Category talk:Advent

OK, Cure. You've officially confused me ... How can the Advent of an Institution be in any way meaningful in a world where most history is false? And if one could be pinned down, why would it be a category and not a singular event? And why would any Ravenloft DM or player care? :) -- Gonzoron 02:51, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

From what I scribbled on the page as an initial treatment of the matter as well as require to your inquires:

"Advents are the births of organising principles, of fundamental institutions, that make people and things what they are. They are not events, as they are not datable. They do not so much preceed history as they are its birth or advent. Creation myths might address some of these advents, but in evidently theological terms and according to the vision of the deity in question. Any competent cleric of the Law Giver when asked for the basis of law will reply the Law Giver. A different sort of answer is proposed here. This different answer actually has the merit of suggesting overlooked possibilities for the attention of the Dark Powers - tabooes - and of the DM, as well as of anthropologists and other scholars from the more advanced domains.

What it is to be a human in the non-biological sense of the term is a question that has always lurked just beneath the surface of roleplaying worlds filled with "monsters" and this is more so the case in Gothic literature and in Gothic inspired roleplaying. Indeed Shelley's Frankenstein is an answer to the very question. Equally, Lovecraft in the Mountains of Misery offers a quite stunning reply that "S" at the very least would wholly endorse. (Being a human is having a scholar's professional curiosity plus an excessive fondness for vivisection!) The answers below, when completed, will offer something quite different for the Dark Powers and others to chew on.""Cure 13:58, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

Personally, I'd prefer to see more focus on people/places/things/etc. - concrete information, before we get into the speculative and philosophical realms that this page and other seem to be focusing on. Let's get the stuff that's explicitly in the books onto the wiki first. (Of course, that's just my opinion - YMMV.) --ChrisNichols 15:20, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

I have to say I agree with Chris. When the average user comes here, I expect them to have questions like: "What is Raveloft?" "Who is Azalin?" "Where are the (Asylums or Universities in the Core?" "What was Van Richten up to in 696 BC?" "What did Malus Sceleris do to merit a domain?" "What Werewolf NPCs can I work into my campaign?" "Who wrote the most Ravenloft Novels?" Not so much questions like: "How did the Advent of Marriage affect Ravenloft?"

Maybe that's a limited view, and I see that Cure is clearly very passionate about this kind of entry. But I have to wonder how much more useful it would be at this fledgling state of the wiki to channel that passion into something like another detailed domain page like Nova Vaasa. I don't want to discourage you from editing, Cure, and as usual, please don't take this personally. I have some inkling of where you're going, in trying to make Ravenloft gel as a cohesive world with realistic social forces, etc. But it still seems a bit out there for me. If this is what makes you happy, I'm not gonna stop you. It doesn't detract from what Chris and I see as the more useful part of the wiki, but it does consume your editing time on something that I honestly don't see a lot of visitors caring about.

And although I recently advocated allowing Mistipedia to take its own shape when useful, rather than following other wikis, I do believe other wikis are useful inspiration, and it's worth noting that such high-concept categories don't appear on The Forgotten Realms Wiki, The Pathfinder wiki, or the The Planescape wiki.

From a more nuts and bolts standpoint, I still don't see why any of the "Advents" are categories rather than pages, but that's less relevant than why they are even here. -- Gonzoron 19:13, 22 April 2010 (UTC)

On the minor stylistic point, I will try to sort out the point of pages vs. categories for this stuff. Probably the matter can even be written briefly into the level above and the whole ended at the level of institutions.

I had occasion recently to read TSR's ethics statement from the 1980's. Tame, tame stuff. No showing law-enforcement officials in a bad light! And of course the utter non-treatment of mature themes. I think the game has moved on considerably since then, indeed with the publication of the Book of Vile Darkness (and especially some of its pictures), to a point that reasonable treatment of mature themes is possible. Evidently the haughty, supremely confident and competent villan has been treated fairly exhaustively. I believe that the thinking behind the Telling Man, a villan cast in an entirely different mold in the controversial VRG to the Mists, was entirely sound. So casting about for other possibilities of tragedy and evil, one that is entirely unplumbed in Ravenloft is incest. The Greeks, with Oedipus, clearly grasped that there was something fundamental about the matter. And fundamental things that are not to be transgressed are precisely the sort of stuff to peak the interests of the Dark Powers. I am not about to pen a darklord and a domain on the theme, but I can well imagine one, were the Darklords transgression of fundamental law is reflected in the slow but gradual collapse of all the norms and institutions of society. Death is not, after all, the only line not to be crossed, especially for Victorian inspired Dark Powers. And the villan of the piece can be very much the opposite of Ivan Dilysnia, yet with results that are far more degenerative of the entire socio-political body.

  Wait, so this is about building your case for incestuous evil in RL?  This is not the place for such arguments.  DeepShadow 02:35, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

That said, yes, it is something of a tangent, or more precisely it is perhaps trying too hard to bring the work of categorisation to a rigorous conclusion. And manifestly it is not something that merits priority given all else that is to be done. Still, please bear with it for the moment and if it can't be beaten into useful and unobstrusive shape within half a year, as I have no intention of giving it anything near constant attention, the matter can happily be revisited.Cure 00:11, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

It's been over a year. Can we scrub these yet?DeepShadow 14:30, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

I think so. Remember, deleted stuff can still be found and re-instated. If Cure or anyone else really wants to take another go at this at a later date, they can. -- Admin 13:29, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

I agree that this is trying too hard at categorization. By virtue of its organic nature, the edges of a wiki can/ought to be left undeveloped. We need to focus on the center. DeepShadow 02:28, 23 April 2010 (UTC)