LFR scenarios every year, a lot of new lore, events, NPCs, etc..., will be introduced.
 * 11) In addition to this, DMG2 style "affiliations" will be created for several organizations (such as the Harpers, etc...) that PCs will be able to join.
 * 12) These organizations will have a lot of lore and background info.
 * 13) They will also need to host quite a bit of mechanic info (how to have your PC join, any forms to fill out, the requirements in-game and out-of-game), etc...
 * 14) Faerun-shaking events are likely to be introduced by the world-wide campaign staff.  As an example, Living Greyhawk had a section of their world over-run by ethereal monsters... the "Ether-Threat" series.
 * 15) A section on what D&D supplements are allowed, which abilities and spells from within core books are modified or disallowed, etc..., in other words the set of House Rules that any campaign develops.
 * 16) A place to make announcements, such as a list of upcoming LFR conventions.

So that covers the content. Getting back to the topic of hosting it within this Wiki, here are some pros and cons, and suggestions:

Suggestions
 * Create a "Portal" within this Wiki to host the administrative info.
 * For the lore info, two suggestions:
 * Create a "LFR Section" within each existing article. For instance, the Cormyr article might have section called "Living Forgotten Realms" that details all the recent events for that campaign.  Con: might be a big section.
 * Create a "sister-page" for each existing article that contains any info that is divergent for LFR. Con: sister-pages make it hard to navigate and get all the info for a region.

Pros of hosting it within this Wiki
 * There is a lot of overlap, in particular with the history.
 * LFR will need to refer to a lot of canon info.
 * If it's not in the same Wiki, there is likely going to be lots of inter-wiki links and copying-and-pasting between the two wikis.

Cons of hosting it within this Wiki
 * Is there a good solution to handling the LFR regional info without adding too much disambiguation data, such as for Cormyr?
 * Will non-LFR readers (the majority on this Wiki) want to constantly see links or sections on LFR info?
 * If we introduce a lot of LFR campaign-specific articles, will other prominent (and not so prominent) campaigns also ask for similar preferrential treament?
 * Will LFR players want to go to a generic FR wiki, or will they to use a LFR-specific wiki?

Any other Pros/Cons that I'm missing?

Please add your thoughts to this topic!

 01:33, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Btw, here's a link to that non-wikia LFR wiki that has already been created. The owners aren't very active, and they plan on "locking down" the wiki to admins only.

I should probably also mention that I've already domain-registered www.lfrwiki.com, www.lfrwiki.net, and www.lfrwiki.org  01:48, 13 April 2008 (UTC)