Announcing OpenEpic:Some years ago I posted on the NetEpic mailing list about making NetEpic "open source". Primarch and other list members seems pretty keen on the idea, but I think the delays in getting NetEpic Gold released meant that it was sort of forgotten about.
I decided to scratch my own itch and do something about it! I wanted to find a way to make the NetEpic rules system available under a proper Creative Commons copyright regime, but which also enabled gamers to easily contribute back, to make the rules a living, breathing thing, always changing, and (hopefully) always improving.
I realised that a wiki was the perfect solution. Wikis should be familiar to most people, because Wikipedia is a wiki. A wiki is a web site that allows its users to edit its contents. There is a simple formatting system, and a set of tools which make it very easy for groups of people to collaborate.
After registering a domain and setting up the wiki software, I have now finished entering the NetEpic core rules into the wiki. Other than reformatting the text to use standard wiki layout (and fixing a few typos that annoyed me), nothing in the text has been changed.
So I now feel that I'm ready to go public with the site: OpenEpic.org. For the time being, although you can view the site anonymously, you have to be logged in to edit the pages, and account requests have to be manually vetted by me.
The next step is to import the army lists. This is a bit more difficult because the army lists contain lots of tables and diagrams, and MediaWiki (the software I'm using) isn't well suited to those sorts of things. But there's more work to do: fixing typos, updating with errata, and so on.
I make no claim to become some sort of benevolent dictator over this, I'm just an itch scratcher who has volunteered to do the sysadmin. I also have no idea whether anyone else will think of this as a good idea, which is why I'm writing this post: to see who else is interested.