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Message: <blockquote data-quote="haiiro" data-source="post: 899135" data-attributes="member: 1891">Caution: Kind of Long...Your proposal makes me think of three analagous (but not identical) concepts: Call of Cthulhu, the Cthulhu Mythos, and the Thieves' World novels.Call of CthulhuChaosium has the license to produce gaming material based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft, and by and large they do an amazing job of it. They also rely extensively on freelancers, but quality control is very high.Over the years, a few other companies have been able to produce CoC stuff as well -- most notably Pagan Publishing, but also companies like Fantasy Flight Games and Triad Entertainment. I'm sure others will disagree, but of the third-party CoC materuial I've seen (which is quite a bit), only Pagan consistently puts out worthwhile stuff.The Cthulhu MythosAfter Lovecraft started writing his loosely-connected tales of ordinary folk confronting otherworldly forces in a nihilstic universe, an ever-expanding circle of writers joined him in building up this setting and its concepts. Over the years, there have been a lot of authors producing Mythos tales -- some very good, some mediocre, and some very bad.August Derleth in particular has had a far-reaching influence on Lovecraft's "world" -- he coined the term "Cthulhu Mythos," he started Arkham House (to keep HPL's work in print), and he wrote a lot of (generally bad) Mythos fiction. He also fiddled with Lovecraft's concepts in order to shoehorn them into his peculiar vision of how things should work (Lovecraftian deities as elemental forces, etc.). In other words, his influence has been a very mixed bag overall.On the other side of the coin are authors like Robert Bloch and Rob Chambers, who have added to the Mythos in important and worthwhile ways.The Thieves' World NovelsConceived from the start as a shared world, the Thieves' World setting grew through short story anthologies written by various authors. The stories were selected and edited by the creators, and they generally wrote a story or two for each collection.Predictably, some of the stories were good, some were just OK, and some really sucked. After reading a couple of the books, I stopped following the series entirely -- because unlike picking and choosing between CoC supplements and Mythos authors, I couldn't avoid buying the crappy stories in each collection.Hopefully these rambling comparisons make sense to people other than myself... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f631.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":o" title="Eek!    :o"  data-smilie="9"data-shortname=":o" />In essence, I think an open setting would probably need some form of editorial control in order to work well. Although that might not be in the spirit of the idea, without it I think you'd wind up with a lot more crap than cream (in the same way that there are a lot more bad d20 products than good ones, IMO).It is a very cool idea, and done right I think it could be sucessful. Out of curiosity, have you taken a look at <a href="http://enworld.cyberstreet.com/hosted/Jagged/umbragia/">Umbragia</a> or the Mor's End project (in the <a href="http://enworld.cyberstreet.com/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=18">Plots & Places forum</a>)? Both seem to have similar underlying principles to the open setting that you propose.</blockquote>

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