Pelagos: World of Storms

[Eru]

Hi all,

I'd like to introduce you to Pelagos: World of Storms. This world is in the early to mid stages of development and is a collaborative effort between a handful of GMs that have come together to test the possibilities of a new structured web-based collaborative world-building environment. The primary goal is to turn Pelagos into a massively collaborative effort, with tens or even hundreds of GMs working together, each owning different portions of the world and fleshing them out (leveraging a unique system and toolset designed especially for this). Some might own entire kingdoms with other GMs owning towns within, while others may opt to own a simple inn and make it the best it can be (anyone know how to make an inn here? ;)).

Part of this goal is to publish Pelagos online, and possibly eventually in print. Visit the link above and you'll see a player's view of the world. Register and sign up as a GM for Pelagos and you'll see a GM's view of the world, with all the character sheets (in PCGen format), villain's plans, dungeon layouts, etc. The hope is that many hands will make light (and detailed) work, and in a year or so we'll have a campaign setting that has hundreds of towns, villages, and dungeons with maps, characters, and unique items, as well as dozens of adventures grouped into a few campaign paths.

I'll leave the introduction of the setting's key themes and features to the site itself. Any and all feedback is welcome, as are volunteers who want to own and develop a piece of it.

Cheers!

[Xeviat]

This is a really cool idea. Ultimately, it is what I hope for my world to become some day, but through novels; I'd love for Three Worlds to become a Forgotten Realms sort of world, with many authors writing in it.

Consider my interest peaked. I'll be perusing Pelagos in upcoming days. Maybe this might get us motivated to work on CeBeGia more.

[LordVreeg]

Lots of intersting ideas.

Loved the map, and how friendly it was.  We have lots of pretty maps, but yours is friendly.  Figure that out.

Loved the seasons and the moon, especially the detail put into the moons changes.  Well done.  Does the moon change at all with the maelstroms phases?  I ran into Dwarfham while poking around...integrated culture vs non-integrated?

Looking forward to the Religion and underpinnings of religion.  The 'Demonic Goth' makes little sense without knowing what demons are in this setting.

[Eru]

This is a really cool idea. Ultimately, it is what I hope for my world to become some day, but through novels; I'd love for Three Worlds to become a Forgotten Realms sort of world, with many authors writing in it.

Consider my interest peaked. I'll be perusing Pelagos in upcoming days. Maybe this might get us motivated to work on CeBeGia more.

Thanks. Eruvian.com is free and open, so anyone can register and use the web-based tools to create a setting - no technical knowledge required. In fact, there are a number of campaign settings currently being built on the site, including Jürgen Hubert's Urbis, which was suggested to me not so long ago as being the most developed homebrew in existence. Once all of Urbis' content is online Jürgen will hit the "Publish" button and it will be visible to the world.

Three Worlds would be more than welcome to join Urbis, Pelagos, and the other settings under development. Who knows, what starts out as collaborative world building could later transform into collaborative story writing. That's essentially the path Forgotten Realms took, though the design team was limited to the employees and freelancers hired by a single company instead of the much larger pool of talent represented by this site and the rest of the gaming community.

Regarding CeBeGia, I know it's not easy to collaborate and publish within a forum-based environment. Often it's even difficult to explore what's been created. The lack of a simple navigational system, the difficulty in immediately separating discussion from decision, and the inability to always be able to see a current "snapshot" of the world make maintaining momentum among the developers a real challenge. The only way that I'm aware of to get around those issues is to have people dedicated to nothing but thread management, restructuring, and hyperlinking, which pulls those people away from the creative efforts. Kudos to what you've been able to accomplish so far.

That said, if there is interest in accelerating the work on CeBeGia, it might benefit from the easy navigation and structured division of labor offered by Eruvian, as well as the many other features designed to facilitate collaborative world building and the publication of the resulting world in a readily usable format.

Thanks for the feedback...I hope to see some of your work published on Eruvian some time....

[LordVreeg]

We should have collaborated on a town or city first.  something with an easier scope.

[Eru]

Lots of intersting ideas.

Loved the map, and how friendly it was.  We have lots of pretty maps, but yours is friendly.  Figure that out.

Loved the seasons and the moon, especially the detail put into the moons changes.  Well done.  Does the moon change at all with the maelstroms phases?  I ran into Dwarfham while poking around...integrated culture vs non-integrated?

Looking forward to the Religion and underpinnings of religion.  The 'Demonic Goth' makes little sense without knowing what demons are in this setting.

Thanks for the feedback LordVreeg. Unless you registered and signed up as a GM you saw a player's view of Pelagos. That view is meant for players to get a general idea about the setting and introduce certain concepts (like the goth) without detailing them - in this world no one has encountered a goth for 1200 years, so they are little more than legend). The GM's view has tons more stuff, such as a more complete history, locations and characters the players wouldn't know about, character stats along with full sheets, dungeons, encounters, etc. It is meant to allow the GM to reveal the setting in the course of their campaign.

Regarding Dwarfham, it is isolated (the GM's view also gives all community stats - population, racial mix, etc.).

Here are a few links deeper into the more developed areas of Pelagos:

Hydanham - an island in the midst of an endless magical storm

Norland - a kingdom on the island of Hydanham

Barony of Middleton - a barony within the kingdom of Norland

Middleton - the capital of the afore-mentioned barony

Hovelton - the poorest district of Middleton

The Beggar King's Hovel - a building within Hovelton

Naryway - a village within the Barony of Middleton (fun to read the GM-only view of this one - the guy who did this is truly twisted)

Grey Swamp - a swamp next to the village of Naryway (another fun one for GMs, done mostly by the same guy who did Naryway)

Pelagos debuts with some 260 pieces of published content, though not all contain the level of detail seen in the locales above (though there are contributions being made daily). It also has specific content requests for about 50 more pieces of content that can be claimed and filled by anyone who registers at the site and signs up as a GM. These requests might be for a specific map to be made or a character to be built (using PCGen, the free and popular open source character generator).

The first adventure (with about a dozen detailed maps) should be published in a week or two, and will start off a campaign of epic proportions.

[Eru]

We should have collaborated on a town or city first.  something with an easier scope.

I agree that having a more limited scope might make collaboration easier. However, I also believe the real problem is that forums are just ill-suited for collaborative world building in general, due to the following realities:

1) Each project has a different structure and it usually takes me a while to figure it out.
2) There is no easy navigation - the mention of a character on one page almost never links to more information on the character, such as their bio, history, and stats. Maintaining this is either an issue of collective discipline or, more likely, a maintenance nightmare requiring a dedicated soul who is then syphoned away from creativity.
3) Separating discussion from decisions can be a challenge, and sometimes even reaching decisions can be tough, especially with design-by-committee projects.
4) Identifying newly made additions or modifications to the world, or getting a current overall snapshot of it can be difficult.
5) Separating the wheat from the chaff can be hard - sometimes a contributor or a piece that is contributed simply does not add to the project. There is generally no fair system of rating and reviewing a contributed piece and determining its place in the project (or lack thereof).
6) Unstructured communication regarding how the work is divvied up work can lead to multiple people duplicating effort on one area while another area is left untouched.
7) Without a final goal motivating contributors, such as print or PDF publication, interest in the world slowly fades until work ceases altogether.

All this is not to say that collaborative world-building can't be done within a forum environment - there are definitely a few examples of relative success. It's just to say that the tools and processes themselves are usually against you before you even begin.

At least that's my opinion - others may disagree.