Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-25226524-20160720202209/@comment-28266772-20160721131532

I think I'd rather something a bit more geared towards an anthology format, where each author is given a bit more room to manouvre. I'm still up for giving it an overarching story, I just think crimson spiders and pink monster aren't as well suited to the collab style, while the door under the bridge seems more like the direction I'm thinking of.

Let me just reel out my ideas and the general reasoning behind each one.

1) Several kids piss off an ancient evil while out drinking and go home at the end of the night. Each author can pick a kid and write a section describing their death at the hands of the ancient evil (whatever that might be, maybe a serial killer, an alien, whatever, I'm not fussed on the specifics). The number of kids can vary so the division of labour would be easily scaled to any number of writers. Plus if someone drops out late into the game, or suffers major delays, it won't cripple the story as a whole - we can just remove that one kid from the gang early on.

2) An investigation - I think this would be a good format for a more overarching story where each author could cover one specific angle of an investigation. Like say a dead body turns up in a sleepy town in the US, and one author writes a chapter about the woman who finds the body. Another covers a section on the police who immediately arrive at the scene. Another covers the mortician who performs the autopsy, another covers the lawyer who gets a look at the bigger picture etc. But each chapter would basically revolve around the respective people getting absolutely fucked up because of their encounter with the corpse - maybe a disease that's spread by it, or a parasite that mutates people, or a serial killer who tracks them down... again I'm not too concerned with specifics.

3) Another idea would be a flat out tribute to old school anthologies like creepshow, tales from the darkside, all the EC comics, VHS etc. where one author writes a wraparound segment and the other authors contribute separate stories that are presented within the wraparound segment. I think it'd be fun to really ham it up with the wraparound segment, and we could connect the stories with a theme or even a central antagonist. This would offer us the most freedom, but it would also be the most disparate.

As you can see I prefer the anthology route but I'm perfectly happy to create something that leans more towards an overarching story. My personal favourite from the 3 suggestions above would be number two where the corpse acts as a portal to hell, or something like that, where each person who comes into contact with it becomes a conduit for interdimensional nasties. My concerns with any overarching plot would be that one weak link will hurt the entire story, that delays and dropouts will leave us all rushing to fill that segment in, and that authors near the start will probably be stuck writing exposition/introductory segments that aren't all that exciting while authors writing final chapters will need previous chapters to be set in stone and polished so they don't reference ideas that get written out in a revision.