Overdue Mention of the Timescape Wiki
On January 30th, 2019 MCDM went live on Matt Colville’s recently renamed Twitch channel and began streaming "Red Sky at Morning". The first session of The Chain of Acheron. Several thousand people tuned in to watch the Actual Play, enthralled by the story and premise. Meanwhile, life was being blown into a Fandom wiki created less than 24 hours earlier as Xinael (Fang Xianfu on Discord) began creating dozens of pages and templates to document everything that was happening on and off the stream. The MCDM Wiki was taking its first breaths.
The rise and fall of Fandom
Within a few days, the existence of the wiki became public knowledge and there were a handful of people making edits and writing articles for it. A channel was also created in the MCDM Discord server to help coordinate work on the wiki.
Over the next several months, while The Chain was airing episodes weekly and Matt was streaming behind-the-scenes worldbuilding, the wiki grew exponentially in size. It was now one of the largest, public, sources of information regarding Matt’s personal D&D setting. However, while the bulk of the wiki was focused on tracking events transpiring in The Chain and the game’s setting, there were also pages made for each of the players themselves, MCDM employees, Matt’s NetHack livestreams, and other MCDM related content. Over three hundred content articles were created for the wiki, with over a hundred templates to assist and bring it all together.
But all good things come to an end. When The Chain went on permanent hiatus after episode 27 in September 2019 activity levels on the wiki began to drop. It wasn’t long before the Recent Changes page, showing edits made in the last 30 days, was blank.
There were small blips of wiki activity in the following years, for instance in 2021 when Matt began running a short D&D 4e game online for some friends, Dusk. But overall edits to the wiki were few and far between. The main contributors to the wiki had moved on, and no one had taken up their mantle.
The community considered the wiki dead.
Call to action
In the years following the MCDM Fandom Wiki’s decline, there were several discussions in the MCDM Discord server about wanting to rekindle it. Mostly by those who were interested in documenting Matt’s setting. However, there was always a major pain point brought up which prevented things from kicking off... No one liked Fandom. For various reasons. Be it the amount of ads displayed on wikis, the company itself, or lack of ability to change deeper aspects of the wiki framework. Creating a new, non-Fandom, wiki was discussed. But no one ever moved on it.
While I had set up a few different MediaWiki websites before (MediaWiki being the framework Fandom is built on), to document my own various worldbuilding stints in college, I resisted jumping in and offering to set one up for the public. Setting up a website for personal use is one thing, but setting one up for the public is another. There’s a lot more to worry about and manage. Not to mention the fact that there was no real reason to document Matt’s setting, it wouldn’t be very useful for anyone aside from the thirty-or-so community members who were curious about it. So, no need for me to jump in and do a bunch of work for no real reason. I could let it lay fallow, let someone else take it on if they really wanted.
The future is always uncertain, and I suspected that someday the issue would come to a head once more. So, when MCDM announced their new TTRPG Draw Steel was going to be using Matt’s setting, the Timescape, as its default setting, I knew that day would be arriving soon.
Because the Timescape was no longer just a niche topic for a select few MCDM fans, but would now be (potentially) used by a much larger audience—some who may not even know much about Colville or MCDM—I decided that there was actually a use case for having a wiki once more. Though I was still unsure if it was an endeavor I wanted to lead. I knew that it would be a long term project, and I tend to avoid doing those for various reasons. Anxiety, ADHD, upkeep, maintenance, cost, etc. But, I would at least consider taking on the project if a discussion came up about it.
Commitment
On August 11th, 2024 a user named Tunegrito sent a message in the MCDM Discord for the first time in five years
Hi all! is there a place like a wiki or some page that has all the lore/timeline or general info about the setting?
This sparked a conversation about how: yes there is an old wiki. But, it’s not maintained. It would be nice to have a new wiki. The usual shebang. After this brief discussion, I realized now was the moment I had to decide if I wanted to take up this project or not.
Before I knew it, I said I would.
Part of my decision to take on this project was a somewhat selfish desire for control. I knew what I disliked about the original Fandom MCDM wiki, I knew sooner than later there would be a new wiki regardless of if I made it or not, and I wanted to ensure that certain subjects would not appear in the new wiki. Mainly: no articles about real life people or activities. Plus, I wanted to make sure that citations were strictly enforced.
At this point, having publicly stated I would take on the job, the ADHD kicked in and I was diving right in. A lot of decisions had to be made that would impact the project for its entire existence. What platform to use, how to host it, what should it be called, what framework to leverage. While Fandom is awful, it does a lot of things amazingly, without any effort. Spam prevention and search-engine-optimization being two major ones. In addition to handling things like sending email notifications that can actually be tricky to do without getting caught up in spam filters. I was not looking forward to having to surmount these problems, but most of them could wait. First I had to gather a team, I didn't want to make all the decisions by myself. This should be a collaborative effort.
I quietly made a new “Wiki Editor” role in the MCDM Discord server, and prompted those interested in helping with a new wiki to identify themselves. I assigned this new role to those people, which let them into a resurrected #mcdm-wiki discussion channel.
After some brief brainstorming we settled on using MediaWiki, which is what Fandom leverages. This wasn’t a difficult choice, as we were more familiar with it than other framework options, and those other frameworks tended to be geared more for technical documentation than encyclopedias. With that decided, I spent the next 24 hours spinning up a linux server through Digital Ocean, installing MediaWiki on it, purchasing a domain, and getting to work.
Timescape.wiki was born. There was no going back.
Laying the groundwork
The first, and arguably the most complicated decision, was “what actually goes into this wiki?”
Scope and project goals
It was clear to everyone that this wiki would be much narrower in scope than the old MCDM wiki. Focusing explicitly on the Timescape setting, and not anything else. With the goal of it being a reference for Directors who are running their own homebrew games in the Timescape, in addition to helping players understand the setting more when creating their characters. With a secondary purpose of helping authors who are writing adventures set in the Timescape (be it 1st, 2nd, or 3rd party content) have an easy and accessible way to find and search for existing information.
Canon
The Timescape setting has been around for decades, with glimmers of it peeking into the public eye in various forms throughout the years. Matt’s campaign diary youtube videos; worldbuilding streams on Twitch; The Chain of Acheron actual play livestream; Strongholds & Followers, Kingdoms & Warfare, and Flee Mortals! lore blurbs, the Dusk actual play livestream, MCDM Patreon content, and of course, Draw Steel preview packets. That’s a lot of material to sift through, and we had to decide what was “good” information to include in the wiki? What is outdated? Do we only want to include setting information presented in Draw Steel products, nothing prior? How do we handle Actual Plays and Colville’s home games?
This discussion about what was “canon” (at least as far as the wiki would be concerned) went back and forth for… days? Some things were pretty unanimously agreed upon quickly, but others were harder to decide on. There was no right answer, it was, and still is, an arbitrary policy decision. Ultimately we decided on the loose guideline of:
- Only sourcing information from material published/revealed since MCDM Productions’ creation
- Events that happen during Actual Plays are not canon, though worldbuilding and lore created for them is considered canon.
- Generally, new material overrules old material. But use common sense.
There’s still some ambiguity as to what is canon though. For instance, I’m not sure if we’ve decided if the Iconic Heroes are canon or not. But we can tackle that in the future, there's lots of other material to document.
Citation standards
One issue I always had with the old MCDM wiki was that it did not enforce strong citation usage. It is full of information, but finding out where that information is from—to verify it—is impossible in most cases. So for this new wiki I set out to be very strict about enforcing citation usage from the start.
English nonsense
There actually wasn’t too much discussion about the more noodly stuff like grammar and punctuation standards. There wasn’t a strong opinion on anything, so I threw a small page together that essentially said “do what Wikipedia does” while copying some more fantasy specific nonsense over from the Forgotten Realms Wiki as well.
The largest discussion we had related to article style was: what tense to use. But even that wasn’t really much of a debate. We merely identified that writing everything in past tense solved a lot of potential problems. For instance, not having to update every “15 years ago” statement in the wiki to instead say “16 years ago” should MCDM move the “present” forward by a year in a future adventure. Plus it’s the tense used for multiple large fantasy wikis (Forgotten Realms, Star Trek, Star Wars, LOTR, Blade Runner, Stranger Things, DC comics, Marvel, and Harry Potter to name a few), so it seemed to be standard practice.
Much of the past-tense discussion mostly revolved around timeline nonsense, and what date system to use. If we should make up one vs using the in-universe one. The Fall of Blackbottom was a good reference point to mark the beginning of “present day Draw Steel”, so there were suggestions to use “Before the Fall” and “After the Fall” to date things.
Ultimately we decided to go with in-universe dates instead. Although, trying to actually date anything is tricky since MCDM notoriously does not like providing specific dates for anything in-universe. In all of their products, there’s only a handful of specified dates. Most events are instead referenced in relation to other events, or “X years ago” from the unknown “present day” year.
Building Scaffolding
Making arbitrary decisions is fun, but the wiki needed a lot of functionality and infrastructure created to actually be usable by normal editors in the future. Scores of templates needed to be made, categories needed to be set up, and plugins had to be identified & installed. This was, while at times tedious, actually fun for me. I really enjoy making things that are useful, part of the reason I actually took on this project as a whole, so building all these little tools and templates was very rewarding.
With those in place, the wiki was all set to go and content was ready to be added by the public! Some switches were flipped, and I started sharing links in the Discord and elsewhere online.
Fun problems
Over the course of setting up and running the wiki, I’ve had to tackle a few issues.
Getting email notifications to work was a huge pain. Unless you want your emails to automatically be thrown onto a spam list, you have to pay to use a 3rd party service to handle sending emails to people. Which then brings you into the realm of trying to calculate potential future costs. Currently email from the wiki is handled by MailGun, with a plan that enables 10,000 emails a month (which sounds like a lot!)
While I’d like users to be able to get email updates for everything they want (per their preferences), at the end of the day it’s simply not feasible to enable all of the potential email notification options for fear of hitting that 10k email limit. For instance, there’s a preference setting available for sending users an email when an article they’re “watching” (an article they have previously edited or subscribed to) receives a new edit. Which, on the surface doesn’t sound like a lot of emails. But if a single article that was edited by ten people in the past receives ten new edits in a day… That’s 100 emails getting sent out! Sure, at the present moment I don’t think we’d actually hit that 10k email limit, but in the future? Who knows. As such I’ve limited email notifications options available to users.
Ultimately I don’t think this is a huge issue, especially since I later installed a plugin that provides a display on the wiki itself for notifications. But it’s still something that I’m unhappy with.
Spam prevention
Managing spam and bots will always be an ongoing issue. At the present moment however it’s mostly mitigated.
The main defense against spam, currently, is the various “questy” captchas that are presented to users before they can make an account (and before they submit an edit to an article). It’s fairly straightforward, users are asked a question about the Timescape that they must get correct before they can hit the submit button. This type of captcha is pretty good for weeding out most autonomous bots, since it requires knowing (or looking up) a thing about the Timescape.
In addition to the captcha, articles cannot be edited unless the user is signed into an account. This adds an additional hurdle for any potential bot or ai agent attempting to spam the wiki. Though there’s no actual restriction to making an account. For a while I required having validated your email, but there isn’t a great way to explain that to new users, so it caused confusion when people still couldn’t edit things after creating an account. As such, I removed that restriction.
There’s some other more standard under-the-hood things setup on the server to help deal with spam related stuff. For instance Fail2Ban is set up to block IPs that constantly attempt (and fail) to log into the server.
AI Crawlers
There’s no real way to prevent AI agents from crawling the wiki and adding its content to their databases. While the server robots.txt file is setup in a way that tells AI agents to fuck off, there’s nothing actually forcing them to do so. If people smarter than me know how to do this, I’m all ears.
Uncertain future
At this point, the main thing left to do is… simply fill out the wiki. This is really out of my hands, I can’t make people start writing content! So, currently it’s a waiting game. Watching people delve into Draw Steel and the Timescape and hoping they’ll be inspired enough that they will want to join a public project like this. Because, without help, this wiki will likely slowly fade away like the first wiki.
I can understand why people may hesitate to help out, it’s a very daunting thing. Especially since the wiki is so empty currently. But, I did throw together a whole Getting Started page to help. With the main takeaway being that even adding a single sentence helps. It doesn’t even need to be a good sentence!
Finally, I’m not really a professional sysop. So, my ability to scale the Timescape wiki infrastructure up as its user base grows is unknown. But, I’m sure I could find someone to help if needed.
Closing remarks
I’m honestly not really sure what the point of this post is. I think, I wanted to say “hey, I made a thing. Here’s how we got here. I hope it’s useful. There’s a handful of people helping out here and there, but you should consider helping out too!”
I didn’t want this to be a how-to guide for setting up your own wiki, nor did I want to get too in the weeds about specific things I did (that history exists on the wiki after all). I wanted to simply... recognize the journey.
Canon is not real, make it yours
While there is an innate desire for everything in the Timescape to be known and set in stone. That’s not really the case. As even Matt himself has said, the Timescape is full of unknowable things, for both people in-universe and us on the outside looking in. There are not answers for everything, no scientific formulas that explain everything, no algorithms that the world follows.
It’s in these unknowns that let the setting thrive at your own table. Empowering you to make your own decisions for how you think things may work. They also ground us, and remind us that nothing is set in stone. Change things around to suit your table and your game. There are no inexorables in real life to show up and attempt to repair what you change.
Acknowledgements
Much of the Timescape Wiki is based upon the work done for other public wikis. The Forgotten Realms Wiki being a prominent reference and source of templates.
Additionally, a huge shout-out to everyone who has worked on the wiki so far. Especially those who jumped in and helped when it was empty. So, kudos to Elijah the protean, EnderC, ReallyOkeyFruit, Jonstodle, C-bass, B4ux1t3, ItalianGuy, Felipecrrmts, and everyone else. Every time I get a notification the wiki has been edited, it makes me proud to have created something I know others are finding useful.
