The Avarthrel Encyclopædia used to be a MediaWiki / SMW -based wiki about all of the elements of the Avarthrel setting. It was my plan that this information would be used as a comprehensive resource for both my own use, and as a way for people to contribute material, whether they are writing their own stories or are just intrested in contributing their own elements to the world itself.

However, the wiki ultimately didn’t work out as well as I had anticipated. As the amount of material grew, it was difficult for me to work on the content; I was mostly just adding stuff that I had been working on in the stories without doing much of systematic work on the material. Secondly, very few viewers seemed to get interested about the world itself and most just came from search engines to very specific pages. (…you can take a few guesses about which parts of fantasy milieu are specifically interesting to the masses.)

All of this was compounded by the fact that the site was down for a very long time due to technical issues. I’m not a fan of PHP applications when something goes very wrong.

So, long story short, at the moment, the Avarthrel Encyclopædia has been taken offline. This doesn’t, however, mean that it is gone for good. I’m restoring the wiki into an internal server and dump the contents to a more easily editable format — in other words, a gigantic Scrivener file. It will eventually be released as a PDF file — probably first as a rough text dump, later as a periodically updated, polished file. I hope that this move will be enough to interest people seeing the entirety of the project as what it is, rather than focusing on individual elements.