User:DaveGross/User blog/How the Pathfinder Wiki Helped Me Write Prince of Wolves

I missed out on the first year or so of the Pathfinder Adventure Path because it began during a board and video game phase. Then a few local friends showed me copies of Rise of the Runelords and Curse of the Crimson Throne. The gorgeous art and design struck me at once, but then I skimmed the adventure summaries, and I was hooked. I picked up the Campaign Setting and put in a standing order for the Adventure Path at my friendly local game store.

By the time James Sutter asked me to pitch story ideas for the Council of Thieves Adventure Path, I had a broad but fairly shallow knowledge of Golarion. To aid my studies, the Paizonians gave me access to .pdf versions of all their published material. The sheer volume of information threatened to smother me!

Even when limited to a single city, a Pathfinder story must include a sense of the larger world—the politics and history, the gods and legends—so I crammed like a freshman for exams, skimming many volumes that were only tangentially related to the setting of the story I wanted to tell. Soon I was spending more time reading than I was writing, and I knew there had to be a better way.

PathfinderWiki saved my ass.

I still consult the many volumes of Pathfinder setting and adventure products regularly, but sometimes all I need is to remember a name, or to check three sentences of history about—oh, let’s say, apropos of nothing—General Arnisant of the Shining Crusade. That's when, while writing Prince of Wolves, I could find the information I needed in seconds—and as a bonus discover a couple of helpful links to information I hadn’t realized I wanted to know—instead of spending fifteen or twenty minutes opening the appropriate .pdf files, searching for the correct page, and reading through an entire article.

The wiki is no replacement for the published material, and even its impressive store of articles barely scratches the surface of the vast store of Golarion lore. Even so, it sure helps navigate the ever-growing archive of information. And because Golarion expands each month with new adventures, modules, sourcebooks, and—soon—novels, the wiki needs your help.

Within the generous boundaries of the Community Use Policy, you can help PathfinderWiki expand and become more accurate by adding and editing entries yourself. It’s so easy, even I figured it out and made some adjustments with minimal errors, which the vigilant yoda8myhead noticed and corrected with lightning speed. Check out the simple editing instructions and see how easy it really is.

Wiki helped me get an illo into a Paizo product! Not that I had anything to do with it thou :P

Hugo —148.201.1.111 (talk) Tue, 08 Jun 2010 23:33:52 +0000

I'll happily admit to using the PathfinderWiki as a first stop for looking up broad details and which sources to pull off of my shelf when I start on a project. For non-planar stuff for instance that I don't have memorized to a scary degree the Wiki is awesome (heavily used to collect sources prior to working on my portions of the Mwangi sourcebook as an example). —174.99.55.233 (talk) Wed, 30 Jun 2010 05:06:21 +0000

Yeah! Now THAT'S an endorsement. ^_^ —64.122.45.178 (talk) Tue, 08 Jun 2010 22:59:57 +0000

It is always good to see someone finding a solid use for the PathfinderWiki project whether it is for writing Paizo material or just running a homebrew campaign. Great job everyone. —Alfred (talk) Tue, 29 Jun 2010 23:10:22 +0000

Glad you like the Shining Crusade article. :) —Brandingopportunity (talk) Wed, 09 Jun 2010 00:10:21 +0000

It was actually one of the harder articles to write, as very little has been written about the Shining Crusade or the Whispering Tyrant so far. —Brandingopportunity (talk) Wed, 09 Jun 2010 01:04:56 +0000

Wow, working on an index for this book is going to take a while (I started it on Google last night - 1st chapter done- 82 references- even though some of those are duplicates, I'm going to use the sort in ABC order function to group them together to get each reference's page number) —Cpt kirstov (talk) Fri, 06 Aug 2010 18:23:12 +0000

If you read Prince of Wolves, you'll see how that was especially helpful. :) —DaveGross (talk) Wed, 09 Jun 2010 00:41:02 +0000

The anonymous above was me. Wasn't logged in. Whoops :) —Shemeska (talk) Thu, 01 Jul 2010 21:41:50 +0000

Thanks, Dave! Glad the Wiki helps you both as a fan of Pathfinder and contributor to the world. —Yoda8myhead (talk) Tue, 08 Jun 2010 21:51:24 +0000