Shimmin Beg

Despite being pretty busy at the moment, I've managed to find time for some more editing. A few people have given constructive advice, encouragement and disagreement in the forums, which is always good - one of the problems with wiki maintenance (in general) is you don't tend to know if you're actually achieving anything useful, and it can get very discouraging. So evidence that people actually care about what you're doing is always nice!

I finally finished my first parse over the existing scenario pages and setting up what I hope is a reasonably rigorous set of categories, and have now drifted into adding new pages. It's really striking how many scenarios have no page at all, and these are only the published ones... it's a bit of a mammoth task really. Unfortunately, not having most of the scenarios, there's a pretty low threshold for what I can actually add to a page. It's quite hard even to find blurb or basic synopses for some of them, and some have no reviews that I can track down. I haven't even looked at that many yet. I reckon that actually knuckling down and writing reviews of scenarios you own, however brief, would be a really valuable contribution that people could make to the general CoC/ToC player base. Even opinions based on reading rather than playtesting would be useful. I should probably put my money where my mouth is, but I kind of overcommit myself as it is and inflicting myself with another 'duty' is really not a good idea. So if you're reading this, please, go and write a review of a scenario. Even just a paragraph! It's a matter of numbers, see. Writing a one-paragraph review of one scenario is a small effort that won't take up much of your time, and if a hundred people did it, we'd have a hundred scenario reviews available. But for one person, writing a hundred reviews is a massive job.

A related thing is that I'm constantly tempted to just buy things. "How much easier this would be," I think to myself, "if I only had the scenario to hand. I could just flick through and work out what the locations are, or the monsters, or the handouts, or the playstyle. I wouldn't have to infer them from vague comments, or leave them half-completed -" (and therefore misleading because it's not easy to tell that information's missing from an article, or that it's not in all the categories it should be) "- or blank. I wouldn't be at risk of miscategorising things." But there are hundreds of scenarios out there, and librarianly urges aside, I can't afford to spend a thousand quid or so on even PDFs of all these scenarios (some of which won't be available, of course) just to write a wiki article about them. It's a bit frustrating, though!