Ok.
Here's how Gwenthia works:
There is a core group of people who write for it. We all agree to release our stuff under the CC licence below, and that if we publish commercially we will share the monies.
It all started with a map and handing out chunks of geography to each of the core team (actually we have 1-2 members without portfolio). When we started we put up a wiki (PMWiki) and a core set of editing rules. In addition we have multiple support forums on the Tavern BBS (
tavern.zunder.org.uk :: View Forum - Gwenthia (public)) most of which are private. But the core strength of Gwenthia was that we met up every Monday night and collectively agreed the history and chronology using a very simple sort of game system, such that we collectively synergised a core mythology, history and interchange of ideas. In parallel each author wrote a guide to their area of the world. All of this is accessible from the Gwenthia home page and is useable non commercially by anyone. (
Gwenthia by the Design Mechanism - Main - HomePage).
We did have some issues. Some people burned very bright, wrote some great stuff and then lost enthusiasm but given the open nature of the licence that need not be a problem. Others plugged away and slowly got a lot of good stuff. A few people have been very good joining the gaps and blurring the edges, or doing stuff like a full climate. One guy has done gorgeous maps and the world is very well illustrated. We had some spectalcular flamewars and one member left and deleted everything he had written from the wiki as he left.. but on the whole we have a good and interesting setting that is a little like the "alien fantasy" of Tekumel/Jorune/Talislanta with a good dollop of dark Moorcockian angst and lurking horrors, all wrapped in a culture well suited to the RQ cult style religions. I commend it as a place to have fun, you can add to it as you like and non commercially publish new stuff. Note that if you do, it also has to use the same licence, so your new stuff is then free to be used again by others.
Downsides? The group is closed, how people leave and join isn't always perfect, in fact you never leave, but it's not easy to join. It's a democracy but participation varies, and I think many people would have preferred a benevolent dictatorship, but I was clear from the start that I didn't want to stifle creativity and the opportunity for left-field ideas to come from nowhere. The biggest long term issue I see is that because we geographically allocated areas to people, they tended to 'own' them, and as such developed it alone and in some ways we have some great places with clear identity, but we then had to do a lot of work to reknit it all together into a more integrated real world with geopolitics and cultural links. The Monday night meetups to decide history and culture really helped with that. I would recommend that any project doesn't allocate by geography, but rather does so thematically: maybe religions, military, cities, ethnic groups, art, etc. I also think that a collective mechanism to generate cross border/theme ideas/facts/cultures. We still have the northern continent of Gwenthia to work on and I think that we will go for a non geographical approach for that.
How do I think that a new project should proceed? Well I think you have to address the following questions:
- Anarchy/Democracy/Autocracy
- Which CC or OGL License and what to do if a commercial opportunity emerges
- How to allocate work, geographically or by theme?
- How to release synergy and work as a team and not a disparate group of individuals
- How to have fun! (It is the objective after all)
I would recommend a wiki, they're so good for absent minded jotting over months that builds to a huge resource (
Gwenthia by the Design Mechanism - Main - HomePage)
My view is that BRP could do with a nexus point: a city of some scale and mutable changeability where visitors from any BRP-like setting can meet and twist in and out of the myriad possibilities. The Viriconium city of M John Harrison, or Mieville's cities or the gothic structures of Peake would work. It has been done before with Planescape and it fits well with the whole Moorcock multiverse idea. A city that isn't quite the same every time you visit, where you can meet up with Lord Byron and Andy Warhol in a bistro run by a Hive Mind from Proxima Centauri sounds great.
I hope this helps, I hope that I have represented my colleagues in the Design Mechanism fairly and I wish you luck. I may even help..
Tom
Gwenthia is developed by the Design Mechanism Gwenthia is an idea by Tom Zunder. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license, visit
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.