I saw a collaborative worldbuilding project in a Discord server that looked very interesting in concept. (I’ve never seen something like it before so I thought it was interesting)
Essentially, people work together to make an entire world with their own cultures, peoples, and languages. It comes with a wiki and game elements like activity points and stats based on how much you develop your culture.
While we don’t have to have the whole game part, I think it would be a neat idea to enrich the community with a collaborative project anyone can contribute to, or generally challenges to develop your personal conlang or even worldbuild.
I do have a few questions though:
Is this even feasible to host on a forum that shares a space with other topics? Would this conflict with existing activity on the forum?
Who would participate in this? How can we make this accessible to as many people or attract people of a specific target audience?
If a collaborative project is hosted, what concepts would it focus on? What would it encourage?
Let me know what you think, I’m open to any feedback, positive or negative.
Yeah, you could start out this project in a single thread and co-opt more resources as the project grows. Like, if you started out with a blank map and had people claim little bits of territory for their cultures, you could do so linearly just by having people re-post the map with claims on it.
I think you answered your own question:
Imo that is enough to run with for a collaborative worldbuilding project. It leaves out aspects that you can pre-establish (like geography, physics, biological differences). Then people can choose to focus on parts that interest them (i.e. someone might choose to lean more into peoples and write about their group's migration patterns, someone else might lean more into languages and focus mostly on their conlang)
That question was more directed towards the people who would participate in this, because I think it could shift depending on what people personally want from the project.
Well on a personal level, I’d love to see people coming up with conlangs that make sense geographically and then conpidgins as these cultures interact – it’d be way more intentional than something like Viossa – and might produce some very interesting languages.
I have an idea very related to this that I feel many people would be interested in, although it does require a lot of setup and planning... I'm talking about it in private right now and it's really drawing me in.
I've worked on a collaborative conlanging/world-building project before, and I certainly enjoyed it ! We each made our own languages and cultures while simultaneously developing a protolang. It was really cool. I would certainly participate in such a project again.
I would create a thread in Meta to gauge interest. Oh looky here ! If there was enough interest, I would create a category for it in Workshop. Create a central organizational thread and go from there to organize the project.
I mean, I would. I know another member specifically said they preferred collaborative projects. In my experience, the difficulty isn't in getting people to sign up, but to follow through. I'd say conlangers are the target audience, but we might be able to advertise elsewhere.
See above organizational thread. I'd see what people want, but it's better to have an existing vision. It's probably easiest to start with people creating some cultures in declared climates, then let folk decide who to border. Let it slowly coalesce over time.
I have been in many, many collaborative projects, so I can tell you all of the potential pitfalls. Unfortunately, I have not yet determined the circumstances required for success! (Only one of many of the collaborations that I've tried has ever gotten any substantial progress, namely Sajem Tan.)
I'm talking like months of it being away from the public eye while it's being developed, as it involves a lot of coding and testing, but I think it'd be worth it if it ever takes off
I'll check this out tomorrow, I just finished a lot of cleaning to prepare for a little house party I'm throwing, but note that this isn't a collaborative conlang—it's a collaborative worldbuilding project at heart.
Years ago, Hoemaı/Solpahi wanted to try out the Microscope GM-less RPG game, which is about collective worldbuilding and historybuilding, as I understand it.
I'm not likely to be very active, but I do find the idea of having an imaginary environment in which to develop conlangs interesting. I like the idea of applying diachronic changes to stuff, and also taking a carefully built engelang and seeing how its grammar evolves once it's been hit by a few ambiguifying sound changes. Not to mention the idea of conlangs loaning words to each other and stuff. But maybe it's all a bit labour-intensive figuring out the resultant wordlists and stuff..
I've had this idea a lot of times too!
Sounds fun, tho I think it's gonna be pretty hard to keep it going as others have pointed out
idk if I would join, but I'll definitely check it out if the plan goes well
