Continuing the discussion from Discover Icewind Dale:
I already explained this to @tim, so if ya’ll ain’t keeping up, jump on a little called jabber sometimes. Thanks.
Anyhow, I’ll explain what an issue is elsewhere. This is the planning doc for “The Spine of the World” issue. That is a working title. I thought of calling it “The Frozen North”, but I actually think that would be a neat issue about the concept of the Frozen North, in fantasy and discourse. Also, an issue can be included in another issue, because we are beyond text. Some might say hyper text!
To start this whole thing, I plan on covering Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition, including Heart of Winter, the mini-expansion (it is as fun as the rest, but relatively short, which was refreshing after the whole game…). For me, that’s the first version of this issue. We have a quest for the sequel, but notably there is not an Enhanced Edition of that game because people suck and horde source code instead of sharing the burden of stewardship. And there is a trilogy of books with the namesake, and I’m sure many stories and artifacts that touch upon this area. But we can update the issue later! We can add things slowly, as interested.
As for the types of articles, here are some I’d like to have in the commons as useful, fun web documents:
- walkthroughs - and I’d like to reach out and potentially collaborate with folks that have already done these, to update them and enhance them together
- personal stories - this is the meat of it, where we share our humanity and tie it all together
- databases! - OMFG do we NEED a database of all the spells in the game? YES, YES WE DO!
- tutorials/help docs - specifically docs like Getting Icewind Dale Enhanced Edition to play in Fedora, where we can solve one problem, and own that problem, track it over time, remain a useful resource (or mark it as deprecated and keep for historical reasons); let’s not contribute to a deep web of outdated knowledge! Also, there are a lot of software projects, such as mods, that could be collated.
- fan assets - the focus of mage.party is on producing free cultural artifacts, and I’d love to highlight creations by people who enjoy the same media. Like, what if we found someone who made a whole bunch of IWD fan art?! We should probably interview them, right?
- save games! - OMG, we seriously need to start an archive of saved games! And characters!
Okay, that’s a high level list, and I will think of specific pieces concerning Icewind Dale. For instance, I was thinking we’d create a newsletter for Easthaven, as if they were passing around parchments with news on it! We can drop hints for astute players, like the old school manuals. And also provide colorful commentary on the area!
That is an IWD-specific idea, I wouldn’t be inspired to do that for every game. Though now that I think about it, I’ll probably do a newsletter for every game… 