The Wongery

All right, it has (once again) been way too long since my last blog post here... but I didn't want to let the whole month of May go without posting something. I have, alas, been busy with work and other matters. As I've said before, I don't hate my job, and it's a reasonably interesting one that even often leaves me time when I have to be present but don't have to completely focus on work and can get some things done on my own projects (I'm at work right now while I'm typing this very paragraph), but it's not really a job that involves a lot of creativity, and it does take up a lot of my time; I'd really like to find a way to make a living through more creative pursuits, and I am trying to make some moves toward that during what little free time I have, but I haven't made much progress in that direction yet. And in the last couple of months my job has kept me particularly busy.

But I have still been finding some time to work on the Wongery. Just a few days ago I finally posted a new article in the Central Wongery (on the Umbilicus, an important location on the living prison world of Plex). And, although it's not finished yet at the time I'm writing this, I'm working on a heavy rewrite and expoansion of the old article on deeplings, watery beings created by of the Bathybius. (And I'm implementing a significant change in terminology here. Originally deeplings were entities split off from the substance of the Bathybius itself, in contrast to infected, similar entities that were originally other types of creature transformed into their current form. But when I was rewriting the Bathybius article a while back, I decided that given their similarity, it would be logical and useful to have an umbrella term to refer jointly to both deeplings and infected, and settled on "nicker", a name for a folkloric water spirit cognate to the better known nixie or nix. But I was never really totally happy with that term, and when it came time to rewrite the deepling article, I rethought the matter, eventually deciding that I liked "deepling" better as the umbrella term and renaming what used to be called a deepling to an imp—which term will eventually have a separate article that I'll write as soon as I'm done revising the deepling article. This is the type of retconny change I feel like I can get away with making now while the Wongery remains obscure and no one has really used the material yet for any derivative works of their own, but when and if other people do start using this content for their own creations, such major changes may become more problematic.)

What I've been spending more time on, though, is preparing to... well, to actually make some content for those subspaces I just finally implemented back in December but that currently remain unused. Specifically, I'm starting with the RPG space—after all, as I've mentioned before, the Wongery's roots lie largely with RPGs, with much of its content having originally been created for that purpose, even if I later decided to release it for broader use. And more specifically still, I'm going to start by posting the statistics for one creature for each of the RPGs currently represented in the Wongery RPG space. It seems fitting; I've always had a particular fondness for books of "monsters" for RPGs, and if I'm going to start putting RPG content on the Wongery, "monsters" seem like an appealing place to start.

More specifically still, I'm going to start with the xastre—a spiderlike creature found in the oceans of the world of Dadauar. This is not, admittedly, because it's going to be a particularly useful monster for RPG campaigns; it's a relatively tough opponent that would be too difficult an encounter for starting characters, and it's found at the bottom of the ocean where PCs are unlikely to venture in most campaigns. But I chose it as the first "monster" I'd stat up, for several reasons. The main reason is that the xastre article was one of the first articles posted to the Wongery, going up on the same day the wiki was first created (January 1, 2009)... so it seems appropriate that it also be one of the first articles to have its subject statted up in game terms. Also, it's a relatively straightforward monster that should be fairly simple to stat up, not having the magical abilities or unusual qualities of, for example, the tabulator batirine, which article technically did predate the xastre article by an hour and a half.

So, yes, I've been working on statting up the xastre so I can get up the RPG pages for it and finally have some content in the RPG space. So why has it taken me so long, and why isn't it up yet? Well... because as much as I want to get that content up there, it's a nontrivial task. There are a lot of things that have to be done first. Such as...

Reading the Rules

If I'm going to create game statistics for the xastre, or for anything else, I have to know the rules of the game. Which I figured means I ought to read at least the core rules, cover to cover, for each RPG I wanted to stat it up for. This has... taken a lot longer than I thought it would. As I said, I don't have a lot of free time, and I'm not a particularly fast reader... and RPG rulebooks are dense and detailed and especially slow going, the more so as I'm reading carefully and cross-referencing to try to make sure I fully understand all the rules rather than just skimming through them quickly to get the gist. Still, I'm almost finished with this step. I just have to get through Pathfinder Monster Core and then I'll have read all the core rules for all seven of the RPGs currently represented in the Wongery RPG space.

Writing the Stats

And then, of course, once I've learned all the rules, I have to actually put them into practice and work out the stats. And I've made some progress on that. I've worked out the full statistics for the xastre for Savage Worlds, EABA (with some help on the EABA Discord from someone more experienced with the system), and GURPS; I'm almost done with the Pathfinder stats but want to wait to finalize the special abilities until after I've read through the Monster Core and have a better feel for how the special abilities are implemented for existing Pathfinder monsters; I've... huh, until I checked just now I actually thought I'd gotten farther with the stats for Basic Roleplaying than I have, but I feel sufficiently comfortable by now with the BRP system that I don't think that's going to be hard to finish. I haven't started the D&D 5e stats, but honestly that's just because I wanted to get the harder systems out of the way first; D&D is the system I have the most experience with creating content for (it's not my favorite system, but it's a popular enough one that I figured it was worth doing something with), and statting up the xastre for 5e should be easy; I just haven't gotten to it yet. It's the Year Zero Engine that's going to be a bit of a challenge, mostly because the YZE SRD includes no sample monsters or guidelines for sample monsters. The logical thing to do, then, would be to look at existing YZE games and see how they handle monsters... but the only YZE game I currently own is Vaesen, and I'm not sure how representative it is. But I just ordered a copy of Forbidden Lands, so I'll take a look at that and then I'll figure out how I'll implement the xastre and other Wongery creatures in the Year Zero rules.

So, if I do have the xastre statted up in some systems, even if I haven't finished with others, why haven't I posted those stats yet? Well, in part because I want to get the stats posted for all the RPGs at once. But even if I had finished statting the xastre up in all seven currently represented RPG systems, there are still other things I'd have to get done before I could post it. Such as...

Templates

A typical RPG monster stat block isn't generally just a block of text. RPG stat blocks have their own formats, different for each RPG, and getting them to look nice will involve the use of stylings, tables, and other ceeëssessery. And unless I want to do all of that manually for each page—which I don't (and which I definitely don't want to force other users to do on the Public Wongery, either), the best way to handle that would be with MediaWiki templates—a different template for each RPG. (That is, a different monster template for each RPG; eventually I'll also want to also make templates for spells, and characters, and anything else that has its own different kind of stat block. But first things first.)

Now, I've made simple templates in the past, of course, like the stub template for pages intended for later expansion (and not intended in their current form to be selected by the Random Pages functions). But RPG monster templates, with their optional parameters and detailed formatting, are going to be considerably more involved. So much so that they can't be, or at least shouldn't be, implemented with just plain wikicode. Rather, they'd probably best be implemented the way such complex templates are now implemented in Wikipedia... as modules written in the scripting language Lua. Which means I'm going to have to install the Scribunto extension on the Wongery. But more importantly, or more timeconsumingly, it also means...

Lua

I'm going to have to learn Lua.

Well, okay, this step I have now completed. More or less. I went ahead and took a Lua course on Udemy. Now, technically, I'm not quite finished with the course, but that's because the last twenty percent of the course is all about applying what was taught in the rest of the course to use Lua with Roblox Studio, which wasn't what I took the course for. (Roblox Studio, which also uses the Lua scripting language, is the engine that allows users to make their own games for Roblox, an extremely popular game platform—popular enough, in fact, that there's a very good chance you already knew what it was and I didn't have to explain it.) I guess I'll probably still go ahead and finish the course at some point; I guess I'm something of a completionist, and who knows? Maybe someday I'll want to make a Roblox game. But it's not a priority, and I've finished the part of the course that matters.

So, yes. I've learned Lua. I don't have a lot of experience with it yet; I'm sure there are things it may take me a bit to get right when it comes to actually using it; and honestly it's been long enough since I finished (the first eighty percent of) the course that I've probably forgotten a lot of it. But I feel like I at least know it well enough now that I should be able to figure out what I need, especially since I can look at existing MediaWiki modules as examples. But that still doesn't mean I'm ready to create the templates just yet, because...

CSS

...I also need to put together the CSS styling for the statblocks.

Now, okay, the CSS itself shouldn't be too complicated. In fact, it would hardly be worth mentioning except for one thing. I don't want to lump all the CSS for the pages for every RPG systems together in one of the MediaWiki stylesheets, and have every page on the Wiki have to read all that CSS code. Ideally, I'd want to have a separate CSS file for each RPG system, and have them used only by the subspaces that need them.

So how would I make that happen? Well, there's a MediaWiki extension called TemplateStyles that allows you to apply stylesheets selectively to certain pages. But I'd still have to add a line into each page with game stats to specify the stylesheet to be used, which is less than ideal; I'd much rather have them to automatically used by the pages in the corresponding subspaces. Which means...

Extension

...I'll have to create a new extension to do that. Or maybe add the functionality to the existing Subspaces extension. Either way, this shouldn't be that difficult; I don't think this should be any more complicated than the extensions I've created in the past... and while it's been long enough since I created those extensions that I don't entirely remember all the details of how I made them, if I figured it out once I can figure it out again. So, yeah, before I can post the stats to the Wongery, I have to write those Lua modules, but before I do that I want to get the CSS styling in place, and before I do that I want to have the extension implemented to include the stylesheets where they need to be included. But there's one more thing I want to do before I do that. Something I've been meaning to do for a long time...

Site Migration

Way back in December before the hard launch, I purchased a new hosting plan for the Wongery. If the site is going to be migrated to the new site anyway, I feel like while I can go ahead and keep posting articles, I ought to hold off on doing anything involving directly messing with the site's backend or databases until after that's done. My hosting provider was supposed to migrate the site to the new server, but, well, this did not happen. (I am still a bit miffed at my hosting provider for their bungling this so badly. Not enough to change providers, but I may respond to one of the feedback requests they've been sending me.) I still intend to go ahead and migrate the site to the new server myself (which I guess is what I should have done in the first place), but before doing so I wanted to try migrating a different site to the new server first to make sure nothing went wrong. And... I haven't gotten around to doing that yet. But I should. Soon. I hope.

Anyway, so, yeah, those are some of the things I've been working on, and the things I need to get done before I can actually start posting RPG statistics to the RPG space and start filling out the subspaces with content. But it will happen. I can't guarantee when, but it will happen. After that, besides writing more new articles (and rewriting and expanding more old ones), I'll add more content to the RPG space, but also try to get some contact in the other spaces. Probably the CCG space will be next; I really ought to finish that Clash of Champions deck I've been working on for the Strike Engine. But anyway... yeah, at some point in the reasonably near future I should finally deal with that site migration, and then I'll take it from there.