I started a Distant Worlds Campaign about ten weeks ago with a collection of a punk, a rock star, a standard gamer, one guy's girlfriend, a bartender, a park ranger, and a college student.
Given the nature of my gamers, I formatted this campaign so that even flakes could have a fine place in participating, and a wide array of characters could be explored.
I took a page from a previous campaign and started the beginning players in a prison on the moon of Gollarion (which I call Oerth), the recently privatized prison once known as the City of the Faceless.
The Big Bads of this campaign, The Thirteen, use perverse combination of arcane magic, divine magic, and technology to clear the planet Oerth of all sentient life-forms affected by sleep.
Whenever any creature affected by this "curse" sleep, they spread the curse via dreams to nearby people, barring magical protections and wards (protection from evil works on suppressing the effect, but Remove Curse cannot actually remove it. .
Bottom line, whenever a character's player can't make it, they "phase" out of the scene and to another planet. Whenever the line of inquiry on one planet seems in danger of growing stale, the whole party shifts to another planet, together. In this manner the campaign setting unfolds in interesting ways.
This opens up all manner of opportunity, story-wise, but it also requires designing, nearly but thankfully not completely from scratch, a whole solar system worth of planets, and a sun.
Once the players got hold of the Advanced Race Creation books, they began creating their own races to inhabit it. I ran up some of the "prefab" races James L Sutter provided, and tweaked them to what I believe would be interesting near and farther down the line.
I will post updates on this campaign as it keeps developing, and notes on what has been done so far.
Very interested in hearing about it.
M