Which I... also haven't been doing. Okay, I am going to set a goal of getting at least three new articles up in the next two days.
Which ought to go great, seeing how spectacularly I've been doing at meeting my goals.
But anyway, something came up recently that I figured I may as well write a post about. But first, some preamble, because clearly I haven't already been digressing enough. There are a lot of red links in the Wongery, links to nonexistent articles. But if I've linked an article, it means that while that article doesn't exist yet, it's one that may be written in the future. As I think I may have mentioned before, one possibility I've been toying with is starting a Patreon after the hard launch and giving patrons an opportunity to help decide which red links we'll prioritize writing articles for. But even if that doesn't happen, we will of course be writing some of those articles. Currently in-progress articles that will fill in some red links (and which therefore probably won't be red links by the time anyone reads this post) include baderscatch, balbaramba, Basodi, Blathe, circle, eidolon, tcerot, umbilicus (Plex), and year. (The fact that so many of them begin with a B is a coincidence I didn't notice until I was typing up that list just now.) Still, very likely there will always be a lot of red links in the Wongery, because even as we write articles for some of the old red links, the new articles will have new red links to other articles we haven't written yet.
But anyway, generally if there's a link to something in the Wongery, we have at least some idea what that something is. We don't have the full article written, of course, or we'd have posted it, and we don't necessarily have a lot of detail, but at least we have a broad concept in mind; we don't just include random words for which we have no meaning attached. Let's take, for instance, the article on the Silver Coalition, one of three large coalitions of nations in the world of Jhembaz. The article includes a list of forty-three member nations, plus four former members that have left the coalition and five that no longer exist. Right now, all of those are red links, and there's no information about those nations beyond their names. But I do have notes on each nation, in anticipation of later writing articles on them. Not extensive notes—for most of them it's just a couple of keywords—but I do have at least some vague notion about each nation that I can expand on later. (Perhaps the Silver Coalition article should include a brief description of each nation, and perhaps I'll add that later. But at the time of this blog post I haven't, and it doesn't.)
Which brings me (at long last) to the point of this post. Recently I was considering fleshing out the Five Masters of Thamarand a bit, and wanted to refresh my memory as to what folks were common there. Here's the relevant paragraph as it currently stands (though this may or may not be partly or wholly rewritten before the hard launch—well, at least one word is definitely going to be rewritten, since I don't use "race" to refer to different ellogous species anymore):
Now, I know, of course, what a human is, and there's already an article about the rradri. The azraryazen are briefly described in the Varra article. (The relevant sentence as it currently stands: "The azraryazen are mineral beings apparently born somehow of Varra's manifold crystals; they exist in plentiful varieties (not all of which, by any means, are intelligent, however).") But what are all those other folks mentioned? It had been long enough since I'd written this that I didn't remember, so I searched through my notes. And I did find brief notes on some of them. Pedarras: "Mixed things!" (Okay, this is certainly vague, but it's enough to give me a reminder and I actually do think I know what I meant by this—though yeah, I should have been more explicit.) Kelden (singular klen): "Weirdly spotted, deformed humanoids, knees backward, naked." kukani (singular kukane): "Lava creatures." Iadora (singular iador): "Robots from a crystal world." Zegzats: "Halflingoid plant creature." Soldis: "Iunno. Make something up. Maybe something glowy." (Uh... all right, so maybe it's a slight overstatement to say we always have a concrete idea of what a red link refers to.)The City lives up to its name, a large network of residential and commercial buildings largely independent of the court and the Core. The population of the City of Thamarand is mostly human, but there are many other races represented, some of whom have their own racial enclaves. Kelden, quilaghs, zegzats, and various sorts of azraryazen and argen live within the City's boundaries, along with many other races present in smaller numbers including (but by no means limited to) rradri, soldis, iadora, pedarras, kukani, and even some extraplanar species. Not all the City is residential and commercial; it has too its industrial districts, places of great mills and usines, many of them far ahead technologically of anything found on Varra's surface.
But what about argen and quilaghs? I scoured my notes, but could find no further mention of those. I'm pretty sure I did have some idea of what they were when I wrote that article, but it's been long enough now that I don't remember. Now, it's not impossible that I do have that information written down somewhere that I haven't found yet—I searched all the files on my computer where I thought it might be, but it's also possible I have it written on paper, and that I may yet come across it. But it's also possible I won't. And if that's the case, then when it comes down to it and when I decide it's time to write those articles, then, uh, I guess I'll just have to, in the words of my notably unhelpful notes on the soldis, "make something up".
I don't think this is the first time this has happened, though I don't recall other specific examples. This is, however, the most recent time, and the time that brought this phenomenon back to my attention. Especially as I was writing the earlier articles, I wasn't always good at keeping my notes organized and in one place, and there may be other information that's been lost. I think I've been better lately at keeping all my relevant notes in one place and easier to find, but it's something I guess maybe I ought to be more conscientious about.
Anyway, I don't know that I have an important point here; just wanted to maybe give you a bit of a glimpse behind the metaphorical curtain, I guess, or something; whatever; I think at this point I'm just rambling and have clearly run out of things to say, so... I should probably stop. Anyway, expect more articles soon, is what I would say to anyone who was reading this blog post the day I posted it, which nobody is, so there's no point in saying that. Writing blog posts I know nobody is going to read for months is weird.