B4cchus said:
How where the judges/decision makers positions filled at the dawn of LEW? or better even, at LEB?
LS is probably a better example than LEB
Basicly, a bunch of people had the idea to do a living supers game, and LS resulted in wanting a game that had an ovious way to bring players togeather, and set the tone to have some continuity, so you end up with a UN sponsored super force, No aliens allowed, and a very specific spot where RL and that universe diverges.
Once we had a fairly agreeable background, we had votes for judges, and kicked it off. It was myself, another judge who left, and a third person (Velmont?) initialy, and we expanded it.
LEB already had the background/starting point, so we sorta voted for judges (RA and myself joined KO), and then we stole most of the initial rules from LEB.
For a new LEW 4E, I'd suggest starting it off by getting a general consensus on the initial town, getting some votes for some initial judges, and then start content approval for fluff just like rules approval. if you start in January, by the time you get to approval of fluff, should be March or April, and you should have the book when it's time to flesh things out rules wise.
I would suggest however waiting to start any actual games till all 3 books have been out at least a month. Otherwise, things like treasure awards, XP awards, and monsters will be somewhat inconsistant, which is ok in a home campaign, but could kill a living/joint campaign.
Things that are easy to do before the full rules are out:
General world history (The Enworldphant for example)
a few Major gods (fluff for the world history) (Creation gods or elemental gods are a good starting point and can be fitted for rules later)
The starting location setup (non-rules portions at least) (The basics of Orussis)
Nations, Organizations, or other fluff stuff (Freefolk, Earling, the Accademy of the Chromatic Order, things like that)
What isn't good before rules come out:
Rules restrictions on the starting city
Racial histories
Houserules
Character creation and advancement rules
Large Deity lists (the need for the list depends on how deities are dealth with in game)
A detailed history (which could be effected by race, item, deity, or monster rules, just to name a few)
Remember, there will be some default assumption changes in 4E, such as cosmology and some monsters may be redone (again). So rushing into this while in the dark about a lot of this won't help anyone. And if the SRD isn't available immedately, or quickly in a usable format (I'm sure someone will HTML it soon after it's released though) , it could slow down potential players quite a bit.
Waiting till things have been out for a bit gives you time to read, prepare, and hopefully not have to do major fixed.