About the D&D 4E campaign -
I must admit that the idea of sharing GMing duties and all this granola-crunchy shared-world business made me a bit skeptical at first. But having read through more of the DMG and having given a little more thought to some NPC’s on Keeley’s Lineage of Light post, I am more and more excited by the prospect of a game world where we all contribute to the setting. Having more influence than just the actions our characters take is intriguing.
And the idea of Bastion started percolating in my head and suddenly I was remembering Thieves’ World. The Thieves’ World setting of the city of Sanctuary was edited by Robert Asprin and the stories were written by a Who’s Who of speculative writers. They traded characters freely and plots back and forth. I loved these books when I was wee, and the appeal wasn’t just more gritty fantasy, it was structural (I was that kind of nerd even back then). I was fascinated by this collaborative storytelling in a novels. It was different, it was granola-crunchy and, for the most part, it worked.
So let’s here it for more ideas and shared stories in our game. I’m on board. Oh, and the Thieves’ World writers had one rule amongst themselves – you couldn’t kill off another writer’s creation without asking him first. But fuck that hippie shit. If I ever end up DMing a Bastion adventure I will most definitely kill off Keeley’s character. Most. Definitely.
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I’m glad you are enjoying this collaborative creation effort. Every once in a while, I like to indulge this little exercise because I feel like it can help make a more interesting setting. Plus it gets everyone really connected to the place where you’re adventuring.
I never read Thieves’ World, or if I did, I didn’t stick with it too long. There was a period in my life when I’d check dozens of sci-fi/fantasy books out of the library and read the first few pages of each of them. Ah, the heady days of youth.
In any case, I loved the Wild Card series, which was a similar concept, only about superheros. And I think I read a book or to about Hell that was a shared world, but I remember so little of that.
I do recall the Thieves’ World stuff reminding me of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stuff. Have you read any of that?