Welcome back!

Last time, I asked you all if you would be interested in coming together as a community to create our own plane in the vast Multiverse, and the response was more than positive. Of those of you who voted (and there were quite a few), over 90% expressed interest in helping to create a community-crafted plane. But the fun didn’t stop there. I received countless e-mails and tweets from all of you expressing your interest in the project—as well as in presenting different ideas you all had for the world we will create. All of the positive energy toward the project has me fired up, and I’m ready to work with you all in order to watch the magic unfold!

Here is how this will play out: In each article, I will present all of you with a challenge. Each of these challenges will help lead us toward making key creative decisions for our world. I will set a time limit (and most likely a word limit) for each challenge, and then I will gather all the information into my next article. Once all the submissions are in, they will be organized in an article so that we can put it to a vote, and as a community, we can decide what we want to incorporate into our plane. All final decisions will be posted into a Google Live Update Status Document that will be updated with each final decision we make as a community. This document will slowly fill itself out until we have created an entire style guide of our own—for our own plane. All information contained within the live document will be considered our official canon, and it will be free to be used by any community member and be built upon in future submissions.

Now to get to what you all have probably been waiting for: the first step. The challenge this week is to come up with the basic identity for our plane: its hook, its soul, its creative identity. What is it about our plane that makes it unique? What is the conflict that is driving the plane? What theme(s) does it hit on? Don’t worry about naming the plane in your submission, as that is something we will be doing as a community at a later time.

In 100 words or less (I have to keep it short so that I can read them all), please submit a brief synopsis of your idea for our plane. All entries must be submitted in the Google form below. I will be accepting entries until next Monday at 8:00 A.M. EST.

Here are a few examples to help you get started:

• A desert plane based on ancient Egyptian culture and beliefs, where the dead refuse to remain that way, rising up in hideous undeath
• A plane with extremely volatile magic, where magic spells can spontaneously come to life as powerful elementals that cause havoc for locals
• A vast ocean world dotted with small islands terrorized by bands of pirate warriors. It’s terror on the high seas in this plane, me matey!

With that, I leave the rest to all of you. Submit your ideas, and let’s start what I expect will be a fun and rewarding community project.

As a final note, let me say thank you to everyone who submitted ideas, to everyone who sent me recommendations on how to organize the submitted ideas, and to everyone who just e-mailed to say how excited they were to participate in this project. I am just as excited as all of you to see what we can come up with together. At its heart, I want this project to be driven by the community, so if you ever have any ideas you think would help make this process better, please feel free to e-mail me. I look forward to working with all of you and the magic we will undoubtedly create together.

Ant