That may or may not end up being something that Thorf wants to incorporate in the "core" of "Pizza World", but I actually think that detailed "drag and drop" pantheons of gods could be really helpful for a GM who wants to add some new culture to any other campaign world.Ashtagon wrote:I'm thinking, if we kitchen-sink it, we could start by taking the real-world pantheons written up in deities and demigods, and do original research to write them up properly. I'm sure more than a little game-reality has crept into the tsr/wotc versions of these pantheons.
If pantheons are optional, then rather that creating a kitchen-sink world, you allow the GM to customise the world. They could add as many pantheons as they want or even mix and match gods between the pantheons.
As well as looking into how individual churches of specific gods within a pantheon might work, it might also be interesting to look at the culture as a whole and see how a multi-god church might work.
It looks good.Thorf wrote:Well, it seems there's no keeping a lid on the enthusiasm to get on with this project.I get busy for one day and look what happens!
I think the main problem you might get is that people (inevitably) all want to push the thing in slightly different directions. I think you would need to decide what the "primary" objective was and then (without banning other ideas) make it clear that anything else is a "secondary" project.
For example, anything involving travel to other planes (or dimensions or the afterlife) is going to be complex to set up. It is really a setting in its own right. The same goes for anything involving travel to space.
I think your primary objective should be to build the world. The other two things I mentioned could be sub-projects (and might even deserve having sub-forums).
As for building the world, I love your idea of the random map. I also love the idea of using a kitchen sink approach with gods. There are a lot of cultures in the world and (if someone brought some of them out of the cuboard and to the RPG table) people could enjoy exploring them, while learning a bit about some random part of the real world. But again, it is possibly too much to organise in one go.
Maybe (after designing the global map) you could focus on one small continent and then come back to other areas and treat each one of them as a campaign expansion. A modular approach like this, could allow you to get something finished fairly fast, but still allow space for all the other interesting ideas to be dragged and dropped.
I'd be more keen to work on a space sub-project, if I could find the time, and as I said, I'd like to go for a multi-licence approach for anything I did for that, but I think that would stand in the way of "the world" if that was done now. It should take a back-seat role.
I also think that the multi-licence approach is something that can encourage things like a fantasy space subsetting or a alternative planes/afterworld subsetting to be used with other campaign worlds. However, the main campaign world probably doesn't need to have that level of compatability built into it.
(I would probably prefer to work on my own - and also donate a CC version of my ideas for fantasy-space to this project - rather than polute Thorf's project with my "Brave New World" idea of making a copyrighted, but totally open, fantasy space setting that works with the OGL, OSRIC, Basic Fantasy and everything else on the market. Local things like how cultures on Thorf's planet (and the other planets in Thorf's planetary system) interact with space would not need to be shared outside of the CC licence. But, I figure that a "core-system", that gives the connectivity mechanisms the basic principles and probably some "shared" space monsters, ships and widespread organisations, would be all that needs to be ported over to every system.)
(The same sort of thing might apply if you were to collect basic information about a real-world culture's gods, weapons, tools and general background and then create something that could be ported over to the OGL to create a barebones SRD for the 3.5 version of "the worlds most well known fantasy rules", OSRIC or anything else. You essentially have the opportunity to use "Pizza World R&D" to benifit other games. But only if the thing is republished under the appropriate licence. Republication could actually be a good thing as you could have a dozen, or more, highly-detailed oriental Pizza World cultures - based on both mythology and CC brainstorming sessions, but then yank out all the Pizza World specific goodies when creating a 3.5 "Oriental SRD".)
How about one thread (sort of like a hello thread) where everyone confirms that they have read the CC licence and is happy to donate their ideas (within the forum) to the project. That way, if anyone new starts posting, the moderators add a note to their posts that says something along the lines of: "Please read <thread X> and confirm that you are happy to contribute your work to this Creative Commons project. If you do not confirm that you wish to join this project, this post will be deleted." They could also PM the new person with a standard "Welcome to Pizza World" message that gives a link to a FAQ thread.Thorf wrote:That said... I want to make sure we have the legal situation in hand right from the start. Anything else could lead us into huge problems later on. The way to do this is to move our discussions to a new sub-forum, with a clear legal notice. And I think we also need to restate the legal notice at the beginning of each thread.
This should do it:
I don't know if it's enough to edit this notice into existing threads - we might be safer just to start new ones.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. By posting in this thread, you are agreeing to release your own words and creations under the same license. Your work remains your own property, but you agree to share it as long as you are credited and it is not used for commercial purposes without your permission.
There is another thing that you need to make clear - something very important - people may only contribute their "own work" to this project. People can not grab random content from obscure RPG books or fantasy novels and try to use this project as a way to launder some stolen IP. Some generic concepts can probably be used as inspiration, but specific names and detailed descriptions are a no-no. People need to take that onboard and somehow confirm that they understand.
(Don't forget that - if someone is slow to respond - their posts don't actually need to be deleted. They could be shunted over to the Black Pudding. That way if the person goes on holiday for 6 months and then comes back and realises they didn't read the FAQ and confirm their contributions were "their own work", they can get a post reinstated and other people can build on their ideas.)
What if we created our own world? 
