can’t do this one as a poll bc there’s endless choices but if you’re in college/university or went to college/university what’s been the most fun/enriching class you’ve had?
Hi Minty! Happy to contribute! This page rounds out the adventures of Pâté and Wellington; greatest heroes of the land! (according to Laudna)
Full text of their daring tale is this:
We were passing through a mountain town that found itself in trouble;
A dragon squatted at the pass, their roads reduced to rubble.
With sword in hand and Wellington, I closed upon the threat…
In seven stabs the day was won! Peace restored to all Marquet!
I actually started with this page when I was going to do a guest comic, but I found it difficult to cram the idea of Laudna making a shadow enhanced puppet show into one panel so I could get on with the rest of the comic. I love that Laudna’s shadow and Imogen’s light make them look more different than they actually are, and I wanted to focus on that for a single page thing. Then I started sketching and realized that this page would hold together better if we knew what Laudna had been doing with her shadows. As soon as I drew a tiny heroic Pâté standing over a dead dragon, I knew I needed another page for the adventure leading to it.
I’m glad I did. I really like the panel with Imogen reaching out for the dragon wrapped around Laudna’s shoulders, and that only came together after i settled on two pages. I also had so much fun drawing Action Pâté with his red ribbon cape. I don’t get much opportunity for drawing it, but a good clean George Perez inspired fight scene with super dynamic poses is so much fun to plot out.
Thanks for reading! So happy that Minty is starting chapter two next week, and I’m excited to see what’s in store for the girls now that they’re leaving Gelvaan. RIP Wellington, you will live on in my heart forever. <3
I can’t wait for Bells Hells to go into battle so Dorian can see Laudna contort into a spooky tree, call to life an army of haunted puppets, and expel a zombie dog, a ghost necromancer, and 20,000 bees from her person.
Poor guy was still getting used to the idea that her shoulder dislocates sometimes last time they saw each other.
The thing is like… we (the council of Imogen Temult Adore-ers) absolutely did not make fun of her this much pre-solstice. something fundamental shifted when she fell down those stairs
@immult@erinmar13 so true actually, everyone put your favorite failgirl failmoment in the tags (ONLY IF YOU LOVE HER IF YOU’RE A MOG HATER AND YOU PUT MOG HATE IN HERE I WILL KNOW)
Part one of a two-part guest comic by the wonderful @astoriacolumnstaircase, featuring Sir Pâté de Rolo and his mighty steed!
Thank you so much. :) 💕
Hi Minty! Thanks for letting me play in your comic world! I’m going to do author notes, because I love that each page comes with them! <3
I think this might be the first time I’ve put color on a comic? Certainly the first for a fan comic. I don’t work in color, but Pâté’s ribbon turned cape was so much fun to play with that I wanted to make it extra dynamic, so he got a splash of red. And a needle sword. Give that boy a sword.
Wellington’s design is so fun, with his rope limbs and carved face, and he was really the inspiration for all of the playful elements in this comic. The clothespin doll people, paper houses, the impression of Laudna’s skirts as hills. And faces on the sun and the moons. (ruidis is frowning because an evil grumpy moon makes me laugh)
This is set during the time Imogen was sick and Laudna was caring for her. I wanted to do something with Wellington, because I was so sad for his fate. He’s such a charming puppet, and I wanted to give him and Pâté a bit of fun as a send off, knowing he won’t survive the chapter. There’s something very Laudna to the idea of fleeting joys that are joys nonetheless.
A Long Road Home will continue in Chapter Two on the 27th. For the next two weeks there will be two pages by special guest @astoriacolumnstaircase that I’m really excited for you to see! :)
Some useful background: Encyclopedia Exandria is a fork of the Critical Role wiki from Fandom. We began initial work in April/May of 2022, and formally announced the split around the time that EXU Calamity aired (early June 2022). A wiki is a living document, so many pages originally created on the Fandom wiki have since been heavily edited, but others have not. Feedback on all pages is helpful, but this is mentioned to give everyone some context on some choices, stylistic changes, and inconsistencies.
Another thing we want to address up front: our editorship is fairly small, and this is a volunteer endeavor. Additionally, within the past year, Critical Role has added both Candela Obscura and Midst - both of which we cover - to their repertoire. Darrington Press has put out two new full games, both of which we cover to an extent; and there are three separate comic series. We are pretty much entirely occupied by keeping up with new content and have not been able to go back to older material in depth. It may put things into perspective that unlike many other fan wikis, we summarize at least 4+ hours of new material almost every week, year-round. The single greatest way to address the majority of this feedback is by becoming an editor - even an infrequent one.
To that end, we are thinking about ways to make editing easier based on some of the feedback we received. Also: there are no qualifications! You do not need to have an encyclopedic knowledge - you just need to be able to look things up and make a good faith effort in citing them.
We also want to direct you to other fandom projects and official sources, as some of the items we do not cover can be found here:
CR Stats stopped adding new episode information as of the beginning of this year, but has full detailed statistics for Campaigns 1 and 2 and Campaign 3 through episode 81. If you are looking for specific castings of a spell, detailed stats by level, or other granular discrete information, please check out the years of great work they did!
The Omen Archive intends to take up at least part of the mantle from CR Stats and has recently gone live!
Finally: some of these questions are answered or addressed via the wiki’s policies. These are available in the sidebar menu under “Wiki policies and help”. We’ll mention some specific examples.
The following addresses constructive feedback from the survey, but thank you to everyone who left positive notes as well as to everyone who provided information on why and how they use the wiki!
The Feedback, Part 1: Existing Pages
The one to address first is quicker updates for new episodes. This is a volunteer endeavor, and the editor who writes the summaries works full time and lives on the East Coast of the US. The summary usually up within 36 hours of the episode’s start (ie, by 7 am Pacific time on the following Saturday), and is often up within 24 hours. With the exception of current PC pages and relationship pages, which require some degree of analysis, most pages judged to be relevant to the latest episode are updated before the VOD drops on Monday. If there is someone who has a schedule such that they can immediately write the summary and would volunteer to do so that would be great, but until then, this is a turnaround we are satisfied with.
Relationship pages have recently been updated! These are difficult to keep up to date, and more editors are highly encouraged, especially since relationship pages are one of the more likely sources of bias and so multiple editors and perspectives are helpful in trying to avoid this.
Official images vs fan-created/galleries: All of our images are at this time from official sources (though many official artists are also fan artists). While in theory we would accept fan art and would distinguish that from official art, in practice we have chosen not to. The main reasons are that we want to prioritize canon depictions rather than pushing forth a specific fan’s interpretation (with the understanding that there is variation even in official depictions), and, again, time. It takes time to seek out fan art, acquire permission, upload it, and post it. It can become outdated or even in contradiction with canon if we learn new information, and keeping up with permissions can become difficult if the fan artist leaves a social media site or the fandom. We love and support this fandom’s artists and hope you check out their work - and our RSS feed on the main page is a great way to get to the fan art gallery - but we have decided not to pursue posting fan art for the above reasons. For more see our Image policy.
Google Search Priority: FANDOM is a for-profit business with an entire SEO team. We are a small group of volunteers. We would love to appear above them in Google searches, but FANDOM’s entire business model is ensuring they appear first; they often appear above official materials for various fandoms. We do however own the domains EncyclopediaExandria.com and criticalrolewiki.com, and you can access us through those (which will redirect to our main page).
Style inconsistencies, page length, etc: different editors do different summaries, and have different thoughts re: relevance. The same editor may try new things. The nature of the episode also drives the exact stylistic choices: an all-combat episode will necessarily focus in more depth on the round-by-round combat since that is the content of that episode, whereas a brief skirmish in a more RP-heavy episode might be summarized more succinctly, even if neither combat is particularly heavy on RP or plot. If a difference in style seems to indicate a bias, or if you feel something isn’t being adequately covered in the summaries, please let us know; but as anyone can edit and is encouraged to do so, expect some variation.
Showing the abilities of magical items in table form: We are unsure of the benefit of this, particularly as many items are not terribly complex. If you’d like to elaborate, please feel free to follow up.
E69 or episode 69 or c3e69 not pulling up the episode: C3E69 (and other capitalizations) should work, as does 3x69, so if you have run into issues (especially recently after the server upgrades) please let us know. E69/Episode 69 will not, because if you don’t specify a campaign, there are three episode 69s (nice). To make this a bit clearer, imagine you search on episode 1: at this point this could mean the first episode of three different campaigns; the first episode of four Candela chapters; the first episode of two TLOVM seasons; the first episode of three Midst seasons; or the first episode of three EXU miniseries. With that said, we can make a page on episode code conventions if that would be helpful.
Navigability in general: CirrusSearch has recently been turned on and is being stress-tested, so that may help with searching, but we’d love to hear more. We have improved some of the categories, but we’d appreciate more specific feedback.
Covering no longer available content: people are working through old Talks pages. It is a long and ongoing project, and as with everything else, your assistance and patience are appreciated, but it is actively being worked on! We also have a summary of the Feast of Legends, and a number of other since-removed one-shots such as Bar Room Blitz. See above regarding one-shots generally. Summaries for removed one-shots are of a higher priority of this lower-priority group.
Articles that don’t correlate with fact or read like meta: This is something we take seriously, and if you could provide specific articles so that we know what it refers to, that would be a major help (the response did not provide any examples of articles) especially because this was an identified issue when a similar survey was run for the Fandom wiki. You can also flag these yourself if you wish; see the Neutral POV policy here, which includes instructions on how to mark a page as needing review.
Requests for a spoiler free option: The choice to not hide spoilers is a conscious one and is outlined in the policy here.
Thank you everyone, and we’ll finish up our report of the survey results tomorrow!
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