What is Kanka?
Kanka is a worldbuilding and campaign management tool. Basically, it is a wiki that is specifically laid out to help people worldbuild. The basic idea of it is that there are certain types of pages (characters, locations, abilities, notes, etc.) that function in different ways and have different ways of working together and referencing each other. Tetra has mastery of it and has put a lot of thought into how to use it in a way that conserves time and energy and promotes organization and detail as she can.
What do we use it for?
Whereas most servers probably have a bunch of info dumped in Discord, or perhaps some google docs or a forum, we have all that same information stored in a more organized way here on the Kanka site. These are things all servers need to have somewhere so that people can conveniently find them when they join.
- Server rules, RP etiquette, and server-specific information
- How to make a character
- The setting and lore
- Information about the game system
- Locations to RP in
The benefits of the character page
This seems like a small yet tedious things that other servers Tetra has poked her head into don't seem to have addressed very well. Where do we store information about characters? If you want to know about another player's character, where do you look? And moreover, why is that important? What's wrong with just having everyone make a google doc, posting them all in the same channel, and letting them vanish to the land of "too far to scroll up" over time?
Have you ever seen a server that has a clique of people that RP together and have the intense stories that you're craving, or maybe are just super active in the OOC channels and go off to RP in DMs? Meanwhile, there's a channel for RP request that is full of offers that never get taken up, or there are a ton of "Hi, nice to meet you scenes" that never seem to go anywhere.
The character page, and the ability for players to access all of them, is one thing (among others) that we do to prevent this from happening here. When you can easily find out some information about someone else's character, you're able to figure out who could create interesting scenarios, and imagine how to frame scenes to make them happen! This way, you can spend less time with RP Request channels and "Hi, nice to meet you" scenes and get to the types of scenes that you're craving!
The Drawbacks of Discord for Info Dumping
Tetra likes to keep things very organized and formatted. Discord is currently insufficient for the level of formatting and control that she wants. Here are the drawbacks to storing information in discord that is fixed by having an external site:
- When you have info dump channels, you end up with either a lot of channels, or channels with a lot of text to scroll through.
- You can't do bullet points or collapsible text.
- It has no outline/heading structure.
- Only the person who posted it can edit.
- You can't put links without putting the whole big ugly URL.
- You have character limits to deal with, and breaking it into several posts could make it impossible to move, re-categorize, or re-order information.
A good example of how Kanka can really shine in terms of describing a world is how the Tullach Port page is set up. Imagine if we didn't have a worldbuilding tool. You'd either be scrolling through Google Docs, or hunting through pins/descriptions in many many Discord channels to start to get a feel for what the city is like.
So, please don't be intimidated!
Again, Tetra has put a lot of effort into putting links to the things you'll need where you can find them, and is always looking for ways to improve. There are dash commands (look for -tag pagename at the bottom of text entries), there is the #information channel, and there is the Dashboard, where we can add links to anything you find yourself clicking frequently. The Quick Links section of the sidebar is also fully customizable. We can even add links to whatever you want on your character page or on your Player Tag, and it's really easy. Once you get used to it, we hope that you'll find Kanka to be an asset to the RP experience. Don't let apprehension toward Kanka itself stop you from trying our game!
Questions or Feedback?
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to drop Tetra a ping! In particular, we'd love to hear more people say "Could you put a link to ____ on the ___ page?" or "Could you put a link to ___ in the ___ channel?" Because we can do that and it's so easy!
This link will take you to the thread for asking questions about Kanka: Kanka Questions Thread