Open Buddha

This is amazing. I just read through the author biography on the site and a few other bits.

 http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,69641,00.html

The Saga of The Saga

Four days isn’t a lot of time to weave an entire fantasy world of whole cloth. Yet in less than a week, scores of people from all across the world have crafted the Epic Legends of the Hierarchs: The Elemenstor Saga, a detailed history of the world of Battal, where powerful wizards seek adventure with ambulatory furniture at their side.

Spanning more than 1,400 articles, the Epic Legends of the Hierarchs — or as fans have unpronounceably abbreviated it, ELOTH:TES — has all the trappings of modern fantasy franchises: a rich history that spans thousands of years; a contentiously out-of-canon cartoon offshoot, The Wizbits; as well as a crazed, seizure-ridden chief creative director, James Langomedes (an obvious caricature of mad comics genius Alan Moore).

But despite references to 28 years of "real world" history, The Saga never really existed, at least in the conventional sense.

Spawned this past week from a single page of material posted on a public wiki by web comic Penny Arcade scribe Jerry "Tycho" Holkins, The Saga is a fan-driven parody of the banal fiction that serves as a backdrop to the majority of modern fantasy game franchises.

"(These worlds) are the half-ass bullshit used to underlie the money-printing extravaganza," of game systems like Wizard of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering collectable card game, explained Holkins. The Saga exists in part to prove the facileness of such back stories and in part to acknowledge the culpability of fantasy fans who buy it all, no matter the quality. The wiki is the "joke that everyone is in on," said Holkins.

The rest of the article goes into it a bit more…