An Open Setting

[Set]

Evil Lincoln wrote:

I like the idea of using earth deities, but I also have this idea of using the "portfolio" of each diety as its personification. A god named Death. A god named Strength. A god named Light, and so forth.

If the 'god of fire' *is* fire, all fire, everywhere, that could make a pretty funky setting. If Fire is displeased with you, fire will not burn, no matter how much pitch or tinder you spent trying to keep back the chill. Temples to Fire would have torches everywhere, so that Fire can see into every nook and cranny.

Being initiated to become a cleric of Fire would involve simply stepping into the bonfire, and if Fire accepts you, you will not burn. If fire thinks you aren't ready (or if your doubt is stronger than your faith), you'll get burned, but that doesn't mean that you can't come back next year and try again, and many elders of the church of Fire have impressive scars from their repeated attempts to join the priesthood.

Fire respects those who do not give up after being burned once.

There was a Dragon article ages ago that went on at length about designing a setting with four elemental gods, each tied to different themes (fire being the god of creativity and the forge, as well as destruction and magic, for instance, and the patron of summer), so that despite having a small 'pantheon,' each god had many different, often contradictory, aspects. The god of the sea was both the chaotic and treacherous god that drags sailors to their deaths, and the eternal calm and patient shephard of the unfailingly ordered tides who sustains the fisherman. Chaotic, good, lawful, evil. All at the same time.

[Blayde MacRonan]

Dotting for interest.

[The Eel]

Also Dotting.

[DM_aka_Dudemeister]

The idea of concepts (Like the Sandman's Endless) as Deities is also excellent for quick shorthand with plenty of room for expansion. I like that as a good alternative, so as to avoid cartoonish representations of Earth deities.

[Apathy_Dude]

I've been watching this thread for a couple of days now and I have a couple of ideas:

1 - Open Content
If you have a great idea that you want to spend time developing you'll have to do it offline since others might jump in and change your content while you're making updates day to day. My solution to this is to allow a creator to limit who has the rights to use, add, write, and read his content for a short time (i.e. a month). This lets the Creator flesh out what they want their content to be with out fear of every thing being destroyed. In summary every thing will eventually be open, just not for a little bit while the Creator has time to flesh out his idea, of course there should be an option to allow Creators to have the content open from the beginning.

2 - World:
We have the spell (lesser, greater) create demi-plane, why not use this as the basis of the world. Every one can create their own world (while following rules on technology and deities and what not), and authors who want to mesh their content together have the ability to do so by casting the spell to link the two together through a gate or some other magic.

3 - Deities:
Why not allow each area have their own deities, with influence over the area (or demi-plane if using that idea) that their Creator initially designed them for. This will allow well written deities to be brought in to other peoples worlds/regions/planes/whatever and therefore encourage well written deities. Also with many deities Clerics can easily find the niche that their looking for. There would have to be a few rules in place to ensure deities are not over powerful when they're only worshipped in a small region. Sort of like how Babylonian, Sumerian, and Egyptian pantheons all lived at the same time (and relatively close together).

4 – Time Line:
EL mentioned that he wants to have a static time line where adventures are designed to take place exactly then, however, why not have 3 or 4 times in history when you can play. This will make more in depth histories since people will generate content for all of those times, allow a structure that some one has made be used by multiple groups of people during different times. Lastly, the Admin or Moderators could decide that a new time period might be needed for what ever reason and with that influence Creators to create more content for that time period.

5 - Static Time Line Issues:
I don't mean to bash the idea of a static time line, however there are of course issues with having a time line that does not move. One being that if multiple people want to use an NPC that a third person generated then there's the issue of that NPC only being able to be used by one of them reducing the usability of content, same thing for locations and objects.

[LazarX]

Apathy_Dude wrote:

2 - World:

We have the spell (lesser, greater) create demi-plane, why not use this as the basis of the world. Every one can create their own world (while following rules on technology and deities and what not), and authors who want to mesh their content together have the ability to do so by casting the spell to link the two together through a gate or some other magic.

I assume you don't mean the literal spell. Despite the fantastic painting in the Spells chapter in Ultimate magic, what you get out of even multiple castings can only be called a "world" by a very charitable stretch of the definition. In short. you really can't create that scene you see in the painting with that spell.

[Ruggs]

You might like this game: Dawn of Worlds. It's a simple, straightforward game where the object is to craft a new world, a new setting, with a group of friends.

The rules are simple, and though you may not use the setting--you're certain to find ideas you may not have, otherwise.