The Wongery

I haven't got much done on the Wongery in the last few days, even in terms of behind-the-scenes things that aren't immediately apparent on the site. But for once, I have some semblance of a good excuse for it. I just arrived home from Gen Con, and there's enough to see and do at Gen Con that I haven't really had time for anything else while I was there.

For those who are plugged in to the tabletop gaming scene, Gen Con needs no introduction. For those for whom it does need an introduction, however, Gen Con is an annual game convention taking place in late summer in Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.A.. It covers all sorts of tabletop games, including board games, card games, miniature wargames, and puzzles, although give my particular interests I was there mostly for the role-playing games.

This was a big commitment financially. Again, I don't want to reveal too much about myself and make it too easy to figure out my identity, so, among other things, I don't want to reveal where I live (though it's possible I've dropped enough inadvertent hints to make it possible to guess—I hope not, but it's possible). I don't think it's too much, however, to state that I don't live in Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.A., or anywhere near Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.A. Attending Gen Con therefore means paying for a plane flight, a hotel stay, and a rental car, and that all adds up to a lot of money. Still, I can afford to spend that much once a year; I don't do much traveling in general, so Gen Con is my one big annual excursion.

While people do play games at Gen Con—Exhibit Halls A through E of the Indiana Convention Center and most of the field of the adjoining Lucas Oil Stadium were filled with tables where people were playing games, as were many other, smaller rooms scattered throughout the convention center and some of the adjacent hotels—that's not what I go there for. I spend most of my time at Gen Con attending seminars and workshops and exploring the main exhibit hall. (Halls A through E of the convention center were, as I said, devoted to game-playing, but Halls F through K were set aside for the Gen Con main exhibit hall where various companies, artists, and writers have booths where they can show off their work and sell their products.) In fact, I booked Thursday solid with workshops and seminars and so wasn't able to set foot in the exhibit hall until Friday. (This wasn't on purpose. It was probably poor planning.) At least, I thought that was going to be the case when I wrote the preceding part of this paragraph—which I actually wrote on my laptop during a panel Thursday morning (because I keep somehow convincing myself I can multitask despite all evidence to the contrary)—but it turned out a two-hour afternoon session I had registered for was canceled, so I was able to make a brief foray into the exhibit hall on Thursday after all. (There were other events during that time that I was interested in that I would have gone to instead, except they all required paper tickets, which take time to print, so I wouldn't have been able to get them in time. Gen Con does also sell "generic" tickets which can be used to get into any event as long as there's room, but having bought some generic tickets last year and ending up not using them, I didn't buy any generic tickets this year, and apparently I should have. Oh well.)

And then on Friday I realized after I arrived at the convention center that I had left my paper tickets at the hotel. (Some Gen Con events used electronic tickets, that were readable by simply scanning the badge; some used paper tickets; but it happened that all the Friday seminars and workshops I had signed up for used paper tichets.) This was a nontrivial matter, because I was not staying in one of the hotels within walking distance of the convention center; I was staying at a hotel five kilometers away, and my rental car was parked a twenty-minute walk from the convention center. Then, as I was driving back to the hotel, I got distracted trying to figure out how to work the air conditioner in the rental car and went the wrong way on a freeway interchange, costing me more time as I ended up taking a more circuitous route to the hotel than I had intended. To top off the trifecta of tonterías, I discovered on finally reaching the hotel that I had left the keycard to the hotel room inside. I am not a smart man. Anyway, this wasted an hour and change that I could otherwise have spent looking around the main exhibit hall, though as it turned out I did manage to see everything in the exhibit hall before the end of the convention, albeit barely.

Among the workshops I attended were several about worldbuilding. Now, when I was looking through the event listings and saw these workshops, I had mixed feelings about whether I should go to them. On the one hand, well, worldbuilding was something I definitely had a strong interest in. This entire site is, after all, devoted to worldbuilding. On the other hand, well, I've been doing worldbuilding almost all my life; if there's one thing I know, it's worldbuilding. Would these workshops really be teaching me anything new?

But was it arrogant to think that I was such an expert in worldbuilding that I had nothing left to learn? Yes, yes it was, obviously. That's a horribly, cartoonishly arrogant thing to think. But was I really that arrogant? Absolutely; I am a deeply flawed person. But I figured I should at least pretend not to be horribly arrogant, and I decided to attend the workshops anyway. Also, while I might not want to admit it to myself, there was, after all, the possibility that I was overestimating my worldbuilding skills and that despite all the time I've spent on this activity I don't know as much about it as I think I do.

(One might note that the statement "if there's one thing I know it's worldbuilding" combined with the premise that I may not know worldbuilding syllogistically combine to imply that I may not, in fact, know anything. I cannot honestly deny that this is a real possibility.)

One panel I feel merits being singled out is a panel on Saturday called "Building Bold Worlds", hosted by authors Kelli Fitzpatrick and Derek Tyler Attico. Not because I feel I learned a lot about worldbuilding from the panel—Fitzpatrick and Attico were good presenters and gave some excellent advice, but as I said worldbuilding has been my main avocation for years and I feel like I've already developed pretty good skills at it, and as I also said I'm extremely arrogant and if I did learn something new from the panel I probably wouldn't admit it to myself. But the reason I feel I ought to mention this panel is because of an activity at the end, when the presenters challenged attendees to put their pointers into practice to develop a world of their own—either coming up with a new world on the spot, or developing one they were already working on. I do, in fact, have a lot of worlds I'm already working on that could use further development, including a couple that haven't been posted to the Wongery yet but will be (only one of which—Tammaz—so far has a (tentative) name), but I figured I may as well go ahead and create a new world for the challenge. I ended up, in fact, creating a whole new universe, or I guess more accurately a new parallel version of our universe—only in very broad strokes as yet, of course, but I feel those broad strokes have some interesting potential that will later be filled in. It'll be a while, but that world will eventually be posted to the Wongery; I don't have a name for it yet, but when you see a planet settled by refugees from a somewhat well-meaning but imperious coalition that wants to keep the homeworlds of other folks isolated and ignorant of the existence of other ellogous life, that's the one that was created (or at least germinated) during this panel.

One panel I did not attend but did consider attending was a preview for the fifth-edition version of the Dungeons & Dragons Planescape setting. Introduced in 1994 during the game's second edition, Planescape is by far my favorite D&D campaign setting, and the only D&D setting I'm considering honoring as a World of the Week, when and if I get that feature up and running again. I kind of waited until the last minute to register for events, but even so when I went through the event listings there was one space left for the Planescape panel. I thought about snapping that last space up while it was still available, but there were a few other events at the same time that also interested me, and I figured I'd wait until I went through the whole schedule and then make the decision. I think I knew, though I didn't really fully admit it to myself, that that last space would almost certainly be claimed by someone else if I didn't register for it immediately, and indeed that's what happened; by the time an hour or so later that I had finished looking through the event listings and was making my decisions and actually registering for the events, the Planescape event was sold out. But honestly, again, at some level I think I was kind of expecting that, and even kind of welcoming it as an excuse not to go to that panel despite—or because of—my affection for Planescape. Because I love the Planescape setting, but I don't really expect to love the fifth edition take on it. I have a great deal of apprehension about what the new book is going to do the setting, given what happened in fifth edition to other settings—Ravenloft in particular. The fifth edition treatment of Ravenloft is, in my opinion (for whatever that's worth), little short of a disaster.

Not because they changed some male darklords into women, which is one thing I remember seeing a lot of complaints about. I mean, I'm enough of a stickler for canon that it bothers me that they changed the darklords so drastically, but not because they changed them into women specifically; it would have bothered me just as much if they'd changed the personalities and natures of the darklords in question without changing their genders. (And honestly, as much as I liked the Ravenloft setting, it could certainly do with more diversity.) No, what really bothers me is this: After an initial spate of unconnected adventures, during the second and third edition a great deal of effort was made to assemble what had been a bunch of separate set piece sites into a coherent setting. Ravenloft was no longer just a collection of discrete domains: there were borders and passages between the domains; there was trade and cultural exchange; there were political and personal relationships between the darklords. Ravenloft began as little more than an umbrella branding term for a set of independent adventures with little in common except a horror theme, but it was developed into a vibrant and interesting world with a well-defined geography and a rich history that could and did easily support entire campaigns. And then the fifth edition books throw that all away. They make Ravenloft just a boring bunch of disjunct domains again. All the connections and relations between the domains that had made Ravenloft into a fully fleshed world were discarded.

(To be fair, this wasn't new to fifth edition; this closely follows the fourth-edition presentation of Ravenloft. However, fifth edition reverted many of the drastic changes that fourth edition had made—it undid much of the destruction that fourth edition had wrought on the Forgotten Realms; it restored the older D&D Great Wheel cosmology rather than keeping the default fourth-edition World Axis—but it left Ravenloft in its much diminished and disarticulated fourth-edition state.)

So, yeah, I'm kind of dreading finding out what damage fifth edition might have inflicted on Planescape. I guess I'll find out eventually in any case (though I'm not sure exactly when, since I don't necessarily plan to rush out and buy the fifth-edition Planescape book as soon as it's available), and there's nothing I really missed out on by not going to the Planescape preview panel other than a chance to ask the presenter questions, which I'm not sure I would have bothered to do anyway (and I'm not sure what questions I would have had that wouldn't be answered regardless when the book comes out).

Anyway, what does any of this have to do with the Wongery, and why am I making a blog post about it? Well, let me explain. (I don't really have to ask you to let me explain, actually. You can't stop me! Though you can just stop reading, I guess...)

One of the reasons I haven't made more progress with the Wongery—aside from the obvious procrastination and incompetence—is that I have limited time I can devote to it. I do, after all, need to pay for things like rent and food (and, on the slightly less essential side, webhosting and books), and in order to do so I need to work. I do, fortunately, have a relatively interesting job with a lot of variety; I don't spend every day sitting in an office, or standing in a restaurant or a retail establishment. Still, my job doesn't involve a lot of creativity. I'd like to make a living in some creative pursuit. I'd love it if somehow, between Patreon and/or merchandise and/or licensing and/or whatever other reasonable monetization schemes I implement, I can make enough from the Wongery for this to be my full-time job, though the chances of that may admittedly be remote. But in the meantime, while I have to do other things to make a living, I fit in what time I can for the Wongery and other creative pursuits.

Still, the requirement to spend so much time on noncreative pursuits in order to make a living does get wearying. And I think it helps, psychologically, to take a few days off and immerse myself in something more related to my creative interests, in games and worldbuilding and imagination. It helps recharge my figurative batteries, recover from the routine, refill my motivation.

Does this mean I'm now going to be a perdiligent creative dynamo and embark on a whirlwind of productivity? (Can you embark on a whirlwind? Is that a mixed metaphor? Editorial memo to self: Don't actually change the preceding sentence, but add a parenthetical bit acknowledging its iffiness and including a self-referential editorial memo to myself about it.)

No, of course not. I'm still an easily distractible, horrible procrastinator. Still, I do feel somewhat recharged, and maybe I can get a little more done over the next few weeks than I have been doing. We'll see.