For the most part, once I write something in a Wongery article, I do not want to change it later. In fact, for those Wongery articles based on material created before (as I've mentioned before, I've been worldbuilding for most of my life, and some of the worlds in the Wongery predate the Wongery itself), I don't even want to change that material; I want to be faithful to my original intentions. But especially for material that's already been written and posted to the Wongery, once it's published I don't want to alter it—reword it, expand it, sure, but not change the "facts". The canon is fixed and immutable.
Or at least, that's the ideal. This is not, however, a completely inviolable rule. I want to avoid changing established information, but that doesn't mean it hasn't happened. Granted, right now when hardly anyone knows about or is visiting the Wongery and no one is using the Wongery material, it's easy to get away with those changes because they aren't really impacting anything; when and if the Wongery gets more popular (and I certainly hope it'll be a when, but it probably won't be for a while) then I may be (even) more reluctant to make such changes. But yes, there are some things I've changed.
Some things I've changed because of inconsistencies. I've written a blog post about that before, discussing my realization that I had in different articles named two different nations of the world of Dadauar as the first onirarchy, had given two different origins for the numbering of the years of the Drithidian calendar, and in mentioning the time that a god had destroyed an onirarch and been destroyed in turn, I gave two different names for the god and two different nationalities for the onirarch. That is not the only time that happened; more recently I noticed that the main article on the world of Ganyak and the article on the First Western Academy both mentioned supers called the Spanner but they clearly weren't the same person (well, I guess what little information was given about them left open the possibility that they could have been the same person, but they weren't intended to be); while I suppose it would have been possible for two supers in the same world to have the same code name, this was unintentional and confusing, so I changed one of them to Haywire. This is the type of change I guess I feel least guilty about making (because it seems necessary; I don't want to leave the contradictions) but most guilty about having reason to make (because I feel like I should have been able to avoid those contradictions in the first place). I hope further changes to address contradictions will not be necessary, but I am very far from infallible and it is quite possible that they will.
Some things I've changed just because, well, as I developed one of my worlds or concepts further I realized my original ideas didn't work as well as I thought. When I rewrite and expand old articles as I've been doing lately (although unfortunately at a bit of a snail's pace), my intent is generally to add information but, again, not to change what's there... but I did make at least one substantial change rewriting the article on the nation of Plakhán. In the original version of the article, I'd written that the sleepers of Plakhán "wake only to eat and to have sex"—but as I worked on the rewrite it occurred to me that there were ways to make even that unnecessary, and it might be more interesting, and more consistent with the Plakháni onirarchs' methods and intentions, if these necessities were addressed in other ways and the sleepers were never wakened at all... and so it now is. As another example, according to the current articles on the world of Varra, the Ravaging, the event when the magelords of Thamarand all but destroyed the world in an attempt to conquer it, happened "long ago"... but as I've been thinking about it since, I realized that I think it actually works better if the Ravaging were more recent; I still haven't pinned down exactly how long it's been since the Ravaging, but when I get to rewriting the Varra article I'll do so, and it won't have been as long as the articles currently imply. In fact, timelines in general are something that early on I think I had some trouble with, extending them far longer than they needed to or should have been—another topic I've written a full lbog post about. Anyway, this—my changing my mind about significant matters—is something that applies mostly to rewrites of older articles, and with my spending more time and attention on individual articles lately I hope it won't arise as often in the future.
And then I admit, though I don't do it often, I'm not necessarily above making changes just because I feel like it or have an idea I like better, even if it's not terribly important. The Red Geis was originally associated with the world of Dadauar, but I've since decided I think it's a better fit for Jhembaz, a world I hadn't conceived of when I first came up with the Red Geis (which was before the Wongery was a thing). I haven't done a rewrite of the article on the Red Geis yet, but when I do, it'll be known and used on Jhembaz, not on Dadauar.
But the type of change I've been the most profligate with is changes in terminology. I've created a lot of new words to refer to specialized concepts in the Wongery (yet another subject I've written a whole blog post about), but some of those words I've altered over time, either because I realized the word I'd originally used had another meaning that was inconvenient, or just because I decided I didn't like the original word, or came up with a new word I liked better. What I now call desis I originally called "henosis"; ellogy was once "noesis"; æalogy was once "pediology". Some of those changes are still not fully implemented; pantachones, for instance, used to be called panypares, and there are a lot of old articles that still refer to "panypares" because I haven't updated them yet in accordinace with the new terminology. Likewise, I used to call intelligent species "races" (like many role-playing games traditionally did), but have since landed on the word "folks" instead—but many articles I haven't yet got around to rewriting still refer to "races", and in fact at the time I'm writing this post the article on the subject is still titled "Race", though it'll be moved to "Folk" when I get around to rewriting it.
But it's not only these kinds of general words not pertaining to any particular world that have been changed. I've changed words associated wtth particular worlds or estures as well, if there seemed to be good reason to do so. The covins of Curcalen used to be called "cabals" before I realized that word in that context might have some potential antisemitic connotations (yet another topic I've written a blog post about previously). The esture of Ses used to be called "Burdipén Rachoy"—or "Rachoy" for short—but not only was that a bit of a mouthful but I realized it was actually a mistranslation, or at least a questionable translation[1]. While rewriting the article on the Bathybius, I became dissatisfied with the terminology I had used for what are now called deeplings, and made some modification—originally "nicker" was the general term for the spawn of the Bathybius, while "deeplings" were nickers split from the substance of the Bathybius (as opposed to infected, which are other creatures that have been transformed), but now "deepling" is the general term and those split off from the Bathybius are called "imps". ("Nicker", meanwhile, has been repurposed to refer to deeplings that do not bear the shape of any natural creature, something for which there was not previously a term.) More recently, as I've been rewriting the article on the Free Republic of Avelax (I swear I'll get that thing done soon!), I decided that my term for the most common kind of aquatic dreambuilt, the "aquanaut", was... kind of stupid. They're now undines, which fits a pattern (that I had never really consciously planned but that just sort of happened) of many dreambuilt being named after creatures from mythology and folklore (e.g. ogres, zombies, dragons). And there was one renaming of something from an external source. A month or so ago, I made a post in the r/WorldbuildingGames subreddit (a subreddit I created and have been singularily unsuccessful in popularizing—not, admittedly, that I've put as much time and attention into it as I perhaps should have) about "The 2025 Interworld Expo", an imaginary event similar to the real-world World Expos but with pavilions associated with entire worlds instead of nations. I thought this would be a fun way for users to share some details about their worlds by describing their hypothetical pavilions at the Interworld Expo, and gave examples using three worlds from the Wongery. One of those three worlds was Dadauar, and as I wrote what was served in the restaurant at the Dadauar pavilion I came up with some processed foods common on the world. Well, as I wrote the section on cuisine in the expanded article on the Free Republic of Avelax, I decided to go ahead and use the foods I'd created in that post—except that one of them, "foodbombs", had a name I didn't really like. I did like the concept of the "foodbombs", though, and ended up renaming them "durways". (There is an etymology behind that name, but I'll refrain from explaining it here.)
(Jehoshaphat, that was a long paragraph. Should I split it into multiple paragraphs? Probably. Will I? No.)
Well, anyway, there's another name that I think is going to have to change. The article on the continent of Asia in Gallerra currently mentions a superpowered mercenary named MechaMan. (That is, it mentions that currently as of the time I'm writing this, but as soon as I post this I'm going to change it, so it won't mention that by the time you read this.) Unfortunately, it has come to my attention that a recent relatively high-profile video game uses "Mecha Man" as the name of its main protagonist, which... okay, technically isn't exactly the same name, since it has a space between the words, but I mean it's close enough to cause confusion.
I had, in fact, done a web search on the name before posting that article, and didn't find any serious conflicts. But that was before the video game in question, Dispatch, had come out. Now, yes, that means technically I used the name first (given how long it takes to make a video game, it's possible the game was already been in development, but it hadn't been published), and yes, I could probably get away with keeping it, but... eh, it's probably better to just go ahead and change it and avoid the trouble.
Now, I'm not saying I'm going to feel obliged to change any name that has been used by someone else. Probably the most powerful supervillain on the world of Gallerra is named Overkill—and that name has been used before by no lesser an entity than Marvel Comics, in whose comic books two different characters named "Overkill" appeared (as I discovered when I searched that name to check for prior use). But I think there are some significant differences between the two cases. Both Marvel Overkills were very minor characters that appeared in a single storyline each and haven't been used in decades; Mecha Man is the main character of Dispatch, a game that just came out this October. Conversely, Overkill is one of the most important characters of Gallerra, while MechaMan is a minor character currently only mentioned in one article. There are some characters and concepts that, despite their being perhaps only mentioned once in passing in the Wongery, I have a lot of plans for in my head and written down elsewhere that I'll use when I do finally write articles on them. MechaMan is not one of them; the brief paragraph about him in that article is basically all that had been determined about him so far. Besides, "overkill" is a (fairly) common word of the English language; "MechaMan", with or without the space, is two words put together and at least a little more distinctive.
So, anyway, the "MechaMan" of Gallerra is getting renamed to "the Pilot". I'm not sure I'm totally enamored of this name, to be honest, and I won't promise I may not change it again, but... eh, I think it'll do. (Has this name not been used before? Well... apparently there was a character nicknamed "Pilot" (albeit not the Pilot) in an eighties TV series called Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, but, eh, I don't think that's prominent enough to be problematic.)
As it happens, I have another character who shares a name with a somewhat similar relatively prominent character from a published body of work. This character isn't actually mentioned in the Wongery yet (though he has an important connection to a character who is, Elêla the ruler of the nation of Ivinii on Dadauar), but I do have plans to write about him there in the future... and when I do, I don't plan to change his name despite the existence of his namesake.
The character in question is a powerful, now-, uh, not exactly dead but very much not around anymore wizard named Xin, or the Necromancer Xin. Well, as it happens, there's a character named Xin (or Emperor Xin) who plays a significant historical role in the campaign world of Golarion for Paizo's Pathfinder role-playing game[2]—and he's not a necromancer (which of course means something different in the Pathfinder universe than in the hosper that my Xin comes from anyway), but he is, like the Necromancer Xin, a powerful wizard. The shared name, however, is a complete coincidence; my Necromancer Xin predates Paizo's Emperor Xin. I can't pin down the exact year I created the Necromancer Xin, but the oldest file I can find that mentions him was last modified in April 2004, so it was certainly no later than that; the earliest mention of Emperor Xin comes in the first Pathfinder Adventure Path book, Burnt Offerings, which didn't see publication until August 2007.
Perhaps the cognominity isn't so remarkable; there are only so many possible pronounceable three-letter names, after all, so some duplication is inevitable. (If Paizo and I had both independently come up with characters named Zomborxi Q-qar A'amadaqia, that would have been much harder to explain.) The fact that both Xins happen to have been powerful wizards makes the matter perhaps a bit more surprising, but not astonishingly so; wizards aren't exactly a rarity in fantasy settings, after all. In fact, Emperor Xin wasn't even the first powerful wizard named Xin to see publication. Yet another unrelated powerful wizard named Xin appeared in the Dungeons & Dragons adventure "Gates of Oblivion" in Dungeon magazine #136, written by Alec Austin. (In this case, the character's full name was "Tenaris Xin", though the adventure mostly referred to him by his surname; he was a practitioner of shadow magic and the main villain of the adventure.) This issue came out in July 2006, more than a year before Emperor Xin's debut in Burnt Offerings[3] (though still after I had created the Necromancer Xin). Maybe there's just something about the name Xin that says "powerful wizard".
Also I mean there have been real people named Xin, including at least one emperor (though he isn't referred to as "Emperor Xin") and one empress (who apparently is referred to as "Empress Xin"), though I'm pretty sure none of them have been wizards or necromancers. There was also a Xin dynasty, though it only had one emperor and I don't think he was ever called "Emperor Xin". Anyway, the point is, yeah, I don't think the fact that my Necromancer Xin happens to share a name with Paizo's Emperor Xin is really much cause for concern, and I don't plan to change it.
But, as described above, there are other names I have changed, as well as other changes I've made to Wongery material, and I thought it might be interesting to explain some of the reasons now. Or maybe it wasn't interesting, but I wrote it and if you got this far then you apparently read it, so what's done is done.
(You do not know how much willpower it took to force myself to not start this blog post with at least a paragraph or two of apologies for not getting more done on the Wongery lately before getting to anything remotely related to the purported subject of the post. You seriously do not know.[4])
- ↑ Okay, this might require a bit of clarification. While I do make up new languages for the Wongery, and certainly not all of the names in the Wongery are based on real-world languages... some of them are, and often on real-world languages that are relatively obscure. Many of the words related to dream magic and the esture of Ses—including the name of Ses itself—come from Caló, a language spoken by Romani of the Iberian peninsula. (The Wongery attributes some of these words to a language called "Calorran", but the implicit idea—implicit until I laid it out explicitly in this footnote, I guess—is that Calorran is in fact Caló by a different name; it's a pantach language that may have different names in different places, and "Calorran" is what it's called in Ses.)
- ↑ Well, mostly historical; a 2013 adventure would eventually have adventurers confront his insane ghost.
- ↑ Paizo was the publisher of Dungeon at the time "Gates of Oblivion" was published, so at least some people at Paizo would certainly have been aware of this adventure, which means it's conceivable that this character inspired the Emperor Xin who would later appear in Paizo's Pathfinder products. However, it's not necessarily likely; again, "Xin" is a simple enough name it's not improbable that different people would have come up with it independently.
- ↑ But, yeah, sorry for not getting more done on the Wongery lately. I was really hoping that during the holiday season when I'm not working I'd take advantage of the extra free time to get a lot done, but so far that hasn't happened, although part of the blame for that can be put on the fact that unfortunately I apparently came down with some sort of flu. I don't get sick that often, but this was one of the times I did. Of course, my not getting much done so far over the holidays can also be in large part attributed to the fact that I'm a lazy worthless procrastinating layabout, but I mean being sick probably also played a role.