Oh, not just doubts that it will ever be a success. Those doubts I've had for a long time. I've always worried that I'd never figure out how to let people know about the Wongery and attract a readership. I had plans for how to do so, as described in a previous post, but I had no confidence that those plans would work (and anyway some of the details have since changed, but I'll leave that for a future post.) I have never been good at promoting myself or my projects. I've never had many followers on any of the social media platforms where I've had active accounts. I tried making my own webseries once, and it never got any viewers, and I'm not sure how much of that was due to my not knowing how to publicize it and how much due to its just... not being something that anyone wanted to watch. Actually, I guess that's true more generally; nobody has ever cared about anything I did, and I've blamed that primarily on my failure to get the word out about my works, but it's entirely possible that the root cause for the general disinterest has just been that my works... haven't been good.
And perhaps that pattern continues. I've questioned whether I'd be able to promote the Wongery as it deserves, but I guess I never really let myself question whether it actually deserves it. Wnhether it should be a success. Those are the more recent doubts, the doubts that I should have been having a long time ago. I'd had myself convinced that the Wongery is imaginative enough that if other people do find out about it they'll enjoy reading about it, and adapting its contents in their own work as allowed by the licensing, and contributing their own content via the Public Wongery and perhaps eventually Private Wongeries... but is it? Am I actually doing anything of value? Even if I did somehow find a way to get the word out and get people to check out the site, would anybody care?
(This would be far from the first time I have overestimated my abilities. When I was younger, for a time I was convinced I was uniquely multitalented, being a gifted writer, composer, and visual artist, until I finally came to the belated dual realization that (a) there are a lot of multitalented people who are good at drawing and writing and composing music, and (b) I'm not one of them.)
I don't know; maybe I'm just depressed because of my current economic difficulties (or for other reasons), and that's making me down on myself. Maybe it's fear of failure; maybe there's a part of me concerned that if I do (hard-)launch the Wongery and it flops then I'll be devastated, and so it's trying to prepare me for that or talk me out of launching the Wongery at all. Maybe this is just seasonal affective disorder, or something, although that's something I don't think I've ever suffered from in the past and I don't see any reason that I ought to start now. (It is almost certainly not seasonal affective disorder.) But while on one level it would be nice to believe that these doubts aren't rationally founded but just a product of some psychological coping mechanism or chemical imbalance in my brain... thinking through them, they seem pretty darn rational. It's my prior confidence in the Wongery's value that seems irrational. What, after all, does the Wongery really have going for it?
The Wongery does not contain a lot of detail about the worlds it describes. The world with the most articles about it, Dadauar, has between those articles a total of—assuming I calculated correctly—fewer than fifty thousand words of description. That's completely inadequate. That's nothing. Other worlds, of course, have even less, with most worlds having fewer than a dozen articles. I had anticipated having a lot more articles
up before the Wongery's launch, but I just haven't had the time to write and/or edit them. Part of this is due to certain life circumstances that have made things difficult lately, but probably a larger part of it is just due to general incompetence and executive dysfunction.
But, well, suppose I had had (and made) more time to work on the Wongery; suppose it had twenty times the content it does. Suppose I had not fifty thousand words written about Dadauar, but a million. That still wouldn't be that impressive. Even if we were somehow able to do this as a full-time job (which obviously we aren't), the handful of six nominal Grandmaster Wongers or between one and sixteen actual people behind the Grandmaster Wonger pseudonyms would never be able to match the volume of material available for some other settings that have had large numbers of people working on them. There are both commercial settings like the Forgotten Realms and the Star Wars universe and volunteer collaborative projects like Orion's Arm and the (apparently recently defunct) Santharian Dream that represent decades of work by dozens or hundreds of contributors, and that have amassed amounts of detail and content that we're unlikely ever to approach.
Okay, so the Wongery worlds aren't particularly detailed. Are they original? Eh... well, maybe I'm not entirely deceiving myself in thinking they're at least more original and more interesting than just another generic D&D-ripoff fantasy world loosely patterned after medieval Europe, but even to the extent that that's true they certainly aren't the only original worlds out there, and I think I would be seriously deceiving myself if I really believed they were the most original.
I said in a previous post that "I've been doing worldbuilding almost all my life; if there's one thing I know, it's worldbuilding". And that's maybe, sort of true, but with a few caveats. Sure, I've been designing imaginary worlds since I was a young child, but it hasn't been a full-time pursuit—not that I wouldn't have wanted it to be one, but there were other expediencies like getting an education and making a living that took up a lot of my time. Worldbuilding was something on which I spent a large proportion of my free time, but I never had much free time to spend. Besides, even if I did spend a lot of time on worldbuilding, that doesn't necessarily mean I'm actually good at it. Sure, Malcolm Gladwell famously declared that it took ten thousand hours of practice to make an expert, but Malcolm Gladwell's "ten thousand hour rule" has unfortunately less famously been thoroughly debunked (where—and I apologize for the synctactic ambiguity—"unfortunately" is supposed to be modifying "less famously"; i.e. I consider it unfortunate that the debunking is less famous, not that the debunking happened in the first place). (Actually, I suppose I could have removed or at least ameliorated the syntactic ambiguity by putting commas on either side of "unfortunately less famously", but I'm not going to go back and do that now, even though there's really no reason for me not to.) Gladwell was wrong; ten thousand hours do not an expert make. I could, and probably did, put ten thousand hours into worldbuilding and still be terrible at it.
So while I think that the worlds of the Wongery are imaginative and full of possibilities, I'm not exactly an objective judge, and I may have no idea what I'm talking about, is what I'm saying.
But I guess the Wongery's main selling point was always going to be the fact that the settings described therein were released as open content. The intent is not just that you can read about these settings, but that you can use and adapt them for your own works. I guess this is a little more noteworthy. You can't just publish your own stories and games set in the world of your favorite book, movie, or video game, not without risking trouble with the publisher. (Well, unless your favorite book or movie is old enough to be in the public domain.) And while the RPG industry has perhaps embraced the open content movement more than most, even most major RPGs with open systems retain the details of their settings as closed content. When Wizards of the Coast released the Open Game License in 2000, it was careful to omit from the open content anything specific to one of its campaign settings, even going so far as to rechristen some spells and magic items that bore the names of gods and characters of the setting; thus for instance in the Standard Reference Document the Mace of St. Cuthbert became The Saint's Mace; and various spells like Otiluke's Flaming Sphere, Mordenkainen's Faithful Hound, Abi-Dalzim's Horrid Wilting, and the Bigby's Hand spells simply dropped the eponym. Paizo has been much more generous with open content in Pathfinder than Wizards of the Coast ever was, releasing almost all the content of its non-setting-specific books as Open Game Content... but its world of Golarion remains firmly closed content. (Third parties can now publish material specific to some proprietary D&D campaign worlds through the DMs Guild and Golarion-specific material through Pathfinder Infinite, but that doesn't make those settings open content.)
One could argue that there were settings in the past that were more or less treated as open for third-party contributions. H. P. Lovecraft and a circle of collaborators including Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard gleefully wove into their own works references to characters and concepts introduced in each others' fiction, and wrote stories that shared enough elements to arguably take place in the same cosmic horror setting. Long before that, the #Arthurian cycle|Arthurian cycle as it's known today arose from the work of multiple writers who built on each other's foundations. And long before that, Homer and Ovid and other classical poets and playwrights not only added their own touches to preexisting myths but also drew on each others' takes on them. And of course you could say that the setting of anything written long enough ago is de facto an open setting because it's fallen into the public domain.
But that's not really the kind of thing I'm talking about. The classical myths and the Arthurian cycle both of course predated the modern concept of copyright, so I'm not sure it's particularly meaningful to say they were treated as open settings. Lovecraft's writing circle, of course, existed when coypright was a thing, but this wasn't an officially, publicly open world so much as it was just a collaborative project among a group of friends and correspondents, which isn't really the same.
Still, even if we consider only settings that are open not because they're in the public domain but because they're explicitly released under open licenses... then the Wongery still isn't the first. I know of at least one open-setting project that predates the Wongery, and at least one more that technically didn't predate my creation of the Wongery in December 2008 but did predate its opening to the public (even the unremarked "soft launch" in 2012).
And so that brings us through a (sadly not atypically) long and circuitous route to what was supposed to be the main point of this blog post, namely a discussion of other open settings that predated the Wongery, or at least that predated its official launch. (For these purposes, I'm counting a setting as open if and only if its licensing terms meet similar criteria to those defining an Open Game License according to the Open Gaming Foundation; this excludes, for example, the setting of Eclipse Phase, which is released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license that prohibits commercial distribution of derivative works.) My prolixious preamble was lengthy enough that the actual meat of the post is likely at this point to seem very short in comparison, but eh, so it goes.
Anyway, here are some other open settings that I think are worth acknowledging:
Basilicus
Basilicus is a science fiction setting started in 2004, and released under the GNU Free Documentation License. I admit I haven't really looked over it in detail (though I'd like to do so if I get the time), but here's the description from the main page of the wiki:
Like the Wongery, the Basilicus wiki even includes statistics for role-playing games! Or at least it's intended to; the site says that "If you have an open gaming system (GFDL or GPL) you are welcome to add game rule articles to existing Basilicus content." (The specification of GFDL or GPL seems a bit restrictive, though perhaps understandably so given the licensing of Basilicus itself; there are very few RPGs released under those particular licenses.) So far the only game system that seems to have support, however, is a bespoke "Basilicus RPG", which has also been released under the GFDL and so could in principle be—but as far as I know hasn't been—used for other settings.Basilicus is a massive world-building project focusing on the Basilicus Prime Galaxy, a fictional galaxy with several interstellar civilizations. Content ranges from space opera science fiction to magic-rich fantasy worlds. Hundreds of locations, organizations, creatures and technologies are available. Since it is licensed with the GFDL all materials can be used for both non-commercial and commercial purposes.
I didn't know of Basilicus when I created the Wongery; I didn't find out about it till relatively recently; so it played no role in inspiring the Wongery. Still, it is an open setting that predated the Wongery, so I figure I should acknowledge it, even if I wasn't aware of it at the time. We were not (of course) the first to have the idea of releasing a setting under an open license. The creators of Basilicus may not be the first, either, but they're the first that I know of.
Unfortunately, the Basilicus wiki is hosted on fandom.com, a horribly ad-bloated, creator-hostile platform that I try to avoid linking to or supporting. I did make an exception and link to the Basilicus wiki above because, well, there's nowhere else to link to, but I'm not happy about it. (I linked to it through BreezeWiki, a utility that lets users browse fandom.com without most of the obtrusive clutter, but I'd still rather not have linked to that pestiferous site at all.) Basilicus did have originally have its own site, basilicus.org, but that apparently early on started redirecting to the external wiki instead, and then the domain registration lapsed in 2013 and 2014. Anyway, back when Basilicus was first migrated to the external site, that site was wikia.com, not fandom.com; that was before Wikia was acquired by TPG Inc. and turned into the loathsome abomination it is today. And as for why the people behind Basilicus haven't moved it from fandom.com since... well, unfortunately, as far as I can tell the project seems to be pretty much dead, and apparently has been since before the Wikia-to-Fandom transmogrification. The wiki still exists, but doesn't seem to have had any updates in years. But hey, speaking of H. P. Lovecraft (as I did many paragraphs above in an entirely different context), that is not dead which can eternal lie. The project could in principle still be revived, is what I'm saying. I guess that quote may not have been all that apposite. Sorry.
Theonosis
I first set up the Central Wongery wiki in December 2008 and posted the first articles the following January, so Theonosis, which launched in late 2009, doesn't technically predate the Wongery, but it comes close. (And of course the Wongery wasn't publicly viewable till December 2012, so it does predate that.) Theonosis is a fantasy setting which, once again, I haven't had a chance to really look over in detail; as far as I can tell the world of Theonosis doesn't really have much of an overall identity, but is more a framework intended for people to slot their own creations into different areas. In any case, though, the reason I'm bringing it up here isn't because it's an especially interesting setting (though, as I said, I haven't had a chance to look into it in detail, and maybe it's more interesting than it seemed from the brief glance I gave it), but because the entire setting was released as open content—and not only that, but its creator, who goes by the pseudonym "Modrobene" (also, surely not coincidentally, a name of the most powerful god in the Theonosis setting), invented a custom "Open Setting License" specifically for that purpose. There were also at least two other settings that were supposed to be under development under the Open Setting License, the science-fiction Thirdfleet and modern-day FreeVerse, but nothing much seems to have ever come of either of those.
The Open Setting License was an interesting idea, but I'm not sure it was really useful or necessary. Basically, while I'm not certain that the actual text of the license fully bore this out (I am not a lawyer, but neither was the person who wrote the license), the intent of the license was that if you published something based on the world of Theonosis, then any elements of the setting would automatically be Open Setting Content, but the text of the work itself would not. Thus, for instance, as an explanation on the site put it:
I can see all sorts of problems with this in practice. There's no rigorous definition of what counts as part of the setting for license purposes and what doesn't. Even the given example of the love poem strikes me as iffy—it could be argued that the character's speaking the love poem to his wife was an event in the setting, and therefore the love poem itself should be Open Setting Content. It seems to me that under the terms of the Open Setting License, someone could just rewrite a novel released under the license, copying exactly all the events, characters, and dialogue but rewording the (non-dialogue) text, and arguing that all the events, characters, and dialogue of the novel are in-setting materials and therefore Open Setting Content and fair game for reuse. Granted, one could also do this under the Creative Common License, but the Open Setting License seems to have been expressly intended to prevent this sort of thing, and it... doesn't. Furthermore, nothing in principle would stop someone from writing another novel that flatly contradicts an existing novel and/or the material on the website, therefore producing two incompatible versions of the setting that are both released under the Open Setting Content. I'm not sure this is really a problem, but I'm also not sure that it's something Modrobene anticipated. (For the record, I am fully aware that other writers can produce material about worlds of the Central Wongery that contradicts the material on the site, but I think the distinction between Wongery canon and non-canon renders that unproblematic, or at least less problematic. (We explicitly say that you don't have to follow canon in your own works, though of course under the licensing terms that would have been true even if we didn't explicitly say so.) The Theonosis website recognizes no such distinction.)For example, if you write a novel that includes the words to a common prayer to your Deity, you can not restrict others in their use of the same prayer in different works. In this instance, the prayer itself is a part of the setting, and therefore must be free. If you write a novel in which a character speaks a love poem to his wife, you can retain the rights to the love poem because it is a feature of your novel without being a feature of the setting.
Moreover, at least one page says that "[p]art of the OSL requires that all Open Setting Content be dual-licensed as Creative Commons", so... I'm not sure what the Open Setting License adds? (Granted, other pages seem to contradict this and impose more of a separation between the two licenses, but the page quoted above seems to be the most recent, so perhaps Modrobene's idea of the interaction between the licenses evolved over time and this is what it landed on.) Actually, the site says that "[a]ll Theonosis content must be released under the Creative Commons [BY-SA] license with the stipulation that individual credit need not be given" (emphasis added), which... I don't think is actually compatible with the terms of the Creative Commons license, so I don't think that even legally works. The Open Setting License itself includes a similar clause, explicitly stating that users "do not have to give credit to the Contributor(s) who created any element of Open Setting Content". The site on one page defends this as "[a] practical matter, as it would be difficult to decipher which users added which pieces of content", but still this... isn't great; I'd think many contributors might not be happy about not being personally credited for their work. (This "practical matter" was a solved problem anyway; Wikipedia has a similar issue of multiple contributors to articles, and manages to address the attrivution issue without trying to add additional stipulations to the Creative Commons license.) Well, like I said, the Open Setting License was an interesting idea, but in practice I don't think it really accomplishes anything that the Creative Commons license doesn't already do better. Still, I don't want to be too harsh here (although it may be too late for that); I may have some reservations about the implementation of the Open Setting License, but I applaud Modrobene's intent to release the setting under an open license for other people to use.
(I'm not just guessing, by the way, when I say that the person who wrote the license was not an lawyer. At one point the Open Setting License page explicitly said that "[i]t was not written by an attorney". (Presumably it was written by Modrobene themself.) That admission is missing from a later version of the license page, but the text of the license itself is unchanged.)
Modrobene seems to have used Reddit as their primary means of publicizing their project, touting Theonosis at one point as the "world's first open source fictional setting", which of course it wasn't, but it's understandable they didn't realize that. (A commenter brought up Orion's Eye as a preexisting open source setting, but that's inaccurate; while a collaboratively created setting, Orion's Eye is not and as far as I know never was released under any sort of open license. But, as discussed above, Basilicus, which also predated Theonosis, is.) They even tried offering cash prizes for contributions. In any case, despite Modrobene's attempts to drum up support and participation, the Theonosis site is long gone now, having apparently had its last updates in 2015 and been abandoned some time in 2018 or 2019... and now, inevitably, having been seized by one of those annoying companies that buys up expired domains to fill them with random garbage full of links for SEO purposes. (I tend to think of these companies as domain vultures, but honestly I probably shouldn't; that's not really fair to vultures, who get a bad enough rap as it is.) However, it's not completely gone forever; parts of the site are still available on the Wayback Machine; there are entries describing elements of the setting (with 3.5E D&D stats) on the D&D Wiki, and there is a dump of the wiki available on the Internet Archive.
(Should the apparent failure of both Basilicus and Theonosis worry me about the prospects of my own open settings having any success? Probably!)
Other Open Settings
Basilica and Theonosis are the two oldest open settings I know of. (Though it is of course not at all impossible that there are other equally old or older open settings I don't know about.) But other open settings have arisen since. Here's a brief and non-exhaustive list of a few others I know of:
- I mentioned myself a few posts back that the material on the SCP Foundation SCP Foundation website was released under a Creative Commons license, which I guess makes the universe of the SCP Foundation an open setting.
- All text of the Lands of Porphyra Campaign Setting is released under the Open Game License, as is the content of the Porphyra Roleplaying Game wiki, so the Porphyra Campaign Setting is also an open setting.
- When searching earlier this year for open-licensed wargames and customizable card games, I ran across a page of free roleplaying material that included several settings released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license: the postapocalyptic Nahmurg Wastes the ancient-Mesopotamia-flavored fantasy setting Braythmar, and the perhaps more traditional fantasy world of Gantauruk.
So, yes. There have been open settings before the Wongery, and there have been more open settings since, and no doubt will be more in the future.
All of which brings us back to the question raised in the opening to this blog post, viz., what's so special about the Wongery, and why should I expect anyone to care about this site?
I don't have an answer to that. Maybe there isn't one. Maybe there's nothing special about the Wongery, and nobody will ever care about it, and this has all been a huge waste of my time. I guess we'll see.
My current misgivings about the Wongery, however, don't mean that I'm going to cancel or delay the "hard launch" in January. Maybe I should, but I won't. At this point I've put in so much time on the Wongery, I figure it would be a huge waste not to follow through with it, even if it's not the paragon of creativity I may have once convinced myself it was. Is this just a sunk cost fallacy? Maybe. Probably. Would I be better off just forgetting about the Wongery, canceling the hard launch, and getting on with my life? Maybe. Probably.
On the other hand, the Wongery still is something I want to exist, and even if the chances of its ever achieving any semblance of success, even if I manage to carry out all my plans for its promotion, are less than one percent... still, if I don't at least try to do something with it, those chances are zero. So, what the hey. I'll put it out there, and we'll see what happens. (Probably nothing.)