Ceri B.

Originally posted at writing_religion almost ten years ago. (Link.) I keep going looking for it in my blog and realizing it's not here.

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I've been annoyed at the lack of information about Paganism for people who aren't planning on joining a Pagan religion. Almost all of the Pagan information websites are aimed at either new members of Pagan religions (most commonly Wicca), or are apologetics trying to explain why Paganism isn't evil and shouldn’t be discriminated against. Neither of those approaches is much use for someone wanting to know about one or more types of Paganism. They're especially not useful for authors who may want to write good Pagan characters or situations, but haven't any idea where to start looking for accurate information. (This doesn't go into that, but it does try to indicate which topics would need what kind of research, depending on the writing goals.)

Disclaimer: I'm only one person, and this is only one list. (Set of lists. Whatever.) This is no doubt biased by my experiences and beliefs, and is necessarily incomplete, because "complete" involves a monograph on each term, plus probably a couple of videos and maybe a stack of original source texts. Please take this as a starting point for research, rather than a definitive source. I've deliberately been vague in spots to encourage that. I've also left out a number of terms that are mostly used by only one tradition/sect/type of Pagans, except for some Wiccan terms that are so commonly-used they needed a mention.

Every one of these terms has been the subject of debate and controversy; with a bit of time, I could probably scrounge up a link to an online screaming match about the exact meaning of every one of these terms. (So when I say a term is "controversial?" That means the average never-heard-it-before person could Google for those controversies. Nonpagans are not likely to be able to find the debates on the differences between a "stang" and a "staff.")
( PEOPLE )

( CONCEPTS )

( ACTIVITIES )

( OBJECTS )

( DEITIES )

( WRITING DETAILS )

( LISTS )

One Night on the Road is a classic example of "we have a palette of four colors: Grey, black, dark blue, and dark green. We will expand this with pale blue and pale red but only as tiny fragments in the distance." The developer's native language is not English (I have reason to believe it's Russian), which normally isn't a problem, except that it didn't occur to them to find an English beta reader to check their Steam listing text:

One Night On The Road is a quest where you play as a character who ran out of gas in a small town. In search of fuel, he finds a shop where he knock you out down and found himself in a small house. You need to look for items that will help you to get out of the house and leave town.

This looks like an asset flip, the video game equivalent of making a book of nothing but Wikipedia articles. (Okay, the assets aren't all free. It's the video game equivalent of a picture book of royalty-free photographs purchased from istockphoto.) In this one, it looks like they bought a "small town at night" package and maybe threw in some combat details.



This showed up on my feed because it's tagged "Hidden Object." I like hidden object games. This... does not look like a hidden object game. Normal hidden object games are like Clockwork Tales: Of Glass and Ink (a delightful steampunk-ish HO game) or the Nightmares from the Deep series (also delightful - ghost pirates). Less-normal HO games include weird mobile and Facebook games that add an energy-use mechanism, so you collect "gems" and need to recharge them to do the searches.

This... this does not look like it has any hidden object features at all. Nothing in the trailer (which involves "driving through spooky empty town at night") or the screencaps implies there are any search-for-items scenes. This might be a point-and-click adventure, or it could be a combat-survival game where you have to find weapons, but mostly it looks like a walking sim.

The publisher's other game is a combat-heavy MMORPG with microtransactions; it's a year older and pretty much everyone who tried it, hates it. I suspect the only reason ONotR isn't full of hate-reviews is that nobody buys walking-sim HO games just because they show in in the queue. The walking-sim and HO fans, like me, tend to be more selective than MMO players who will grab anything under $10 with the right keywords.

Violent MMORPG players are not (necessarily) less interested in quality, but their ideas of what "quality" means is different. "Has no real plot" is often not a strong negative; "has great shoot-em-up scenes" can outweigh that. For the walking sim people, there has to be a reason to get this game and not just replay Gone Home or Home Is Where One Starts. Both of those are charming. This? This is not charming. This looks like, at best, the opening act of a real game.