Let there be light.

I've quoted Larry Niven before, specifically with regard to his commentary on collaborative world building, and more specifically, the introduction to his short story "Flare Time" in the N-Space compendium (page 342 for those of you playing at home,) where he says you must have a dictator among the group in order to really get anything done. (That's the whole book, by the way, for those of you who can stand to read things on screens I highly recommend it.)

As the duly appointed dictator of FPL continuity, I've managed over 20,000 words on the subject, and run damage control on various egos (including my own,) but the project still feels like it has yet to GO anywhere. Admittedly I was a bit sidetracked by Nimbia, which is my own little tribute to Terry Pratchett, but I even put that on hold just to try and get people submitting. I've never been plagued by a dearth of ideas, and I could easily fill in every minute detail myself, but then it isn't a shared world anymore and we're all just playing in Ivan's sandbox. I already invented a highly suspect form of social government, balkanized the Soviet metahuman contingent, and built a self-aware computer with a fondness for dogs. What else do you people want from me?

There are other noteworthy concerns in crafting the environs for a shared experience, including several places where the world we inhabit doesn't live up to it's potential. Penny Arcade's Jerry Holkins has been forthcoming with the following bit of hilarity:

Like other atheists, I can see some of the rookie mistakes in the "world building" God has done, by which I mean Jehovah, with his cryptozoological fascinations, underutilized themes, flat protagonists, and the prevalence of barbarism - but my own work is rife with genuine concerns. When I have my way, I gin up a world where life is a doomed accident, a planet whose crust is nothing more than a prison for an inconceivable evil, while a floating city of half-angels wages a genetic pogrom to scour mortality from their race. If anything, I've managed to create a scenario where leprosy actually sounds pretty good.

Of course I've come across the opposite problem, not wanting to stifle creativity once the character submission engine comes online, I've possibly made things too easy for Khazanians and their ilk, although any system in place to maintain the Superheroic status quo necessarily tips Khazan's needle toward "Top 10." The problem is, in spite of my insistence that superpowers are by no means ubiquitous, the creator itself requires the expenditure of Ability Points, meaning one has to be both willful and creative if one wants to craft an ordinary person.

In any case it looks like it'll be year's end at least before the system architecture is in the beta stages of testing, so I've got at least another month to populate this world before I start having to deny characters based on the fact that they're misrepresenting the Arcanus Obliques or whatever.

Needless to say, when Khazan is finished, we will have built THIS city on fundamentally more than Rock and Roll.