Collaborating to get a massive campaign setting (Pathfinder)

I just wrote in the Google+-group, and realized that this would be a great idea. Firstly I'd need the devs to tell that this is allowed, possible and all that, but I can't see any immediate problem with this. Well, there's insane amounts of campaign settings around in Roll20 per now. The idea here, would be to create a campaign, and add the link here, and make everyone GMs. The principle would be that everyone can add stuff, noone could delete stuff (except bugs, and this might be stricter when we go into this). So I could go in there and make an inn, complete with dynamic lighting, a bartender with personality, some guests, and basically whatever I'd want. Then someone else could make some more guests in there, if they'd want, or maybe a competing bar? And I could make a town, which someone else could specify how the market looks like, and we'd need maps for the whole world (which may be expanded as we go), lots of cities, and so on. Basically we all create a whole world. If this would be allowed, it would be great to have a thread like this, where we posted what we have done, and someone administrated that it got into the first post, to get an overview of what is there. We could also ask for stuff, so we had an overview of what people wanted to be in there. I would suggest making two different overviews of content, one grouped as natural, and one by date. Grouped would be: "Genericstuff" "Generic desert fight setting" "Generic map of sewers" "Regionregion" "Towntown" w/ some important characters - "Barbar" w/ Characters, hidden rooms, Dynamic Lighting - "Otherbarbar" w/ Characters - "Detailed map of sewers" w/ encounters And so on. The same chronologic would be: March 10th: Timmy Added Towntown March 10th: Barney Added Barbar March 11th: Roger Added Generic desert fight setting March 12th: Roger Added mayor, bartender of Barbar, some guards for the city Guard March 14th: Harold Added Otherbarbar with bartender, some guests and the mayor on a visit with some guards. March 14th: Leif Egil Added hidden rooms and Dynamig Lighting on Barbar. March 14th: Leif Egil Added a generic map of sewers March 15th: Andre Added Regionregion, with Towntown pinpointed in it. March 19th: Roger took the "generic map of sewers" and made it specifically to Towntown, with some encounters ECL 1-3. March 20th: Leif Egil Added more encounters to sewers in Towntown, ECL 7. When you wanted to use the campaign, you simply copy it, and start playing. This way, playing in the campaign won't affect the campaign setting itself. This may also end in a whole lot of different cities, and some with heaps of content and some as only concepts. The problem would be that we do stuff in different ways, but we'd have to accept others adding stuff to your stuff, but you would never edit or delete others stuff (edit meaning changing stuff, not adding stuff). Example: If I create a bar, someone else could add torches with light. Then I could go in and add Dynamic lighting walls. But I could not move the torches, or change the light range they shed. Another example would be if I added a bartender in the bar, and added abilities (Str, dex and so on). Noone could change them, but they could add a physical description to the bartender. And someone else could add a psychological description to the bartender (Eg: Is really eager when speaking, loves animals, has "objective" if characters ask, is sick of his job). And if I then add (loves his job) it would be wrong, but I could easily add (has an ache in his foot). There would also be big variations on what type of graphics we add, some might draw and scan everything, while others use what is found in the Roll20 search results only. This would be have to be respected, and hopefully if would work perfectly anyways :-) My hypothesis is that we still wouldn't have a massive description on any characters, but that it would be easier for other GMs to simply do more of their work, and not worry that much of basics. And if your intentions crash with what others have written, it's still no problem, as long as all deleting and editing happens in your own copy of the campaign setting. Then again... If something like this already exists, I am sorry, I couldn't find it.. But I really hope that this could be a reality. And it is based on TRUST, COLLABORATION and RESPECT. I'd like to have the first post, if there's actually people willing to help on this. I will then commit, to the best of my ability, to visit the forum once per day to update the first post. I would probably start with adding the campaign I have per now, as a start, but it's extremely small, only one city with some folks, a generic fight scenario in the woods and a bar :-P But in time, we would ha complete campaign setting. Probably wider than any other campaign setting out there. To better managing the slides, though, it would be great if the DEVS could make some sort of grouping in archived slides. So that we could make groups like "Generic", "Towntown", "World maps", so that we could add "Barbar" in the Towntown group, and the region maps in the Word maps. And maybe even make it possible to add Towntown in a group within the region group, so that we could gather everything in the same way we group it in the first post? Yes... this got TLDR... But I'm really passionate to make this real, if it's possible and legal.  Hopefully we could do this for several games. Pathfinder, DnD 4e, Warhammer, whatever. Kind Regards, Leif Egil R.

This could be interesting, aye. Maybe post links to some maps as well?

I love the idea of a GM at least being able to grant public access to his or her stuff. So if I build an awesome dungeon: share it! Or if I'm rushed for time and need an encounter with some goblins, I could search for a pre-made one. I'm sure there'd be issues with copyright and so forth. At least, I've worked on re-creating adventures I already own in book or pdf form. Maybe such things shouldn't be sharable.

I'd like to bump this one. Is it legal to do something like this?

Well, if we're worried about copyright... we could always use public domain graphics, textures and objects, or make them ourselves.

Thanks for answers! :-) I just copied my own campaign, copying pages and journal (which is everything we should need to copy), and it seems everything is there. But what you mean is that is I make someone else GM in that campaign, they will not be able to copy it like I just did? Which means that to make this actually possible, we would either need that functionality, or we'd need the owner to copy either lots of copies and link them on demand or simply make some daily updates... But that makes a problem with transfering PCs and the actual campaign. As I know you Devs can copy the campaign, it's theoretically possible. Is there any probability you guys could add the possibility to grant specific GMs on a campaign the ability to copy the campaign like that? As I can see in the ToS, this should not be a problem if we keep it free, as by granting that control the owner automatically agrees that the other GM is allowed to copy his stuff, the same way he agrees on giving the GM the possibility to modify his stuff by making him GM. It might only be the owner who could grant this, though, which would only be a minor bump in this case, as the owner would do it every time he made a joined player to a GM. The core idea would be to make a campaign setting, to make it way easier for new GMs to start GMing, and to hopefully help it not being so incredibly wast amounts of work done so many times. It would then be useful if there was a possibility to merge campaigns, so that I can transfer my PCs and macros and what I needed from my current version that I copied, and over to a newer, up-to-date version of the campaign, as it hopefully grows between every session. And also... If we could copy some pages over to another campaign (don't know if this is technically possible), so we could either take only the pages we wanted, or we could add some of our existing pages that we've created. I know you have a whole lot of stuff on your list, so I guess this isn't new functionality we will find in the immediate time, unless this is actually stuff you've already planned to do.

Do you have a pantheon?  I would like to submit some ridiculously mathy deity configuration.  Prime Numbers and Products and Spreadsheets will be involved, but the 33 domains will be assigned six at a time to the 11 resulting Deities such that...well any more rules than that and math happens.   May I please submit a custom pantheon?  But what would we call it...

Well, there is nothing concrete ATM, because it's really bad if we start doing this, and the features we need for it to actually being usefull, will never get there... If we made a massive world, and suddenly everyone had to run their game in that specific campaign, we'd need a time schedule to acctually make individual campaigns in there, and other GMs adding stuff might be annoying... We'd need the ability to copy, so that not only the Owner would be able to play in this world, since he's the only one who can copy the campaign... But we would easily think it's great to have different realms (which would also benefit greatly from further organizing, which has been suggested several places, so it might come :-) ) I can't see any reason not to make it, though, and share it in any way, maybe by link, and we could start gathering resources, which could be used in any campaign anyways :-)