The Wongery

So, while I still haven't gotten around to implementing the Game namespace (and it'll probably be some time before I do, since I'll have to get a lot better with coding and learn about how to use MediaWiki hooks and extensions), but I've been rethinking some of my ideas about the interface. My plan was to have tabs in the tab bar the new namespaces—Game, Asset, Atlas, Build, Works, Sources—, between the Article and Talk tabs. And then to allow the user to switch between subspaces, like content for different games, I was going to have a second row of tabs below the first one, with an "Overview" tab on the left and then tabs for each individual game.

But... would that really be the best approach? Even aside from the æsthetics of the second row of tabs, about which I was already dubious, I'm not sure it's practical given the number of games I want to eventually include. (I say "eventually" because when I finally do get around to implementing the Game space, it'll probably only have three or four games at first, and while I do plan to add more over time I'm not sure whether at the time of the hard launch there'll be more than ten or twelve... but there are dozens of RPGs I ultimately hope to include support for, and that's not even counting the card games, wargames, and other games; they just won't all be there at (hard) launch.) There's a limit to how many tabs can fit on the screen, after all, barring shenanigans like absurdly small font sizes. Could the subspace tab bar scroll left and right? Eh, even if I could figure out how to implement that, it seems like it could be unwieldy for the user.

So I thought maybe instead of a tab bar there could just be a dropdown menu at the top of each Game page through which the user could navigate to different subspaces. But that seems like it could be easy to miss and a bit inconvenient, so I'm not really sold on it either.

Hm... hold on, wait, I'm just now coming up with another idea. What if there are some game tabs displayed, and that at the right of the subspace tab bar there's a dropdown to see the rest (like the Tools dropdown on the existing tab bar)? Hm, that might work. And then once the user selects a subspace from the dropdown, that subspace gets added to the visible tabs, displacing one the user hasn't visited lately. That could work. The main question is what tabs would be visible when the user first visits the Game page. The most popular games? But eh, I actually kind of want to motivate users to check out less well known games. Alphabetical? But then that would consistently privilege the games that happened to come first alphabetically (4C, the Archmage Engine, the Awfully Cheerful Engine, etc.) I guess the subspaces initially displayed could be randomized, maybe. Then, too, there's still the question of whether this would really look good, which I'm still not sure about. But eh, I don't know; this might be the solution I go with. Or maybe later I'll come up with an idea I like better.

Another thing I've been unsure of regarding the subspaces is the URL. After considering the matter earlier, I'd been leaning toward having the subspaces basically be subdirectories: the main page for the EABA subspace, for instance, would be at Game:Main_Page/EABA. But just a few minutes ago I think I changed my mind and now I'm leaning toward delimiting them with colons like full spaces, so the EABA subspace would be at Game:EABA:Main_Page. I don't know. I'll have to come to a decision before I actually implement the subspaces, but I don't have to make it right now.

But none of that is what I wanted to write this blog post about. No, there's another realization about the Game tab I just came to recently.

Although I still haven't implemented the Gamespace, I've begun writing content for it. In the case of most games, that means, well, basically just stat blocks and similar crunchy rules bits. The open licenses allow use of the game rules, but generally not of the specific setting details. However, for GURPS, Steve Jackson Games' "Generic Universal RolePlaying System", the case is different. GURPS is not under any sort of open license, but does have a fairly generous Online Policy regarding fan use of their game, which explicitly does allow "original background and scenario material using our rules terminology... as long as you're not selling it in any way." (There's a lot more to the policy than that, of course; I just quoted the most immediately relevant bit.)

So, under this policy, as long as I'm not charging any money for it—which I had no plans to do anyway—I should be able to include GURPS stats for Wongery creatures and characters. But I can do more than that; if I'm interpreting the Online Policy correctly, then as long as I include the necessary disclaimers and notices (and as long as I'm not restating the copyrighted rules or otherwise copying material from the GURPS books, and as long as I'm properly designating any trademarks of Steve Jackson Games), I can refer to setting information from GURPS books too—and in particular, I can give suggestions for using the Wongery worlds with GURPS Fourth Edition default setting, the Infinite Worlds. And so I've been doing just that. It's not posted yet, partly because I don't have the Gamespace implemented yet and partly because I haven't finished writing it, but I've been including on the GURPS Gamespaces some links between Wongery worlds and the 8-dimensional space of GURPS: Infinite Worlds: there's a portal from Madland to Vlastach (part of the time; half the year it leads from Vlastach to a Quantum 10 world called Cypress); Lemerari, one of the cities of Eidecia, is on a Quantum 6 world called Colbert. (Also, speaking of Madland and of Eidecia, there's a link between the cities of Savarginia and the eidopoles. Overkill has agents on a Quantum 7 world called Mandragola; the Infinity Patrol knows Nuclearth as "Teller-2"; and so on.

Now, while of course the primary purpose of the Wongery is to present our own original worlds... you know, it's fun sometimes to also play in others' proverbial playgrounds, to build on foundations that others have laid. And I sort of wished I could refer directly to other settings like I could the Infinite Worlds.

And then it occurred to me (very belatedly—I should have realized this a lot sooner, but I am apparently not very bright) that maybe I can.

Of course I can't do so under the OGL, or the ORC, or the other open licenses that reserve some "closed content" as outside the license terms. But some other companies might also have separate fan licenses, similar to GURPS' Online Policy, which would allow similar use of its trademarks and intellectual property (subject to similar restrictions). I'd really only looked for fan licenses/online policies for games that didn't have open licenses... and except for GURPS, I didn't find any. HERO Games, the company behind Champions and the Hero System that grew out of it, had such an online policy in the past, but the site has since undergone a complete redesign, and I could find no such policy in the new version—and can't assume that the previous policy is still in effect, especially since it specifically said that "[a]ll of the policies and conditions set forth in this document are subject to change or withdrawal at any time and without notice". (I made a post on their forums asking if they currently had any such policy, but as of the time I'm writing this I haven't received a reply.) The same is true (except the posting on their forum part) of White Wolf Publishing, the owner of the World of Darkness games that in the nineties rivaled Dungeons & Dragons for popularity, as well as the anime-inspired RPG Exalted. In this case, it's somewhat more understandable since White Wolf has since undergone a change of ownership and no longer publishes its own material—nor in fact even exists as a separate entity from its current owner, Paradox Interaction—, the World of Darkness and Exalted lines now being published under license by Onyx Path Publishing. (Technically there's also a "fifth edition" not published by Onyx Path, but the less said about that the better.) In any case, back when White Wolf was still its own company and still producing its own games, there were clear guidelines for sanctioned fansites called the Dark Pack; the current version of the White Wolf page has a Dark Pack page, but it's not clear that it covers RPG statblocks and game expansions (there's a long list of types of "non-monetized and non-commercial content" that can be created and shared, but RPG materials, except for character sheets and online character generators, are not among them), nor, even if it did, whether it would cover the IP licensed to Onyx Path or only the "fifth edition" properties. (Nor does Onyx Path Publishing have any sort of online policy that I could find, either for the games it publishes under license of for its own property such as the Storypath System games.)

Atlas Games, publisher of the RPGs Ars Magica, Feng Shui, Over the Edge, and Unknown Armies, does have a relatively clear Fair Use policy for its materials—but unlike the GURPS Online Policy it disallows not only charging money for content that uses its IP, but generating income in any way from the site that hosts the content, including advertisement. Now, I wasn't planning on ever having ads on the Wongery anyway (I made a whole blog post about that), but I was considering eventually making a Patreon account for the Wongery, which means I would be making some money from the site. The Atlas Games Fair Use policy doesn't explicitly call out Patreon accounts as a problem, but it does mention "subscriptions", so a Patreon account would still run afoul of its restrictions. Hold on... or would it? Taking another look at the policy, I think when it refers to "subscriptions" it means circumstances where you'd have to pay a subscription fee to access the content; I'm not sure it's intended to rule out something like Patreon that's basically an optional way to support the site. You know, I think I can email Atlas Games and ask if use of its content on the Wongery Game pages would be okay under their Fair Use guidelines. Though I can certainly wait on that until after the hard launch; it's not as if I don't have a load of other systems I can add (and other things to do) before then anyway.

But anyway, though, as I said, I'd searched for fansite guidelines or online policies for companies that didn't have their systems released under any sort of open license... it hadn't occurred to me to search for them for companies that did. Even if I could already publish statblocks and rules expansions for their games under an open license, there might be fan licenses or online policies that would also allow me to refer to their settings and other closed content in ways that the open license didn't permit. And yes, while there may very well be more, I did find at least two companies for which that did seem to be the case.

Paizo, creator of the Pathfinder and Starfinder role-playing games, has a Community Use Policy that allows noncommercial use of its intellectual property, provided that it's free to access and that a proper notice is included. Chaosium, publisher of games including RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu—and of the Basic Roleplaying system—has a Fan Material Policy with similar terms. Under these policies, it seems we could actually refer to specific locations and characters in the Pathfinder world of Golarion and the RuneQuest world of Golarion, and come up with ways to link them to worlds of the Wongery, after all.

Of course, since the content published under the terms of these policies wouldn't be under the Open Game License, I couldn't mix it in with the open content—and vice versa. I'd have to have separate pages for the open game license content vs. the fanpage/fair use content. Maybe whole separate subspaces. But then what could I call them? In the case of the Chaosium games, there's a straightforward solution; we could have the BRP tab for the Basic Roleplaying rules and statblocks published under the ORC, and then a separate RuneQuest tab for suggestions on how to use Wongery material with a RuneQuest game, following the Fan Material Policy. For Pathfinder things are a bit stickier, because the ruleset and the game don't have separate names; I guess maybe I could have a Golarion tab for material published under the Community Use policy, except that it seems a bit odd to name the tabs after worlds instead of games, and if I'm going to do that should I call the RuneQuest tab Glorantha? In any case, it may be best to split the list of role-playing games on the Game page into two: one list for RPGs for which content was provided on the Wongery under the OGL, ORC, CC, or other open licenses, and another list for those for which some free material was available under an appropriate Community Use or Fan Content Policy. Some games, like Pathfinder and BRP, would be represented in both lists under different names: in the first for open content, and in the second for material that builds on IP not available under the open game license.

Or, you know, on second thought, maybe I won't be doing any of that. I haven't really totally convinced myself that this would all be completely in keeping with the applicable policies, but even if it is, there's another consideration. One thing that makes GURPS especially suited to this kind of treatment is the very nature of the Infinite Worlds setting. It already involves, well, if not literally infinite worlds, then at least an awful lot of them, and travel between worlds is a major theme of the setting. In contrast, the only major Pathfinder IP that's not usable through the ORC is Golarion, a single, rather generic fantasy world. It doesn't seem reasonable or particularly entertaining to say that the single world of Golarion for some reason has portals to every world of the Wongery. Well, technically I suppose there are also the other worlds of the Golarion system, Aballon and Akiton and so forth, and that helps some but not much; sure, I could say there's a portal to X'xere in Castrovel, but meh. (And okay, there are the planes of the Great Beyond, but the existence of those actually are included as open content—albeit some of them by different names—and while many of the details that have been developed about them are closed content, I wouldn't have to refer to those details just to mention the existence of a portal to one of them.) As for RuneQuest, that setting too encompasses just a single world, and one more self-contained than Golarion (albeit much more interesting); portals to other worlds aren't even really a thing in Glorantha, and positing a portal somewhere in Glorantha to each world of the Wongery would be downright silly. There just isn't as much scope for connecting all the worlds of the Wongery to Golarion or Glorantha than there is the infinite worlds of the Infinite Worlds. Sure, it could be fun to be able to say that one of the portals of the Ochamecon leads to a chamber deep within the Sunken Queen on Golarion, or that the eidopolis of Bulemar lies on the coast of far-flung Luathela in Glorantha. But I'm not sure it's worth—actually, I'm pretty sure it's not worth—having a whole new subspace just to make a handful of such references.

So, yeah, over the course of writing this blog post (which I didn't just sit down and write all at once; this post was written piecemeal over the course of three or four days) I think I've changed my mind about the main subject of this post. When I first started writing this, I'd basically fully resolved to make use of the appropriate Community Use/Fan Content policies to include pages directly referencing Golarion and Glorantha and suggesting how the Wongery content could be used in them—and to keep looking for other companies that might have similar policies I could likewise so employ. But now I think I've decided I'm not going to do that after all; it may be stretching the intent of the policies a bit far, and in any case I don't think there's enough I'd want to include to make it worth the extra subspaces. So I guess that makes this whole blog post pointless.

Well, not entirely pointless, or I wouldn't have posted it. (At least I don't think I would have, but I can't promise I've never done any pointless thing.) For one thing, the first few paragraphs about the changes in my plans for the Gamespace still apply. For another thing, maybe some readers might find the thought processes behind my changing plans for the Wongery interesting, even in cases where I end up deciding against a change. (And, hey, I guess it sort of gave me an opportunity to slip in suggestions for links between Wongery worlds and Golarion and Glorantha in the context of explaining why I couldn't include such links.) In any case, though, I've really got to get around to actually implementing the Game space (and the other custom namespaces), instead of just writing about them. If I'd spent half the time actually trying to write the code for the custom namespaces as I've spent writing blog posts about them, then... I still wouldn't be anywhere near done with them, because seriously, this is going to be kind of a big undertaking.