scrape_r_rational/data/cache2/4drrzx.md

[D] Shared Setting Development

• Author: u/None *

• URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/4drrzx/d_shared_setting_development/

• Score: 8

• Created: 2016-04-07T16:17:38

Post:

People here write fanfic and original fics alike and submitted it here. That's great.

However, the downside of using someone else's setting is that all your hardwork are heavily restricted by copyright holders. You can't have it published or do anything of significant value without their permission.

What I want to see is the development of a shared setting that people can spin off and base their stories or settings on, a sort of Creative Common multiverse.

That way, people can work hard and be rewarded by creating fanfic. Let not forget that the Odyssey and the Illaid and other great epics were created by storytellers without copyright, all spinning their own slightly different versions. So this is not an unprecedented situation.

In theory we could use pre-existing creative common work, but nobody wrote fanfics for those.

Anyway, how do we do this? How do we get started? Do people want to do this?

Comments:

u/artifex0 [+7] (2 hours later)

So, this isn't quite what you're describing, but the Orion's Arm world-buildling project might provide some insight. It's a very large database, started in 2000 and still somewhat active, which describes some 10,000 years of a hard to semi-hard sci-fi setting, full of posthumanism, singularities, and strange aliens.

It's created by volunteers who retain the rights to what they contribute, but have worked together in the past to publish fan-fiction anthologies in the setting. So, a far cry from a fully CC-licensed setting, but that does give it the advantage of having a curated canon- and, in theory, anyone can join the community and contribute to what it publishes.

u/UltraRedSpectrum [+5] (52 minutes later)

The weird thing is that a lot of fanfiction communities have a baseline so far removed from the actual source material that the only thing keeping them from being Creative Commons is the fact that they aren't. It seems like the Schelling point is in a really inconvenient place, but I can't for the like of me work out how to move it.

To get back to your point, I suppose that what we need is to make a Really Cool Thing, and then declare it Creative Commons. The trouble is, creating a Really Cool Thing is actually pretty fricken hard.

u/Nighzmarquls [+2] (54 minutes later)

Extremely hard. Takes teams of experts tons of work or individuals extreme mastery and a bit of luck/good marketing.

u/None [+2] (an hour later)

So, you need a dispute resolution system or some enforcement of editorial control.

With a CC wiki, one does not have to abide by an editor's stamp of approval and create one own fork.

u/MugaSofer [+3] (a day later)

Fanfics don't have a dispute resolution system, do they?

The SCP wiki seems a lot like what you're looking for. The site has high community standards, with strict moderators and an expectation that anything receiving consistent downvotes will be remove.

There's no central canon at all, unless you count the single creepypasta that started it. But a rich set of shared fanfic-like conventions and assumptions has nonetheless grown up, to the point where there is unquestionably a shared SCP setting. People vote based on their "headcanons" of the SCP universe as well as quality.

Based on this, a well-designed website along the same lines and a single well-written "seed" fic could do the job.

u/Nighzmarquls [+2] (2 hours later)

for a later stage of the whole endeavor that would work, but in the early stages too much 'pick up my toys and leave' can leave to fragmenting the project into oblivion.

A degree of re-coherence pressure really needs to be in place for the early stages of a project like this.

u/None [+3] (2 hours later)

So, for this to work, someone has to lay the groundwork with a bunch of stories/novel and a well developed setting?

u/Nighzmarquls [+1] (3 hours later)

That could work.

u/OutOfNiceUsernames [+3] fear of last pages (an hour later)

Here’s one project I’ve recently stumbled upon.

Asides from the writeups expressly labelled as being home-grown and portraying original characters, all of the featured characters and distinctive likenesses are the intellectual property of someone else (comic book publishers or authors, writers, movie rights holders, etc.). All trademarks and copyrights are owned by their respective owners. Each and every entry is clearly labelled as to its source - usually the comic book universe/publisher, the name and author of the book, the title of the movie, etc.

Mostly the articles it has can’t be used for what you’re looking for, but the format itself can.

A CC wiki could be created based on a similar idea with an enforced rule that all donated IP must be the provider’s original work. After that, articles could be classified into “Characters”, “Monsters”, “Locations”, “Items”, “Laws of Universe”, etc.

u/None [+3] (2 hours later)

I have an unbeta-ed meta setting that I developed. I am considering donating it as a CC setting.

No stories yet and no real details for the humans living in that world sphere.

u/callmebrotherg [+3] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (12 hours later)

Okay, so this isn't quite what you're looking for, but... I ran a Kickstarter a few months ago for a worldbuilding resource called Strange Nations. Every culture in the book is free to use. The only requirement is that if you use something from the book then you have to let other people riff off of whatever you did with it too (e.g. if you apply some modifications to the Traveler Clans, then those modifications are Creative Commons material, though the rest of your universe might not be).

I can let people know once it's available (it'll be pay-what-you-want), if you think it might help.

u/MugaSofer [+3] (17 hours later)

The Loops seem like a fanfic setting that escaped it's bounds. Didn't Eliezer throw around the idea of a ratfic original-setting Loops story as his next work?

u/Nighzmarquls [+2] (23 hours later)

I would say the mechanics of the loops is very much brain candy delicious.

However at the same time I think for barrier to entry you REALLY need some core understanding of the 'canon' of things before you get as much enjoyment from it.

I'm not all that big a fan of kingdom hearts for example, so when I see loop crossovers with it I don't get the same kind of 'INVESTMENT YAY' gut reflex that I do with other things.

That said if some one wrote stories about alien hive minds, character reincarnations or species re-assignment, insectile or giger-esque morphology and so on and put it just about ANYWHERE in ANY genre I probably would gobble it up joyfully.

So I suspect maybe there is a hint of a thing there.

u/Nighzmarquls [+2] (48 minutes later)

I've worked on one team that did this with slack and a wikia wiki. I'm not terribly enthused with the final results of their stuff so far but I did what I could. It can get dicey when people are super invested in their pet creations and getting all the parts to mesh well is a HUGE challenge because especially with amateur creatives diminishing or challenging a concept looks like attacking them personally.

On a side note of interest to this, I personally created a Creative Common Species explicitly designed to be portable to multiple settings and nominally rational.

you can read the 'encyclopedic' entry for them them here

I also made a kind of soft collaborative story to show some of the potential of them in a story you can read about here.

I know there is not necessarily a scarcity of horror boogie-boos on the internet in the creative commons but I felt like there IS a paucity of open source alien aliens in fiction or otherwise.

If anyone wants some other 'things to populate an open setting with' on the broad strokes world building/species side I have literally 20 years of archived critter/species/empire building ranging from sci-fi to fantasy I could mine or refurbish.

This stuff is pretty old but as an example I'm willing to put a lot of it up for the creative commons use.

here, here, here and here.

If anyone wants to use that stuff or other things I've made let me know and if there is legal concerns I can go and get them actually registered in the CC.

The world needs more visually and conceptually interesting baseline tropes and I don't personally use art as an income source so I'd rather donate to the cause as it were.

u/Tommy2255 [+2] (3 hours later)

I know that /r/hfy has created quite an extensive shared universe (the Jenkinsverse), named for the main character of the first story. I'm not sure it would be an appropriate setting for the sort of thing this sub would tend to produce (it just wouldn't be enough of a challenge), but it is an excellent example of a shared setting working smoothly between several writers for quite a long time. I'm not an writer myself, but if I were and if I intended to try creating that kind of shared universe, then hambone3110 would be the first person I'd ask for advice, because he's already done it.

u/Luminnaran [+2] Prophet of Asmodeus (7 hours later)

Personally my favorite shared universe is that of the forgotten realm books. They have a huge world that many authors have written various heros into. However this only works because the original author and creator of the world decides how dramatic the actions of characters in these worlds can be.

Otherwise nothing can stop an author from creating a character that takes over the universe making it impossible for anyone else to logically have a story in the universe with a super powered hero. A true shared universe requires someone to decide what makes the cut as cannon or you simply end up with lots of stories that are basically just fanfiction.

Someone could make a good starting universe that can be used in a million different ways. Recently I've been thinking of making something based roughly on Rick Riordan's or Jim Butcher's worlds which could theoretically make a good universe. But this wouldn't truly make a combined multiverse without someone deciding what is canon and what is not or the multiverse would make no sense.

u/callmebrotherg [+2] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (12 hours later)

I like the idea of multiversal shards. Each author can pick and choose which other stories are canon for that author's shard, etc., sort of like how various authors will pick and choose from the same mythology (but with a metaphysical backing for this).

That said, I think that the thing that we're really trying to avoid here is fanfiction in the "nobody can make money off of it" sense, rather than in the "not part of the original author's canon" sense.

u/Luminnaran [+3] Prophet of Asmodeus (12 hours later)

I do like the idea of multiversal shards, where a shared universe is less a cohesive whole like in forgotten realms but rather a pick and choose of each new author. Of course the difficulty is finding an author who makes an amazing world everyone wants to use and having them choose to make it CC.

u/callmebrotherg [+3] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (15 hours later)

I think that we could be very basic in what we make universal. Consider Magic: the Gathering, which has how many different planes, each one with its own flavor?

Brief braindump:

• You have the multiverse. Hundreds or billions of different universes or planes or what-have-you.
• You have what we'll call "shards" for the time being. Shards are like collections of universes, and mirror each other. You could have one shard that contains Earth's plane, Olympus, and Tenefritzya, and then another shard that contains those planes, but some or all of them are slightly or wildly different.
• Not every universe/plane is represented in every shard.
• Some shards are really similar to each other, to the point that they might differ so slightly that only hardcore fans can tell the difference. Others are really different.
• People can have doppelgangers, or echoes, in shards that are really divergent from each other. Their echoes don't even have to be in the same universe from shard to shard.
• This last bit basically means that we can have all of the weirdest AUs, and it's all still "canon" from a fully removed point of view. Luis Walker might be a wizard of Tenefritzya in most shards (i.e. that's how Luis' original author first wrote him), but in this shard he's a barista because I want to write a Coffeeshop AU, and in that shard he's the avatar of an alien god, because, I don't know, he just is.

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