We hired Alice Tang of think/feel to handle the design and WordPress implementation, and it was a joy to work with her (incredibly professional, never missed a deadline, great at managing customer expectations, etc.).

As if my experience at Runes of Gallidon wasn’t sufficient, this was yet another reminder of the unique value a skilled, professional designer/coder can bring to a website.

The latest offering from Philip Straub, Utherworlds, is officially online. First and foremost, it’s gorgeous, something that should be no surprise to anyone familiar with Phil’s work.

But what, exactly, is it?

That is something each visitor will have to answer individually. There is more to Utherworlds than pictures or words. In a very Zen way, I believe that each person will perceive the site through the filter of their own personal background and life experiences.

I found Utherworlds to be equal parts warning and encouragement about where our world is headed and what we, as individuals, can do about it. You can enjoy the content on a few levels, and, depending on where Phil takes Utherworlds, who knows where you might end up.

At the very least, Utherworlds promises to be a wonderful showcase for Phil’s art, and it holds the potential for being something more – depending on what you bring to it.

Expanding Gallidon through role-playing game modules as a way of pushing the world experience off the site and onto the gaming tabletop has always been a goal, and I’m grateful for the post from a recognized site devoted to helping game masters. In their own words:

Gnome Stew is a multi-author blog about tabletop RPG game mastering, written by GMs, for GMs. We think about GMing in every waking moment (okay, GMing and hot, hot gnome sex meals), so we figured we’d put our obsession to good use.

Here on the Stew, it’s all game mastering, all the time, from system-neutral GMing advice and ideas to system-specific suggestions to help make running your games easier and more fun.

That focus has helped to make this the most widely read blog dedicated exclusively to GMing on the planet — we hope you enjoy it!

I encourage you to check out their site if you regularly find yourself wondering where to take your next campaign, how to balance combat with role-play, or just discover an inexplicable urge to rub a gnome.

I committed to what became Runes of Gallidon while finishing a platter of bimimbap at a Seoul Brothers restaurant in April of 2008. I was having dinner with two friends, Tony Graham and Andy Underwood, and after a few weeks of evaluating our collective skill sets, I decided that our startup idea was ready for funding. More importantly, I had worked up enough courage to face the risk of failure if this idea went down in flames, which seemed distinctly possible given how crazy the idea sounded, even to me.

Tony’s a friend I’ve known for over ten years who makes his living as a professional writer with a passion for sci-fi and fantasy.

In March of 2008, Tony had introduced me to Andy, someone he had known for a long time (in truth, I had quested several times with Andy’s various Azeroth avatars but had never met him in person until a few weeks before that night at Seoul Brothers). Andy’s background was art and design, with a dash of programming thrown in for good measure.

A month later, the three of us formed Brain Candy, LLC, and by June we were building the world and website that would become Runes of Gallidon. These are the legal and obvious milestones of this website, but the more accurate origins go back to March of 2007, when Tony and I sat down to discuss starting a website of collaborative content under a single, branded fictional world.

So, exactly how would this work?

The details of Runes of Gallidon’s beginning will never be known for two reasons: only Tony and I were doing the talking at that time, and neither of us took notes (pretty pathetic given that he’s a writer and I’m a former project manager…).

I do remember that somewhere in early 2007, we began kicking around the idea of creating a collaborative space where writers could share/borrow/integrate each other’s ideas legally and with each other’s permission. I had spent much of 2006 researching the background for a quasi-historical fantasy novel I wanted to write (see Kenji), but as I considered what I wanted to do with the final product, I found I wasn’t all that concerned about “being published” or becoming the next bestselling author. Where might such a story wind up? I began a very unscientific survey of fictional outlets online, and what I found started me on a fascinating look at what happens to content when it’s placed on the Internet (more on that in future posts).

The more I thought about the current state of fictional writing (and sci-fi and fantasy in particular), the more I saw an opportunity to explore a new way of generating and sharing content. I shared my initial ideas with Tony about an artist-friendly, collaborative space were writers were encouraged to share each other’s ideas so that each new work had the potential to draw from the collection of existing content, even if someone else created it. Tony was emphatic that whatever happened to the submitted content, the creators had to retain ownership. As a writer, he was disappointed at how traditional media approached new content from writers (“We bought it, we own it, you’re done, now please go away.” – and I’m led to believe that “please” is optional). Based on that, we haphazardly began thinking about how such a project would work in practice.

Both of us researched various forms of collaborative writing, Tony brought me up to speed on how things currently worked in media for writers, and I delved into the technologies available to support such an endeavor. After several weeks, we sat down to review what we had come up with.

Why hasn’t this been done before?

In March of 2007, Tony and I met on a Sunday afternoon, and I pitched him my first take on how the website would work. As we talked about it, we referenced things we had come across during our research:

• The Grantville Gazette and Baen’s World were great examples of, respectively, collaborative writing in a single world and how offering free online versions of content can generate offline sales.
• The 1980′s Thieves World series (see also; I don’t think I’ll ever forget the cover of the original issue!)
• the explosion of ARG’s (who loves bees?)
• Innumerable webzines, ezines, and fan fiction sites
• The (usually) failed attempts of industries and companies to “protect” (read: control) their “creations” (read: property) when offered in digital format (think music industry, newspapers, etc.)

After a few hours of discussion, the following realizations struck us:

* there were lots of fan fictions sites (mostly based on well-known and copyrighted works such as Star Trek and Lord of the Rings) that could not monetize their content directly since someone else held the rights (the most the site could hope for was ad revenue based on site traffic)

* there were lots of web/ezines out there, but we couldn’t find one enforcing a single-world collection of submissions (instead, the submissions were independent works without sharing/integration between writers/artists or cross-over of ideas); plus there was a lot of churn in these types of sites, with many not lasting more than a year or two

* the big media companies almost universally require all-rights purchases or work-for-hire agreements when buying new content for established properties/franchises they own

* there seemed to be no site trying to leverage the technical capabilities of the Internet with what was quickly becoming a trend towards both user-generated content making its way “up the content” ladder (towards more established works) and a collaborative approach to creating content

DISCLOSURE: I will be the first to admit that we might have easily overlooked hundreds of sites doing exactly what we came up with for Gallidon. I’m not saying we were the first; in fact, to this day, we still walk around mumbling, “Someone HAS to be doing this, we can’t be the first to try this kind of model.” If we overlooked you, our sincerest apologies, since it was due to a lack of resources, not a lack of trying. Please contact me if what I’m describing sounds like what you’re already doing, I’d love to learn more about it; heck, I would probably blog about or link to your site, since I don’t like to think in terms of “competition” when it comes to ideas I believe are cool.

Anyway, I think I finished the conversation with Tony along the lines of, “I wish there was a website/world like Warcraft where the world keeps moving along and things are happening, even when I’m not checking the site. I want it to feel like it’s constantly evolving, so that every time I come back, there’s something new. But it needs to have a cohesive feel to it, not just be a random bunch of posts or art or stories.”

We continued to hammer out how we could build this kind of site, and our first game plan was to build a site where:

1) we would manage it on the side as a hobby

2) we would craft a new universe and seed the site with some initial content

3) the creative community would supply almost all of the new content after launch

4) we wanted the creative community to create content but retain ownership; we would simply license the right to post and sell their work

5) we would share at least half of the money from sales with the artist who had submitted the work

6) we would post new content as quickly as humanly possible (every few hours was our goal)

That was our first serious meeting about what this website would do and how it would function. Clearly, we had a lot of details to work out and far more legal and technical challenges than we foresaw, but it was enough to start with.

Up next: Part 2 – Multimedia

Still, the main one is excitement to finally get this site up and on the web. For the first time in my life I was able to marry my personal interests with a professional effort, and even though I had to sacrifice time away from family and friends, put a lot at risk, and logged more hours than I can count, the hard work just doesn’t feel that…hard. Fascinating how your perspective on “work” changes when it stops being work.

Before closing out this post, I have to mention three people who did the technical heavy lifting to get the concept and design off paper and on the web. That honor belongs to the following individuals (and you can read more about them here):

Markus Sandy of Apperceive, Inc.

Jen Simmons of Milkweed Media Design

Nathan Eliot of T9 Productions

Many thanks to Markus, Jen, and Nathan for their help over the last few months. If you need help with any web/I.T./technical projects, I highly recommend you consider using them.