Game RPG:Main Page
The RPG subspace in the Wongery will include game statistics for various creatures, spells, and objects from Wongery articles, and other suggestions for how you can use this material in role-playing games.
Advice for Use
While individual pages will have advice for use of those specific elements in your games, we also have some overall advice that applies to use of Wongery material for role-playing games in general.
Don't be afraid to change things! This applies in two ways. First of all, you don't have to use any of these worlds, creatures, and so on as written. By all means feel free to change anything you want for your campaign. If you want Vlastach to be a force for evil intent on destroying civilization, in your campaign he can be. If you like the world of Nuclearth in general but don't like the salvage-men, they don't have to exist in your campaign's version of the world. If you like the city of Sammendare but aren't otherwise fond of the world of Ym, you can transplant Sammendare to your own campaign world (changing the thedes of Ym to folks more appropriate to your world). And so on. For that matter, there's nothing stopping you from pulling a single element out of context for your campaign, either. Just because the qennis is canonically found only in the world of Arianiga doesn't mean you can't use it in your campaign set on some other world.
The second way this applies is that you shouldn't be afraid to let the PCs change the campaign world; don't feel like you have to stick with the status quo. Can the PCs overthrow the onirarchs of the Free Republic of Avelax and establish a true democracy there? Sure, good for them. Can they manage to convince the living mortals of Interlife Earth of the existence of ghosts and forge a new, harmonious relationship between the living and the dead? Why not? Can they destroy all the bonelords of Varra and restore the world to how it was before the Ravaging? Well, that's an awfully tall order, and it seems unlikely to me that a single group of characters could accomplish it, but if you want the PCs to do it in your campaign, sure, go for it. None of that is going to happen in canon, but there's no reason it can't happen in your campaign. Feel free to let the PCs kill off major characters or even blow up the whole setting.
Loose vs. Strict Conversions
Because the worlds of the Wongery were not designed with any particular game systems in mind, there are aspects of them that may not be well represented by the core rules or default assumptions of various systems. This is particularly true of the workings of magic; most fantasy role-playing games have specific rules for magic, and even specific spells, that may not match the way the arcana in the Wongery are described.
Some gaming groups might prefer to use the core rulesets they're accustomed to, even if they conflict with the canonical descriptions in the Wongery. Others may prefer to represent the settings as faithfully as possible, even if it involves drastic alterations to the rules. Because of this, many entries in the Wongery Gamespace will include both "loose" and "strict" rules conversions. A "loose" conversion is a suggestion as to how to approximate a magic system or some other aspect of the setting using the default rule set, or hewing as close to it as possible. A "strict" conversion gives more detailed rules that better reflect how the settings of the Wongery differ from the default assumptions of the role-playing game, but may involve much more substantial additions to or modifications of the rulesets.
For instance, suppose you're playing a member of the Aabelon on Curcalen in a Pathfinder campaign. Canonically, the magic of Usm is very different from the magic of the Pathfinder universe, and a strict conversion will include a whole new class to represent wizards of this esture. But if you're less interested in conforming to canon than you are just using the rules as you're used to them, as a loose conversion we'll also include a new arcane school for the Aabelon that you can use with the wizard class from the Pathfinder core books. (Yeah, I say all this in the future tense because none of that is here yet, but we'll get to it. Sorry.)
Of course, you're welcome to mix and match elements of the loose and strict conversions, using some but not all of the customizations of the strict conversions, to strike a balance that appeals to you somewhere in between use of the unmodified or minimally modified core game rules and strict adherence to the setting as described.
Stat Blocks
At the moment, there is, unfortunately, no easy way to include nicely formatted stat blocks in articles. We're working on that, and we do intend to implement templates that will make it simple to add stat blocks to pages. But it may be a while before that's in place (among other things, it looks like in order to do that I'm going to have to learn Lua). We apologize for the inconvenience.
Licensing
Please note that the licensing terms of the material on the Game pages are not the same as the licensing terms of the Central Wongery mainspace. In particular, unless specified otherwise, material on the Game pages is not released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License or the Akinetic Media License. It may be released under other licenses, but that depends on the specific system and its usage and licensing policies. For example, for Basic Roleplaying and Pathfinder, the statistics in the Game pages are released under the Open RPG Creative License. However, the ORC does not apply to GURPS, for instance, and while their online policy does permit us to make available free game aids, it does not allow us to apply any additional licenses to their use.
Conversely, the licenses the Game pages are released under do not extend to the corresponding mainspace articles. The content of the Wongery mainspace is not released under the ORC, the OGL, the Dominion Rules License, or any other license beyond the Creative Commons and (eventually) Akinetic Media Licenses. This means, for instance, that your use of the ORC License for a BRP adventure set in the world of Ym does not by itself permit you to quote background material about the world from mainspace articles. However, this should not be much of an impediment, since that material is licensed under other licenses, and you can use such material in your adventure as long as you license it appropriately. (I'll later put in some examples here about how the licenses can be combined, but this is another thing I want to consult with a lawyer with to make sure I get it right.)
Also, please note that the Wongery's licenses allow commercial reuse, as long as the terms of the license are met. That means you're welcome not only to use it in your home campaign, but to publish your own supplements set in Wongery worlds and based on Wongery materials, if you want to, as long as the game system you're using has a license that allows it. You can publish a series of Dungeons & Dragons adventures set in Gala under an Open Game License, or a Powered by the Apocalypse supplement for Gallerra under a Creative Commons license. Technically, as long as you include the proper license and copyright notices, you can even sell printed books just collecting Wongery material without adding anything new, though I'm not sure how many people will buy them when all the material is freely available online. Of course, what's said above about not being afraid to change things applies to your published material as well. You want to publish a Starfinder adventure that involves the PCs discovering that the Emperor of Conabia is really a protean in disguise? Well, again, that's certainly not Wongery canon, but nothing's stopping you.
Community Content Programs
A number of game companies have recently partnered with DriveThruRPG to implement Community Content programs by which third-party creators can publish products using these companies' intellectual property, with a share of the profits going to the IP owner and subject to certain other restrictions. (Most of these community content programs apply to role-playing games, but there are community content programs for some card games as well.) While using Wongery content in a product created under the ORC or another open license is relatively straightforward, whether or not you can use Wongery content in a product created through one of these Community Content programs is a stickier question, and may depend on the program. To be clear, it would not violate the terms of our licenses, and we, the Grandmaster Wongers, would have no problem with it. However, it may violate the terms of the appropriate Community Content agreement.
For example, the Content Guidelines to the Storyteller's Vault explicitly disallow "[c]opyrighted material that is not World of Darkness’s [Paradox’s], which also means no crossovers with properties that are not World of Darkness’s." While this may have been intended to forbid illegal copyright infringement, as written it does not make an exception for copyrighted material which—like the content of the Central Wongery mainspace—is under an open license that would otherwise allow its free use. Therefore, the terms of the Storyteller's Vault Content Guidelines would seem to disallow any use of Wongery material in a Storyteller's Vault product, even as a minor element of an adventure or supplement otherwise firmly set in the World of Darkness. Similarly, the Content Guidelines for the Hall of Champions (the HERO System Community Content Program) say that "You do not have permission (or we reserve the right) to release work based on the intellectual property of other people or companies as part of Hall of Champions." While, again, this may have been intended to forbid copyright infringement, taken literally it means you would not be able to incorporate Wongery material into a Hall of Champions product, even if we, the owners of that content, would be okay with it (which we would be). (Hm... actually, I guess technically since it refers to the intellectual property of other people or companies, we, the Grandmaster Wongers, could publish works on the Hall of Champions based on Wongery material... but I don't know that I want to do that. I'd rather we keep the game material on the Wongery site and allow other people to use it and not publish through the Community Content programs ourselves.)
However, there are other Community Content programs with terms that may allow the use of Wongery material. Even here, though, there may be other strictures to be aware of. For instance, the only mention of the use of copyrighted material in the Pathfinder Infinite content guidelines is the following: "Illegal and Infringing content is not allowed. It is the content creator’s responsibility to ensure that their content does not violate laws, or copyright, trademark, privacy, or other rights." Use of Wongery material, provided it was appropriately credited per the terms of the applicable licenses, would not be infringing, and therefore would not be in violation of this part of the guidelines. Elsewhere, however, the guidelines make it clear that "[t]he Pathfinder Infinite site is geared toward setting-neutral and Lost Omens content only." Therefore, while an adventure that takes place in the Lost Omens setting but includes an incursion by cultists of the Oloth from the Empire of Norg could perhaps be allowable under the Pathfinder Infinite guidelines, a Pathfinder adventure wholly set within Norg definitely would not. (Such an adventure would, however, be permissible under the terms of the ORC, as long as it didn't use any Paizo Reserved Material.)
In any case, nothing on this page should be taken as legal advice, and we make no guarantees that our interpretations of these guidelines are correct. Before creating Community Content for any of these programs using Wongery material you should read the appropriate Content Guidelines carefully yourself and if in doubt you should consult with your own lawyers and/or the companies running the Community Content programs—and if you don't have access to lawyers and don't get a response from the companies in question, then if in doubt we recommend not proceeding. As much as we would like to see the Wongery content used and promulgated as widely as possible, we don't want to encourage users to violate other companies' policies to do so.
Supported Games
The Wongery currently has subspaces for the following RPGs:
(Of course, you're welcome to use Wongery content with any RPG; these are just the games for which the Wongery will provide stat blocks and other rules information tailored to the specific game.)
You may notice one conspicuous omission: Where's Dungeons & Dragons, the most famous RPG of all? Well, I do intend to include pages for Dungeons & Dragons (although this wasn't always the case... more on that when the D&D Gamespace is up), but right now it's in the middle of releasing a new edition, and the release won't be complete—and the new license available—until at least February. That being the case, rather than implement a gamespace for an edition that was going to be obsolete in a matter of months, we thought it best to wait until the license for the new edition was in place and add the subspace for it then. (Though, come to think of it, we could have put in the subspace but not put any content for it and explained the reasoning. Uh... in retrospect, maybe that's what we should have done. Well, we'll get to that eventually...)
More systems will be added in the future, especially if we receive numerous requests for them, provided that we are able to legally publish material for that system. This requires at least one of the following to be true:
- The system in question is published under the Open RPG Creative License, the Open Gaming License, a Creative Commons License (but not CC BY-ND or CC BY-NC-ND), a GNU Free Documentation License, or a license with similar terms, or has been explicitly released into the public domain.
- A written policy publicly exists (perhaps called a community use policy, or fansite policy, or acceptable use policy) that gives explicit permission for third-party websites to post material based on the system, possibly subject to certain reasonable conditions (e.g. only for noncommercial use—note that the Game pages in the Wongery are and will always remain freely available).
If neither of these cases applies for a given system, then we are unable to legally include statistics for that system on the site. (Arguably we might be able to justify doing so under fair use principles, but that's a nebulous area we would prefer to avoid; we'd rather stick to clear-cut cases and not try to see how far we can push.)
Unless there is significant demand, we have no intention of including statistics on the Wongery for older editions of current games, even if they do meet the criteria above. (As games we currently have statistics up for are released under new editions, we may leave the pages up for the older editions, but probably will not include stats for those editions in newer articles. Or we may replace the older pages with the newer ones—for those who do want the material for older editions, it will still be available in the pages' history anyway. I'm not sure yet; we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.)
Here is a non-exhaustive list of other games with open licenses and/or suitable "fan use" policies that we may eventually support (though it's going to be a very long while, if ever, before I get to all of them): 1w6, 24XX, 3Deep, 4C, Archmage Engine, The Awfully Cheerful Engine, BASE12, Cepheus Engine, Circe, Cogent Roleplay, Descended From the Queen, Dominion Rules, Dragonbane, Eclipse Phase, Expedition, Fantasy Heartbreaker, The Fantasy Trip, FASERIP, Forged in the Dark, Four Colors Al Fresco, Fudge, GUMSHOE, the Iridium System, Ironsworn, Lancer, Level Up, MasterBook, MasterCraft, METTLE Core, Monad Echo, Mutants & Masterminds, Opend6, Old-School Essentials, Paragon System, Polyhedra Core Engine, Porphyra RPG, Powered by the Apocalypse, QAGS, QuestWorlds, the Resistance System, Risus, Saga, Shadowdark, Soft Horizon, Starfinder, Storyleaves, Sufficiently Advanced, Tales of the Valiant, Torchbearer, TOTEM System, Unbound, Unsung Tales, Valor, Wanton Role-Playing System, Wayfarers, What's O.L.D. is N.E.W., Wushu, YAGS.
(Yes, I am aware that adding more games means there won't be space at the top of the page for all the tabs—there isn't really space for them now on small screens. I do have plans to refine the arrangement of the tabs, including putting tabs that won't fit across the top in a dropdown menu, but it may be a while before I can implement them.)