May 2025 Monthly Update
Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! What? No, no, everything is fine. It's just May Day: the first of May. Oh! Um, right, sorry, SOSo sorry, won't happen again....
Welcome to the May 2025 Monthly Update. April was a little busy, I'll try to hit all the high points. First, apologies for no April Fools article this year. Just wasn't feeling up to it, hopefully next year. Or, you know, talk to me privately if you have an idea.
- 1 Status Report
- 1.1 What Talvin has been doing
- 1.2 Shoutout and Thank You!
- 2 Fulfillment
- 3 What Happens Next
- 4 Conclusion
- Down to 21 pages under Category:Update from Leviathans Core Rulebook. Along the way, found some that needed updates from Leviathans Gazetteer that I missed the first time. I doubt we'll ever be "done" with that book. Ho…
The Regia Marina and Italian Sky Fleet Problems
This blog post is going to be very much "inside baseball", another one of those that explains "What was Talvin thinking when he did this." If that's not interesting to you, you can probably give this one a pass.
In a wiki with more active editors, questions like this would typically be resolved by discussion and consensus in the talk pages. These serve as an important record of "what the $#&*! were they thinking?" that can be referred to later on. Since I am currently handling most of this alone, I am, well, talking to myself in a place where those who follow me can read it.
Two problems to deal with, and I have been dealing with them both at one go:
- The RM ship prefix
- The unusual history of the Regia Marina and the Italian Sky Fleet and how…
How many leviathans has the Pope?
Way back when the Kickstarter hadn't even closed yet, I posed a joking question to the community, "How many leviathans has the Pope?", riffing off of a quote famously attributed to Stalin in WW2. I followed this up with, "Maybe I shouldn't ask that question, since we know how many BattleMechs the Pope has! (about a regiment all told) So, no telling what CGL might do!"
Over two and a half years later, this topic still comes up occasionally. It came up again, briefly, over in the Flying Battleship Actual Discord server, and someone asked, "Do the Swiss Guard get Leviathans?"
I got to thinking: we have Category:Vatican City and Pope Pius X in the wiki, but what is going on there in-universe, and what do we know about the history?
This is going t…
April 2025 Update
"But Talvin!", you say, "It's March 31st!" Well, yes it is, but for some strange reason people are awfully wary of what I post on April 1. To accommodate your trust issues, I am putting this up the morning of March 31st, rather than a day late.
In all seriousness, I was hoping to do an April Fool's article for this year, but it just didn't work out. I have a rule that I only do one April Fool's joke a year, and this year I am having a little fun with some of my friends in Second Life. There's not much overlap between there and here, so you're probably safe.
But if you are in Second Life, send a hello to Talvin Muircastle over there!
I emptied out Category:Update from Leviathans Gazetteer (though there is something in there now, because of co…
A Review of How the West was Done
I want to start off by saying that, unlike my monthly Updates and some other posts, most of this blog entry is made with the Admin hat very firmly off (gotta put it back on at the very end). I am not discussing policies, procedures, where the Wiki is going with this or that. Just my opinions, for whatever they are worth. I also want to point out that despite having a degree in English and Education, I'm not exactly the best at writing reviews of fiction. I may not meet your expectations in this. I am going to ramble on and go down some odd paths: Talvin has ADHD, all who know him know this, if you didn't, by the time you are done reading this you will.
And finally, if you have not read How the West was Done by Michael A. Stackpole yet, yo…
The Italian Question
Sometimes I come across something in the lore, and I can't resolve it. Usually I can get by with a Notes section, but this one has me perplexed enough that it needs a blog entry to explain what we know, what we don't know, and what we know we don't know. Are we going to have an update in which Talvin explains what we don't know we don't know?
Don't know!
The Question: When did Italy get its first Leviathan?
What we know: it was probably between 1892 and 1895.
What we don't know: anything more precise.
What we know we don't know: which of the conflicting facts in the two main sources are correct!
- 1 The RM Napoli
- 2 References
- 3 Speculation
- 4 Conclusion
Both the Leviathans Gazetteer and the more recent Leviathans Core Rulebook state in their timelines that 189…
March 2025 Update
Finally realized I better start putting year in the title!
Hello, welcome to March, beware the Ides and Happy St. Patrick's Day and all that! Got a bit to cover, let's dive right in.
- 1 Every Day For A Year
- 2 Leviathans Gazetteer
- 3 "Oh, Those Russians!"
- 4 What's Next
- 5 Can You Help?
I did it! I got the achievement on Fandom for editing this wiki every day for a year. And I haven't stopped yet!
There is no following achievement, and I am glad of that. If I had to edit every day for five years to get another little badge, I'd lose my mind. But it has been a silly little motivator over the last year: no matter what, even if it is just fixing a typo or a category or making a note of something to do when I have more time, I worked on this thing every day …
February 2025 Update
Hello, everyone, a bit to talk about this month, so let's get to it.
- 1 Status Update
- 1.1 Leviathans Gazetteer
- 1.2 How the West Was Done
- 2 Ragnar!
- 3 Fair Use
- 4 Mexico
- 5 Going Forward
What got done?
I had planned, I had hoped, to be done with Category:Update from Leviathans Gazetteer by this time. I'm not.
I am down to six pages!
- Flotte de Volée
- French Republic
- German Empire
- Kaiserliche Lüftmarine
- Russian Empire
- Russian Imperial Fleet--though this one gets confusing: I am going to be decoding conflicting information about whether the Russian sky fleet is independent, Army, or Navy. So I might have one more to do.
I am currently working on the German Empire, and I plan to do the Luftmarine after I am done with that.
As you can see, these are not quick, "Oh, this hap…
January 2025 Update
Happy New Year!
- 1 Status Report
- 2 Product Pictures
- 3 More Product Pictures
- 4 Flying Battleship Actual
- 5 What's Next
Still plugging away at the joint Leviathans Gazetteer and Leviathans Core Rulebook updates. There are 27 pages still needing updates from the Gazetteer--it was down to 26 but I found another one to add--and 111 pages that need updates from the Core Rulebook. Everything from the Gazetteer also needs something from the LCR, so the total number of pages is 111.
Special:WantedPages stands at 17. You may recall I had it down to zero a few months ago, but that was part of clearing the decks for this project. Seventeen is not bad at all. Some of those will require running back to the Gazetteer and/or the LCR, I'll be doing those after I get the…
December 2024 Update
Welcome to the December Update!
- 1 Progress Report
- 2 How the West was DONE
- 3 A Personal Plea
- 4 Looking Forward
So, we're at 49 pages needing update from Leviathans Gazetteer, and 138 from Leviathans Core Rulebook, which is less progress than I had hoped for by this time. I did add a few, so the actual work done is slightly greater than a comparison would indicate, but yeah: the holidays have me slowing down a bit. Do note that almost everything that needs update from the Gazetteer also needs update from the Core Rulebook, and I have both files open when I am working on a page.
To check my own tendency for self-criticism, I went back to the September Update. At that time, there were 318 pages needing updates from the LCR. A fifth of the Wiki! It's now…
November 2024 Update
Hello, and welcome to the November Update.
I apologize that it is a bit late. Both on the personal level, and on the wider stage, things have been...uh....
Anyhow. Here we go:
- 1 Caught a Big Mistake!
- 2 An Historical Electroid Refinery?!
- 3 New Fiction!
- 4 And now, the Progress Report!
- 5 What's Next
Last month, I talked about how every wiki, indeed every encyclopedic work, should be presumed to have errors, and you ought to check the source. Well, I caught a big one I made: Alfred Harmsworth, Alfred Lord Northcliffe. I had him down as a fictional character created for Leviathans. Nope! Historical Figure! He even sponsored a motorboat race that has some of the same features as the Race to the Pole!
I was wrong, and I have done my best to correct it. S…
Sports in the Age of Leviathans
Talvin has had a bit of a day--nothing serious, nothing relating to here, just...bleh. So I am taking a break and doing a blog post about Sports in the timeperiod of Leviathans.
Obviously, nothing here is Canon: while the fictional timeline is very similar to ours, there are differences. But if you are a Role-Player, FanFic writer, or even someone looking to write canon, you may want to slip a bit of cultural background in there, and it is worth noting: the time-period during which "leviathans" were developed overlaps pretty closely with the rise of modern sports culture!
Perhaps the Bosun plays a pretty mean game of baseball, or the Lieutenant did pentathlon in the Olympics. Imagine a Sky Captain playing a round of golf when there is a blas…
October 2024 Update
Happy Fall, Happy Spring to you in the Southern Hemisphere (I know you are out there), Happy Halloween Season to all.
- 1 Monthly Updates
- 2 Where Things Stand
- 3 A Concern
- 4 What I Am Doing Next
- 5 Conclusion
Last month, I did an update. Then I thought, hey, Talvin, you should probably make that a habit: around the first of the month, just write out something about where the Wiki is at that moment in time, what's coming up, anything else of particular interest.
So here we are: second monthly update, and Gods of ADHD willing, another around this time every month going forward.
When last we spoke--ok, when last I blogged--I was laying out plans leading up to the expiration of Moratorium on the Leviathans Core Rulebook PDF, and what my priorities would be th…
September 2024 Update
I have said it before, but it always bears repeating: I like to put down my thoughts about the direction of things because too many times in the past, I have had to come along behind someone and ask, "What were they thinking when they did this?" Not even necessarily in a derogatory way, just...where were they going with this? What is this supposed to be or do?
And sometimes "they" was "me": I come back to something after a hiatus and find myself saying, "OK, what was I doing here?"
So this is a letter not just to the current readers and users of the Wiki, but to those caretakers who will come after me.
Special:WantedPages has only technical stuff in it at the moment. No missing articles. For a wiki with (checks quickly) 1,561 article pages …
Leviathans isn't Odd, History was
Heard it many times:
- "The British are not allied with the French? That's odd!"
- "Wait, the British are fighting the Russians? What about the Germans?"
- "Hold on, which side are the British on? That's weird!"
So, mild spoiler territory here from the Leviathans Core Rulebook, though it is nothing we haven't been told before: in Leviathans: The Great War, the British Empire is not fighting on the continent, though they do continue to skirmish with the French over the English Channel. Instead, the Brits are engaged in a struggle with the Russian Empire for Scandinavia. (The Russians are also involved on other fronts, but that's outside the scope of this blog post.)
Now, I want to take a moment and remind you that I am not a serious scholar of the Great…
Leviathans Core Rulebook Released To Backers!
HOORAY!! The Leviathans Core Rulebook is finally here!
Let's talk about what this means for the Wiki going forward.
We have a rule about no spoilers for recently released stuff. That means we won't be updating the Wiki from the lore parts of the rulebook until 27 September, 2024. Two months! That doesn't mean we'll be sitting idle.
A lot of pages are going to be tagged with Category:Update from Leviathans Core Rulebook. The Leviathans Gazetteer is partly reproduced within, but there are differences! We always knew that portions of the Gazetteer could wind up being retconned, and of course it was always subject to in-universe error, being a British briefing document.
The Wiki's work on the Gazetteer still needs to be finished: of all the sourceboo…
Where is Mikhail Kozlov?
Almost two years into this, and I finally got the Battle of Port Arthur and the Battle of Tsushima pages made. Some of that was ADHD and diving down a lot of other rabbit holes, some of it was trying to reconcile Leviathans Gazetteer, Leviathans: Armored Skies, and RL history.
Along the way I discovered a mystery. The existence of the mystery was right under my nose the whole time, but only recently have I become conscious of it. Don't read too much into that: Talvin can be a little dense at times! But now I really want to know:
Where is Mikhail Kozlov?
Polkovnik Mikhail Kozlov is one of the two main characters in A Monster in the Sky, the other being Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō. Admiral Togo is treated as a hero of the Empire of Japan, even in…
Happy Pride 2024! A list of resources
Last year around this time, I made a short blog post about Pride Month. As I said then: while Leviathans Wiki pledges to "Keep Modern Minimal", that hardly excludes LGBTQIA+ matters, so long as we stick to what happened in the historical period! The period surrounding "The Great War" was a busy time in Queer History.
I still maintain that I am not a true Scholar of LGBT History, but I am more of one than I was this time last year. This is offered as a collection of links and resources for those who may be looking to include LGBT characters and situations in their fiction (canon or fanon), roleplayers, or anyone just interested in the period.
I went back and got most of the links from my previous post and included them in here for completene…
Janes, James, Brassey, and More!
This blog entry will make you sad, but I have some consolation prizes that should make up for it.
I will start by answering a question that comes up often:
Is there a Jane's Fighting Leviathans?
Good News and Bad News.
Now, I am not in any way, shape or form a representative of Catalyst Game Labs (or any other company), and I am not a lawyer. Despite that, I think I can give some pretty clear answers. Yes, this is the Bad News.
- Jane's does canonically exist in the Leviathans Universe. Jane's Ships of the World is consulted in Rendezvous in Rio.
- Jane's Fighting Leviathans, or anything using the Jane's brand name, is very highly unlikely to ever appear as a publication by Catalyst Game Labs, and I advise against using it for fan-produced stuff.
- We are al…
My Next Steps
I recently finished (mostly) getting Miracle de la Tactique into the Wiki. I thought I had it all in there, only to realize there are some pages that still need info from that novella. It's the life of the Wiki Editor.
So I took a good look at the Wiki after a year and a half and...yeah, I have some messes to clean up. Several of the Fiction pages don't have a plot summary. The . That goes on a product page--a piece of fiction, sourcebook, even box of minis if there is something in there we can use to update articles--and points editors to the category for "Update needed from X". The Miracle de la Tactique page has that now: it will guide new editors easily to where they can find a list of pages that need more cited information from that …
Civilian and Cargo Leviathans
Hello, fellow Sky Captains!
Today I am taking a break from my continuing work on the links off Miracle de la Tactique to do my best to answer a question that I get a lot (and that people often search on the Wiki!):
Variations on:
"Are there cargo leviathans?"
"Are there civilian leviathans?"
"Are there noncombatant leviathans?"
Before I give an answer, I need to deliver a little Caveat Lector, here: some have tried to present me as the expert on this stuff, or as if I have some secret, insider knowledge. Absolutely not! I have access to the same words, the same publications, the same updates as any other backer of the Kickstarter. Less than some, actually: I was not a Playtester. As for an inside track to news from CGL: nope! Don't have it and don't wa…
Talvin's List of Interesting Sources (Updates Occasionally)
This is going to be a weird cross between a Blog Post and a Non-Canon Wiki Article. At some point, I (or ideally someone with a better background in the material) may turn this into a proper page of resources somewhere.
If you have listened to me talk about this wiki and Leviathans for at least five minutes, it is a near-certainty you have heard me carry on about mention that one of my favorite parts is comparing and contrasting the OTL or "Original Timeline" (ours) and the LTL or "Leviathans Timeline". Whenever I add a new character, ship, unit, battle, location, event--anything--I first do a check to see, "is this fictional, or based on something from history?" The historical stuff gets extra attention, historical images, special categories…
"What is the best way to help with the Wiki?"
I have been asked this a time or two, and for once I will try to be brief. (But you know me!)
The best ways to help the Wiki (and me!) are: proofreading, lore research, and product assistance.
In Help:Getting Started as an Editor, one of the first things we say is that Small Stuff Matters. We make typos. Other people catch them and correct them. A reference might point to the wrong page: fix it if you can, leave a note on the talk page if you cannot find it. Punctuation, some people like to fix grammar, maybe something could be phrased more clearly. All useful.
This is where I spend most of my time right now, and my workbench is typically full of things I am going to follow up on. If you think you can tackle something there (or something not l…
The Cavendish Family Problem
It is the seemingly simplest things that can be hardest. The Cavendish Family is mentioned in one inset in Leviathans Gazetteer, and plays a central role in What Prices Paid. At first glance, they should be easily added to the Wiki, but when I dug down into the fine details, I found things are a little complicated.
As with all the "Problem" blog posts I write, I am doing this for two reasons: first, I have found that writing these things out on one page without being constrained by the format of a regular Wiki article often helps me figure out how to handle the problem, and second, it serves as an explanation to future readers, wiki editors, and perhaps even fiction and fluff authors of why I did it the way I did. Because I am nearly certain…
Submersible Leviathans?
If you hang around in the Leviathans Discord Server long enough, the topic of Submersible Leviathans is going to come up. (Full disclosure: I am probably the one bringing it up.) They are the Land-Air 'Mechs of Leviathans: you love them or you hate them.
Let me take a moment to be clear: this is all Fanon! We know that there are amphibious leviathans, we see them in Rendezvous in Rio. We know that Holland-type submersibles exist, we see them briefly mentioned in Leviathans Gazetteer.
Could John Philip Holland, or anyone, make a submarine that can also fly using electroid? Maybe. Do we have canonical evidence of same yet? No. This is all pure fan speculation, and as such must remain in the "blog" section of the Wiki.
One point that has been raised w…
Looking Ahead: More Admins
We are getting closer to the time when we can expect greater interest in Leviathans: they are on track for fulfillment and (I would assume) public release this year. With a little luck, in time for Christmas.
That's likely to mean greater interest in what we are doing here. Yes, it's been mostly a one-man show for a while, though a few others have popped in to help out, and I very much appreciate that! But once the game is out there in the world more, we're likely to grow.
We need more than one Admin. I am not rushing to add people: the policies say "Do not seek Authority, seek Responsibility", and I want to see who does that. But I still think it's worthwhile to discuss a bit of what we should expect from Admins. Three seems like a good…
Pride Month: LGBTQIA+ in the period
Here in the Leviathans Wiki, we "keep modern minimal", confining most of our discussions to the time period leading up to and including The Great War. Pride Month thus might seem an unusual topic for this blog, but LGBTQIA+ history in that time offers a fair bit to talk about!
To date, we have not seen any canonically-confirmed queer characters in Leviathans, but Catalyst Game Labs has not shied from this topic in other properties, so I will not be surprised if they dip into this rich history as they continue to bring out novels, short stories, and "fluff" for this series. To paraphrase a recent slogan for another CGL property, "Leviathans is for Everyone".
As a Straight guy who is only a passing scholar of Queer history, I am not going to tr…
The Frederick the Great Problem
SPOILER ALERT: this blog entry is going to contain spoilers for Miracle de la Tactique. If you haven't read that yet and don't want to be told about something important ahead of time, stop reading now.
Let us now consider four (or maybe not four?) leviathans and an OTL warship:
- SML Friedrich der Grosse
- SMS Friedrich der Grosse (wikipedia page for OTL vessel)
- SML Frederick the Great
- SML Friedrich II
- SML Frederick II
All of these are named for the same person: Frederick the Great, who was also Frederick II. We have Leviathans Gazetteer, a novella, a Kickstarter Update with a full-color ship card, another Kickstarter update with black and white cards from the design process, and a lot of discussion in the Leviathans Discord Server.
And me, your poor …
The Cleveland Problem
When doing a wiki like this, sometimes we get to play detective. We are committed to sticking to documentable facts from the sources, but sometimes the facts are scattered around a bit.
- In The Wind from the Sky, we learn that the USS Cleveland is a Denver-class vessel, adapted from what was to be a maritime hull.
- In Steel, Bamboo, and Rice Paper, we learn that in 1903, Togo is due to return home with four leviathans purchased from the Americans after he completes his post-graduation cruise.
- In Leviathans Gazetteer, set in 1910, we are told a few things:
- The Japanese air fleet is based largely on American Cleveland-class hulls. We know of no such weapon from The Wind from the Sky, but the Gazetteer is set six years later, and certainly the Cleveland had…
Rules, Stats, and Leviathans Wiki
From the time I started resurrecting this Wiki, I have struggled with, "How shall we deal with Rules, Stats, and similar things?" So, here is where we stand:
The Leviathans Wiki will not give rules for play, nor will it be a repository for game statistics outside of point values for ships. It will strive to have well-referenced pages that point to where one may find this information.
I am a firm believer in communicating why I make decisions in most cases. I know that I will not always be the chief maintainer of this Wiki (I am counting on it!), and I want whomever comes after to me to have not only a solid foundation, but a solid understanding of why certain things were done.
- 1 Copyright Issues
- 1.1 Something Lost In Translation
- 2 Labor Cost
- 3 Wha…
Calling All Experts!
I have always had a passing interest in "The Great War", which puts me ahead of the pack when you consider how few people really study it at all. After joining the Leviathans Discord Server, however, I began to understand that there are some people in this fandom that know a lot more than I do, and probably a lot more than I ever will.
I love that. I am playing a game and editing a wiki about flying battleships in The Great War, and I get to hang out with people who are steeped in knowledge about the history, politics, technology, and culture of the era. So to them I say: hey, wanna write an essay?
Leviathans Wiki doesn't host fanworks in the wiki proper, but when it comes to discussion spaces like user blog posts and other user-centered space…
Categories!
385 categories (for 291 pages at this writing!) Yes, that is a lot, but in time we will add things to all of them. We will even add a few more, but I hope the growth of categories will slow down past this point. You can see the full list of categories here.
Now, that's not going to help much. And some of those come "built in", but yes, most of those I made.
I am not going to explain every category, but I will give a brief tour of how categories work right now. We start with:
- Category:Content: the "root" level of the categories. Everything comes under this somewhere, or it gets flagged for categorization.
- Category:Administrative: the stuff the Admins and Editors use to handle stuff, as well as policies for the Wiki.
- Category:Community: Blog posts…
Looking Ahead: After the Kickstarter
What a wild ride! Catalyst Game Labs had a very successful Leviathans Kickstarter with all but two stretch goals reached (and we expect to see those sooner or later in any event!) I spent a lot of time playing "Whack-a-Mole" on the Wiki, getting stretch goals up as Announced Product pages, switching to creating Help pages, then switching to creating pages that help answer questions I saw a lot of in the Discord server, it was crazy--and I loved it.
But now things are settling down, and it's time to start taking a more considered approach to what's next. One of my goals from the time I set my sights on getting an Admin position here was to reach out to CGL proactively and ask how we can stay in their good graces. Some fandom communities …
Historical Figures!
One of the exciting things about Leviathans is that we get to see alternate versions of people from history, both the "big names" and some that 99% of the planet has never heard of. The key divergence in the timeline (at least that we can see) is when Frances Rychnowski, an engineer and lover of pseudoscience who gets a fairly short Wikipedia entry, discovers "Electroid", the technomagical fluid that makes Leviathans really "steampunk".
I have only been working on this wiki for a few weeks, but along the way I have improved my knowledge of the Great War and the world of the late 1800s and early 1900s. I had never heard of Jackie Fisher, August Bebel, Raisuli, or some of the other figures I have run across in the fiction. Leviathans: Armored Ski…
Policy Proposal: "Keep Modern Minimal"
Leviathans is set at the beginning of The Great War, what we now refer to (in our timeline!) as World War I.
But it is not exactly our Great War. Leviathans is set in a different universe. The Russo-Japanese War began and ended earlier, and in this fictional timeline, the Russians won. Czar Nicholas II and most of his family were assassinated--the British are blamed--and Anastasia takes the throne. Anastasia was born earlier: she is near twenty when the Great War begins. Archduke Ferdinand died on schedule, and in the same or at least a similar manner. Switzerland no longer exists as a sovereign nation, however, and Chile is occupied by Japan.
Some things still exist in this fictional timeline and are acknowledged in the fiction and lore of L…
Redirections
Hey, is there a way to make a page or a search automatically redirect to another page? For example, if I type "Destroyer" in the search bar, it would then take me directly to the Destroyer page instead of giving me search results anyway?
Or, perhaps slightly more importantly, having common mistypes of article titles redirect to that page anyway. The most glaring example I can think of for that is Royal Skyfleet redirect immediately to Royal Sky Fleet instead of first sending you to a redirect page with no text except to tell you that it's a redirect page. It offends my sense of neatness.
Gonna Need Help...
...with the references on various pages. I just don't have access to enough of the material (core box set, fleet boxes) to really, fully cite these pages. The process to cite something is also incredibly annoying and tedious. I just plain won't be able to do it all by myself. I'll sure as hell try, though! Just, some help would be nice.
Administration
I have submitted a request to adopt this wiki, thereby gaining sysadmin priviledges.