The Wongery

Ignore the title of this blog post. There is a rationale for it, and I do think it is relevant to the post, but I'm not sure the connection is clear, and if I try to explain it that might just make things worse. I am bad at titles. I am bad at a lot of things, most things, probably, but titles are high up on the list.

Actually, let's take this as a given for all blog posts in the future. Ignore the title. I am bad at titles.

I suppose it is also possible that the connection of the title to the content of the post will be obvious to anyone reading it, and that I'm worrying over nothing. In that case, rather than being bad at titles, I'm bad at... judging people's ability to see connections. Or quite possibly (probably) both.

Anyway, with that out of the way, let's get to what this blog post is supposed to be about.

As previously discussed, the long-awaited "hard launch" of the Wongery in January, when I would finally make a public announcement about it and make some attempt at publicization, was... a bit underwhelming. Though this isn't surprising, given that there... really wasn't much to it. Though I had at one point had loftier goals, when it came to it the "hard launch" consisted of nothing more than posts on three websites. So it perhaps isn't surprising that little came of it. Sure, the site got a few visitors, but... the main purpose of the site is to provide fictional worlds that people can use for their own projects, and as far as I know nobody has done that.

(Well, and secondarily—as I've said before—to encourage other people to share information about their worlds. But nobody's done that here yet either.)

But then, again, that's not really surprising. There's not nearly as much content there as I hoped there would be by now, not just in terms of number of articles (though that's certainly true as well), but also in terms of... well, anything aside from the text of the articles themselves. I'd intended to include RPG statistics, assets for computer games, and more... and while I did finally get around to implementing the subspaces for that content, there's no actual content there yet. (There will be. Hopefully soon. I'm working on it.) Once that's in place, well, there'll be more you can do with the Wongery worlds, and maybe people will be more likely to make use of them. As it stands right now, sure, you could still write a story in a Wongery world, but that's about all you could easily do with the content without a lot of extra work (and even that isn't as easy as it would be if there were more content to draw from). Sure, you could even run an RPG campaign set in a Wongery world now, but in the latter case you'd have to stat everything up yourself.

And some of the other plans I had for the Wongery hard launch that for various reasons (including but not limited to my inherent laziness and general inability to get anything done) didn't come to fruition... they may still happen later. At some point in the future I still do plan to solicit stories for an anthology of fiction set in Wongery worlds (for which we'd pay professional rates; don't worry—I'm not going to ask anyone (except the Grandmaster Wongers, apparently) to work for free). I still do plan to host a game jam, with cash prizes, themed around Wongery content. But before I can do any of that, I need, well, more money, and I also probably need to get the Wongery legally set up as a private limited company so it can have its own bank accounts and I don't have to make payments from my personal account (and thereby reveal my identity). Also, I want to have a lot more content in the Wongery so there's more to draw from.

But lately I've come to consider that while I do ultimately want other people to use the Wongery content for their own creations, their own stories, games, and watnawhats, perhaps it would be helpful for the Grandmaster Wongers to get the ball rolling by making some material ourselves based in Wongery worlds. At least, I thought I'd only come to consider this lately, but glancing over the previous blog post I linked in the last paragraph, I see that I did mention there that I was considering releasing "[f]ree RPG adventures and supplements set on Wongery worlds made available on DriveThruRPG", so apparently this is something I thought of before, and then completely forgot about, as is my sad wont. But anyway, yeah, I've been thinking about this.

I have not, of course, previously published any RPG adventures or other sourcebooks. I'm a long-time roleplayer and I've written plenty of adventures and other material for use in my own campaigns, but I haven't actually published any of it—I've even started writing lots of RPG adventures and sourcebooks I intended to publish, but, uh, never finished them, because I never finish anything (but still keep vainly telling myself this time will be different). Still, I have enough experience creating materials for RPGs that I should be able to whip something up. Will it be of especially high quality? Well, I'm certainly going to do my best, but realistically, no, probably not, but it will be free, so maybe it'll get some eyes on it regardless—and maybe some of the people who do see it will... see past any deficiencies in the adventure itself and want to find out more about the setting, and think (no doubt correctly) that they can do something better with it. (I say it will be free, and yes, of course I'll make all these adventures and materials free in PDF form, but if I also make a print version available I'll have to charge enough for that to cover the costs. Well, maybe I can charge a little over the cost for the print version, so I have a chance of making some money from this. But the digital version will definitely be free regardless.)

(Oh, wait, that means I'm... still kinda going to need to set up the Wongery as a private limited company and get it its own bank account before I do that. Huh. Well, okay, I... probably ought to get on that soon. Work has been keeping me very busy lately, which is part of the reason I haven't gotten more done on the Wongery, but on the plus side that means I'm actually in a better financial situation right now than I have been in some time, and may actually have the money to spare to get some of these things done that I'd been meaning to do.)

So what, specifically, will we be making? Well, D&D is, for better or for worse (mostly worse, really), still the proverbial 800-pound gorilla of the RPG industry, so it's a no-brainer to release a free D&D adventure set in a Wongery world. As a matter of fact, I'm working out a six-part series of linked adventures (tentatively called The Opaline Cube) that will take the PCs across six different worlds. I'm also planning a similar six-part adventure series for Pathfinder, though I don't really have even a tentative title for that (well, I sort of do, Distant Realms, but this is "tentative" in the sense of "I have to call this something but I kind of hate this title and I really need to come up with a better one"). But I'd like to have sourcebooks for particular Wongery worlds for other systems, collecting all the core information about the world into a single standalone volume—though they wouldn't need to go into a lot of detail, since more information would of course be available on the Wongery site. I'm considering, for example, a Savage Worlds setting guide for Nuclearth and/or the SKE; a Year Zero Engine book for Interlife Earth; maybe a Powered by the Dark book on Dadauar and a Resistance system book on Gallerra (or possibly vice versa).

Heck, maybe I'll even try to get something together in time for next year's Free RPG Day. (For those unfamiliar with it, Free RPG Day is an event inspired by and similar to Free Comic Book Day (and if you don't know what that is... you can probably guess from the name and context), in which retailers give out free copies of certain RPG products created for that purposes and provided to the retailers by publishers. This year Free RPG Day is on June 22, so... just over a week from this post, if you want to check it out. For my part, there's a good chance I'll be working that day and won't be able to avail myself of the free goodies (that was, alas, the case last month for Free Comic Book Day), but we'll see.) The deadline for publisher commitments for Free RPG Day is in December, for marketing materials in February, and for the actual prodct in April (at least that was the case for this year's Free RPG Day, according to the official site, but I'm guessing that next year's deadlines, though they haven't been posted yet, will be similar)... which may be challenging to meet, but not necessarily impossible. I don't know for which world or which system I'd want to make an adventure for Free RPG Day... but I'll come up with something. (Or maybe (honestly, probably) I won't.)

But of course the Wongery isn't just for RPGs, and so it would be best to release not just RPG materials. but... examples of what else I hope other people will eventually use Wongery material to create. I said that eventually I want to publish a Wongery-themed anthology of stories by other writers... but in the meantime maybe it wouldn't hurt to write and publish a novel of my own set on a Wongery world. I think I'll set that as a goal for this November, to coincide with NaNoWriMo. (Er... that's National Novel Writing Month, for anyone unfamiliar with it, an event in which participants try to write a complete novel of at least 50,000 words in 30 days.) Which Wongery world will I set the novel in? Eh... I'm not sure; maybe I'll put up some sort of poll when the time comes closer. Assuming I can figure out a place to put the poll where people will actually answer it. (Oh, hey, maybe the NaNoWriMo forum? Except that I just checked the NaNoWriMo site, and... it doesn't seem to have a forum anymore? Although I do see an announcement saying that "[t]he NaNoWriMo forums will eventually reopen with a small group focus", whatever that means. So... we'll see.)

(Of course, even if I do finish writing the novel in NaNoWriMo, don't expect it to be released immediately. Whatever I get done in NaNoWriMo will be a first draft, and is sure to need a lot of rewriting before I feel it's anywhere near acceptable for public consumption.)

This would not be the first novel I have written. I have written at least seven novels (that is, there are seven I recall off the top of my head, but it's possible there may be one or two I'm forgetting), but they are all unpublished and almost certainly unpublishable. (And they have terrible titles.) And, of course, those are just the completed ones; I have dozens more novels I've started but never finished, that languish at various levels of inconsummacy. I don't expect this new novel to be very good either, but at least I hope it will be good enough that it may pique people's interest in the world where it's set.

(All right, I have a confession here. Despite my going on about my lack of writing talent, I do perhaps have sort of have some faint and foolish hope of trying to get my most recent novel published. But it desperately needs extensive rewrites first, and I haven't gotten around to doing that yet. (And it's been almost fourteen years (yikes, so long?), so I don't know how realistic it honestly is to expect that I ever actually will get around to it.) Anyway, even after the rewrites I'm not sure it would be good enough for any agent or publisher be interested, but that doesn't need to stop me from trying. (And no, I'm certainly not going to go the route of self-publishing. I mean, yes, I'll be self-publishing the novel I write in a Wongery setting (when and if I actually get it done), but not my non-Wongery-related novel. If it's not good enough to get picked up by a traditional publisher, then I'm not going to inflict it on the world by other means. Besides, it's evident from how little attention the Wongery has gotten that I'm hopelessly incompetent at self-promotion—an essential skill for self-publishers—, so any attempt at self-publishing my novel would doom it to obscurity regardless. Which raises the question, I suppose, of why I think I'll be able to get any attention with a novel I write set on a Wongery world, but that's going to be given away for free, so the bar is much lower. Even so, yeah, I'm not hugely optimistic that it will get many readers, but I have to try anyway. (Well, I guess I don't have to, but... I don't know. I guess I kind of feel like I should.)) If, however, I do against all odds get my novel published, I will definitely not announce it here. In fact, I will probably never mention it here again.)

And then, too, it might be nice to release a video game set on a Wongery world. It might be nice, but it might not be realistic. Creating a video game from scratch is a formidable endeavor, and although I do have some rudimentary programming skills and have made some attempts to learn Unity (before its implosion) and, after that, have some aspirations to learn Godot, I haven't actually finished a full game (to, no doubt, no one's surprise), and even if I had the knowhow to do so, it would take a huge amount of work and time. But then, rather than creating a game from scratch, I could create a game using an existing tool that does much of the work for me, like, say, one of the RPG Maker programs. RPG Maker games are still popular, right? So, yeah, anyway, I think I'll make an RPG Maker game set in Meliauth. And maybe other games too, but that will be a start.

Of course (of course, I say (or write) "of course" way too much), the main thing standing in the way of my doing any of this is... time. If I don't have the time to get as much done on the Wongery as I'd like, how am I going to find the time to do any of these other projects? Well... I don't know. But I'm going to try. I have a hard time focusing and hop between projects all the time anyway, so this just... gives me a few more projects to hop between. Futile as it may seem, I do still hope that somehow I'll find the time to do all of these things. This may, of course, be because I am stupid.