[quote="Shir'le E. Illios":gd5rzggd]I messed around for a while trying to get a wiki set up. It seemed like the best way to preserve Eilistraee and continue developing her into the future. But there was never any real content there (turns out the hardest part about setting up a wiki isn't setting up the wiki, but filling it with content
).[/quote:gd5rzggd]
Sounds about right. You do need to have some special "concept" or a number of "concepts" that a team of authors want to help you create content for.
You could write about Eilistraee canon, but then there is already Forgotten Realms Wiki out there for that. It might be just as easy to go over there and make sure all of their drow-related articles are up to date. Another way to do this would be to raid Forgotten Realms Wiki, copy the drow-related or Underdark-related information over here and then go into a bit more detail. (That would be legal, so long as you used the right licence and credited them.)
A list of source material, with notes on how each product relates to Eilistraee (or drow in general) could be useful to fans who do not have every drow product yet. (And you could add affiliate links to earn a bit of money towards your hosting fees.) But you might be able to achieve the same thing in one or more forum threads or on your normal website.
[quote="Shir'le E. Illios":gd5rzggd]Then when the website got shut down the plan was to move to another host and use a full CMS there. With that I thought that it might be better to just have a number of articles rather than a wiki. But I ran into a fair bit of trouble integrating the forums into the CMS (additionally there's a lot of css work to do to make the site look nice). There's generally three parts to these kind of things: setting up the site, making it look pretty and filling it with content. All three have their challenges.[/quote:gd5rzggd]
A CMS could work just as well. I suppose it all depends on who you want to give access. If you wanted a large number of people to be able to set up accounts, a wiki might be better, but if you were aiming for a small team of people who already write on the forums here, then a CMS might allow you to lock them down to local areas.
I guess a CMS could be used for campaign documentation (for anyone wanting to run roleplaying games in the forums) but it would be a bit of a shame to set it all up and find that the GMs running games did not want to use it.
you could theoretically set up some sort of project that encourages people to build something like a netbook.
Have you ever looked at the Arcane Age products (for 2e FR)? They have one line that deals with the Netherese Empire and another that deals with Cormanthyr. I think it might be possible to create something set way back in the Crown Wars era and have Eilistraee as one of the Seldarine.
I mentioned areas outside of Faerûn elsewhere. It might be possible to create an Underdark to go below The Hordlands, Kara-Tur, Zakhara, Maztica or some other part of Toril.
Or people could create some villages, towns and/or cities in the 2e/3e Faerûn that are useful for Eilistraee-related games.
Or (for anyone who likes 4e) it could be possible to have some drow get dragged over from Toril to Abeir. Perhaps Eiliastraee herself could be forced out of Toril and over to Abeir (rather than killed).
There are probably a number of things that [i:gd5rzggd]could[/i:gd5rzggd] be done, [i:gd5rzggd]if[/i:gd5rzggd] you had people that wanted to do them. But you need people who want to do "something".
[quote="Shir'le E. Illios":gd5rzggd]I probably should pick all of that up again, but I'm lazy and it's a fair amount of work (upside, I've actually gotten a [i:gd5rzggd]lot[/i:gd5rzggd] better at css since then... as in professionally better). And with Eilistraee being officially dead and this site seeing almost no traffic anymore it feels hard to justify (not to mention that my own interests have shifted).[/quote:gd5rzggd]
That makes sense. There are plenty of people that play retro-versions of D&D or play with out-of-print campaign settings. So I think it is possible to support 3e, 2e or 1e Forgotten Realms. But if you do not have the time to do it, you do not have the time to do it.
If things changed, you could always come back to this idea later. Thanks for clarifying the current situation.
[quote="Irennan":gd5rzggd]Well Eilistraee is still mentioned in new sources (even if it is only a mere, kinda useless 'she is the goddess of good drow and fights to redeem them') and her name comes up fairly easily when looking about drow, so I still see new people wanting to find out about her. However I get how you feel, the enthusiasm [i:gd5rzggd]can[/i:gd5rzggd] get kind of dampened, when you see WotC's stance about the characters and elements you like the most in their setting (and how ridiculous that setting has become with nonsensical gods drama or apocalypses all day and every day).[/quote:gd5rzggd]
It is easy to get frustrated by new material that messes with older material that you like, if you let it get to you.
If you can rise above it, you can stick with the older material and ignore the newer material, but that can be tough. Especially if people keep bringing up the new stuff and reminding you about it.
Here is an idea, imagine if there were a number of hypothetical subforums here to discuss Eilistraee in specific eras (for example the Time of Troubles). If those subforums only used D&D material pre-dating a certain date and only used newer material to infer history set back in the appropriate part of the timeline, it could be theoretically possible to run a number of discussions about how the Church of Eilistraee would work in that specific era.
If people wanted to do that and if they worked hard to stay on topic, something like that might work. Of course, not everyone is an expert, so some people might accidentally talk about material from a later time-period (or D&D edition).
But if people wanted to avoid the negative 4e stuff and focus on good 3e, 2e or 1e stuff, they could probably find a lot to talk about.
[quote="Irennan":gd5rzggd]Anyway, as you said, the real issue would be what kind of info we could put in the wiki. We could use DotU 2e and Demihuman Deities info, and then add homebrew lore about what she and her followers try to do, what they have accomplished and so on. For example, an alternate version of WotSQ where Eilistraee doesn't go 'burn the ebil' mode that doesn't fit her the slightest
Or what kind of relationships they managed to build with other factions and how they did it.[/quote:gd5rzggd]
Sounds good. You obviously would need to be a bit careful about copying any information from books like Demihuman Deities, but it would not hurt to tell people to use information from a certain page of a certain book and then add new information that dovetails with it.
I've not read WotSQ yet, so I'm not sure how an alternative version would work, but I have considered using The Spellplague as a "possible future" that people need to avoid. So I think it would be easy in principle to do the same with the drow-related stuff...if people wanted to do it.
Actually making the stuff might not be easy. A lot of expert designers spent time making the canon stuff. Making any sort of netbook might take a lot of time. And anyone working on it would need to know what they were doing.
[quote="Irennan":gd5rzggd]I've started running a campaign which has this (with Eilistraeens and Vhaerunites working together, trying to start a ''rebellion'' in Menzo, helping Maerymidra refugees and even trying to retake the city, trying to retake the Twisted Tower and establishing surface and underground outposts/settlements linked through moon-portals -- basically making themselves and what they want to achieve known to the drow, showing that the kind of life they want for their people can lead to an actual future and that they have the tools to build it --) as part of a greater story. But then again I heavily modified -and am still working on- various elements of the setting (especially elven/drow history), drow are a bit less... stupid and followers of the two deities are way more organized and prepared than they are portrayed in canon (which is only logical, considering that they survived all these years against such hostilities. Eilistraeens in particular are few, and have few agents, but they are competent and distributed well enough to be able to do the job, especially with Vhaerunites' collaboration).[/quote:gd5rzggd]
Have you looked at the way that [url=
http://paizo.com/pathfinder/adventurePath:gd5rzggd]Piazo work with their Adventure Path[/url:gd5rzggd] product lines? They generally put out a small free Player's Guide and then have a number of adventures that follow that up.
If you wanted to open up your alternative concepts perhaps you could create a mini-player's guide (listing the options that players start off with).
The main problem with things like this is you might find that different people prefer to do different things with the drow (making it hard to get enough people to work on one project). But if you or someone else wanted to go ahead and knock up a netbook on your own, other people could maybe help find free art (maybe from the artists on deviantArt) to help make it look better.
[quote="Irennan":gd5rzggd]However homebrew about Eilistraee alone would hardly warrant a wiki (unless there was way way more material than I think, or we wanted to include stuff about Vhaereaun or drow in general), some articles would be more suited.[/quote:gd5rzggd]
I think that one problem with fanon is that canon has a single continuity, but fanon naturally splits off into multiple different directions. It can be a bit of a jumble. You kind of have each person creating an Alternative Toril that works slightly differently. (And of course, nobody is wrong if it is an [i:gd5rzggd]Alternative[/i:gd5rzggd] Toril.)
Writing up articles sounds like the way to go (if anyone wants to write new stuff). I guess that anyone interested could just write stuff here (in the forum) and then good stuff could get copied over to the main website.