Scorpio said:
The great thing about this is that we can do pretty much everything folks have mentioned- after all, different parts of this world will have different 'histories'. I love Jurgen's premise, he must have had that on his back burner for a while!
Well, I had some similar ideas for quite some time, but I only put it together on Friday evening.
My general process for brainstorming is: I read a lot of books, daydream a lot, write all the ideas down that I get - and when I start laughing like Jinnai from El Hazard when I get a certain idea, I know I have a winner.
And the offer of the forum and site is hard to pass up.
If you come up with a good name for the world, I can put up a forum immediately...
In some aspects, there will be obvious similarities to other previous creations, that is inevitable. It is the Standing Challenge to take those aspects and meld them into a New and Unique Game World that will stand apart from the others...
Sort of what Pyramid's
Suppressed Transmission column does with real-world history...
There is a core History that we will have to agree on...Jurgen laid the groundwork there, in my opinion, we can work off of that, and then spiral off from that. But remember, Consistency is very important, along with cohesiveness-we can't have complete anarchy as far as the general developement of this world...
That's why having a Campaign Editor is so vital. He or she would be the one who works out all the inconsistencies (with input from the community, of course). And if any questions come up, he will have to badger the contributers until they come up with something useful.
Ideally, the Campaign Editor would have some previous experience with writing (like writing articles for d20 Weekly or some other magazine - or at least a campaign of his own with lots of notes). This task requires a lot of time and effort.
No one person should be straddled with undue responsibility or commitment to this project, there should be a core of people who can 'run' the whole thing,a 'council' of sorts, regardless of who has absence to due the 'real world'-jobs, family, military, life in general.
Then maybe we can split the project up (and I can create seperate forums for each subproject).
One split that immediately springs to mind is that between the colonies - all the beings that came from the old world (humans, etc.), and the "natives" - those who had lived there before that (and their ecology, and so on...)
That all said, I think it would be prudent to take this to another venue, if there is agreement here. My vote would be to take Jurgen up on his offer at this time. I would think that a thread here that 'advertises' the project would be a good idea,to get more people involved, and with the URL of the new venue prominent...
You could also all put a link to it in your ENWorld signatures, like I'm doing with
Urbis in mine.
Perhaps someone with an artistic inclination can create a banner for it as well, as soon as we come up with a name...
Develop a core History and Geography of the World,
Hmmm. I think I'll have a look at these Random Planet Generation rules in my copy of
GURPS Traveller: First In. Perhaps I can come up with something useful...
>>Decide who will want to 'volunteer' in what areas-for instance, I will volunteer to create ridiculously detailed maps of the whole thing...
I might be able to gather some more ideas about the native ecology...
