OOC - Come Together Part 3

I have received a number of ideas from some of you guys since I wrote Part 2 (Thank you Hosea Tuinakelo, Ensimed, and Rosemary) that I wanted to share with the community, and I also want to make an announcement about how I plan to continue development of this idea.

Hosea's idea (which can be seen in the Disqus comments of "A Roleplay Idea") is to have the various Ongoing Worlds settings be tied together through books in a library, and characters from those settings can enter this library through the book-world they came from. Hosea proposed that only a mod of the game about said world is able to make characters from that world (he used the term "Traveller" for these types of characters) and any other player interested in working with those Travellers could make a "Human" character that would interact with them and could take Travellers to other Worlds (also via books in said library). Hosea probably explained this idea better than I just did.

Ensimed proposed an idea in which the setting could change routinely, similar to the episodes of the TV show "Sliders" or "Stargate". Some ideas he thought he would enjoy are:
• Marvel, but the characters are less overpowered with plausible caps placed on their abilities.
• Medieval/Fantasy where magic exists, but is possessed by few (no more than 2) and rarely actually used. 
• Darker themes featuring creatures of the night (vampires, spirits, and such).

He also had a few good points about likely areas of concern that are worth mentioning. The first is that there is a good chance that more casual contributors could find themselves confused and lagging behind the current setting maybe not having understood it to begin with. I'm hoping that we could combat this issue by having a large team of moderators with specific responsibilities (so that the mods don't get overwhelmed by mod things and can have time to enjoy the game and other games), and one of these mods would be dedicated to making important information easy to find while another mod would actively work with people to help them out with any confusions and such. See Part 2 for more information on my Moderating Proposal.

The second area of concern was how to manage overpowered characters (and probably Mary and Gary Sues as well). I don't really have an easy answer for this one. This is going to take assertiveness from the Mod(s) responsible for accepting characters and patience from the writers/creators of characters. I understand the temptation of making such characters, I've done it myself (Lily can attest to the fact that my iteration of Ceriden Malkaan in Kingdom Realms was the most OP Gary Sue ever). However, I have come to learn that writing imperfect, relatable characters that needs to work with other people to accomplish great things is much more rewarding. To that end, if anyone needs help designing characters, don't be afraid to ask people on this Platform or the Mods of the game you want to make your character in for help.

Rosemary has fired off a plethora of ideas to me, which is something she is great at. Seriously, if any of you guys ever want help brainstorming stuff, Rosemary is your girl. Anyway, I'll list her suggestions below.

• There is a multiversial threat that is an aggressive interdimensional empire based on one of the ones from Empires of Glass. They could use the Darkstar from Path to the Darkstar in their conquest, and one of the goals of the heroes is to destroy this gateway. Characters could start from all over the place, or players could agree to have their characters start together, and maybe start in a military prison that they need to escape from, or something like that. The bad guys could also be a diverse lot, for example, Nazis, wizards, aliens, etc, with an organization that rents the Darkstar out to these groups for some nefarious purpose.

• Along the lines of what FallowNorth had proposed awhile back, either Imperial Rome is unleashed on the multiverse, or the Roman Empire finds itself under attack from interdimensional invaders.

• Due to Ragnorak (in Beyond the Ragnorak) the Bifrost has been knocked askew, and instead of connecting the nine realms of Asgard, it is instead linking dozens of random OW game worlds together, and in some worlds the corrupted Bifrost takes the form of (and 'is') the Dark Star from Path to the Darkstar.

I personally had a thought more along the lines of what TheHeroUp had originally proposed in which a someone (or a group of people) perform a ritual spell that summons a bunch of heroes from our various Ongoing Worlds in order to help the person/group save their world from the machinations of five different factions, those being:
▪ The Valthien Technocracy - An empire led by an powerful, dimension-travelling sorceress who brought futuristic technology into the setting and used it to bring down the existing nations and forge a despotic empire in which most of the population gets mind-control chips planted into them to keep them in line.
▪ The Draemorthan Union - A confederation of groups that resorted to using dark magic to stand against the Valthien Technocracy. They fight a perpetual war against the Valthiens using hordes of skeleton's, zombies, animated constructs, mutated creatures and people, and other twisted horrors.
▪ The Followers of Chaos - The Goddess of Nature has forseen the destruction of the world to the machinations of the nations, and her followers have taken up arms to destroy all civilization before those civilizations can destroy the world.
▪ The Dark Ones - The Orcs have long been suppressed by the Kingdoms of Man, but those kingdoms crumbled with the rise of the Valthien Empire, and the Dark Ones have used the opportunity to expand and strike back at mankind who forced them to live in the wastes for centuries.
▪ The Slaver Lords of Zakar - The Empire of Zakar is the economic powerhouse of the world, with their economy built on the backs of slaves, most of whom come from the populations of other kingdoms captured by the Slaver Khans.

If you guys have any thoughts regarding settings you guys might be interested in, feel free to shoot me an email, comment on this post, make a new post on this Platform, or post it in the temporary game I'm going to make fairly soon (which I'll describe below).

I have decided that I will take most of the subsequent development of the Come Together concept off of this Platform, and instead make a new, temporary game that I will initially call the Come Together Development Pad. I can see a number of advantages to continuing development of this idea in a seperate "game", which include:

1.  I think I need the publicity in order to really get the attention of people who don't follow the OW Community Platform.

2.  I can use the Character Profile Labels to gauge who wants to do what for the Come Together" game.

3.  People can easily see our progress, and also have a model to use for developing games together moving foreward, instead of the single person typical spur-of-the moment inspiration that is the development of most games on OW.

4.  I can might be able to get a fairly accurate guage of actual interest in the Come Together concept.  I've noticed that most game proposals on the Platform don't get many committed yesses but do get a lot of random comments, which can make it hard for people (like TheWritingBug for Sauria) to really understand the actual amount of support (or lack thereof) that they would get from the community.

So anyone who is interested in being a part of the Come Together game, please join the Come Together Development Pad once I make it, particularly if you are interested in being a moderator.

For convenience I am posting links to the previous Come Together Posts below.

Crossed my Mind - The Initial Concept Proposal

Come Together - The Call to Arms

Come Together Part 2 - New Management and Organization Proposal

Come Together Part 3 - Idea Discussion