Re-Establishing vWord or Equinox

[TetNak]

Hello all --

Some of you might remember the sprawling D&D 3.5 games that either fell in the category of vWorld or Equinox. Basically, these were connected worlds with various different games inside. vWorld was initially build by Vardaen with a couple games that were geographically linked. Equinox was basically theme based, and not necessarily in the same geographic area.

Anyway. I think the linking of game worlds is an interesting concept. And I love world building. I'd like to do something like this again, and with help, we can come up with something. Who is interested?

Tet

[Muskrat]

I'd be interested, but the last time we tried a common world-building project, it fizzled after not too long. I think a big part of the problem is that everyone went off and created their own slice of the world without much interaction with each other. This sort of defeats the point of a collaborative world-building project.

One possibility is to use a collaborative world-building game. I'm currently in a game of Microscope on another site, which I'm very much enjoying. It's GM-less and the rules, while unusual, are actually pretty simple, but I'd be happy to coach people through the initial stages. You go about collaboratively defining the beginning and end points of your history and defining a few key aspects of the setting. You then take turns filling in the rest of the history in a non-linear fashion. The name comes from the fact that you can zoom in and out, defining broad periods or looking closely at certain interactions, which you role-play out.

I think there's other collaborative world-building games out there as well, like Dawn of Worlds.

[Vardaen]

I'd love to see Palamon's Durnalis world take shape from his initial vision. I would also welcome additional GMs to build on the Fallen Empires game world I have now that links to the Age of Ice: Children of Kylorin game set 400 years later.

[TetNak]

I'd be interested, but the last time we tried a common world-building project, it fizzled after not too long. I think a big part of the problem is that everyone went off and created their own slice of the world without much interaction with each other. This sort of defeats the point of a collaborative world-building project.

One possibility is to use a collaborative world-building game. I'm currently in a game of Microscope on another site, which I'm very much enjoying. It's GM-less and the rules, while unusual, are actually pretty simple, but I'd be happy to coach people through the initial stages. You go about collaboratively defining the beginning and end points of your history and defining a few key aspects of the setting. You then take turns filling in the rest of the history in a non-linear fashion. The name comes from the fact that you can zoom in and out, defining broad periods or looking closely at certain interactions, which you role-play out.

I think there's other collaborative world-building games out there as well, like Dawn of Worlds.

Interesting, I'd like to hear more about this.

[TetNak]

I'd love to see Palamon's Durnalis world take shape from his initial vision. I would also welcome additional GMs to build on the Fallen Empires game world I have now that links to the Age of Ice: Children of Kylorin game set 400 years later.

I like the Durnalis stuff as well. Not sure I'd want to mess with it, though. It'd feel strange if we changed anything, etc.

As for Age of Ice, those are interesting things as well, and might be good to slip into any build.

[Vardaen]

Well you know where I am if you were interested. The AoI stuff has broad strokes of history, cosmology, and cultures defined, but the closer look stuff is totally unexplored except for where PCs have been.

Fallen Empires would be a great place to grab up a culture or two and flesh it out, and drop a game there.

[TetNak]

One problem is what you do about system. do you conform to one for all, or just do theme and leave everything else up the the gm. in AoI, do you have the entire world populated?

[Shurijo]

To be honest, I'd prefer a single system. That allows for homebrew custom weapons, PrCs, races, feats, equipment, etc. to be shared (or imitated) across different parts of the world. I know you hate d20 Tet, but if you're looking to world build a large system with multiple themes and games, I think you're going to have to give in.

Maybe you could even wrap it up as a Campaign setting for Pathfinder d20, like we started with ME.

[TetNak]

I'm not sure why it has to be one system.

Say you create a race. The race is described, you know what the powers are, but if someone is making them for Pathfinder, that's cool, if someone makes them for Savage Worlds or GURPS or whatever, that's cool too.

[Vardaen]

In FE the continents are populated with broad strokes of cultures and such, but easily manipulated, thse were also initially created in part by the player base.

It doesn't have to be 1 system, some time the history and theme is more work than the crunchy bits, but the theme would have to work for many systems. You couldn't have lots of firearms in a game that would get run with d20, or a high magic theme then use a Magicless system.