When I proposed building a collaborative world on Substack, I wasn’t sure how it would go. Maybe a handful of you would throw in votes or a few comments. I thought I would be lucky if I got around 10 people interested in the concept.

Instead, you came out in full force!

This is bigger than just me, with the reshares, likes, and nearly 80 comments. And that’s not even getting to the polls; nearly 150 of you voted across each of the three opening polls.

And the results were decisive enough to give Zemaryth its first shape:

• The Shattering of the Sky (34% of the vote)
  A calamity that shaped the Zemaryth all know today

• The Merchant Princes (36% of the vote)
  The power brokers in control of the current age

• The Nine Red Houses (45% of the vote)
  The seats of power over many, given to only the few

That foundation already feels alive. A world of broken heavens, gold-soaked decadence, and intrigue-drenched palaces is exactly the kind of canvas I hoped we’d create.

What Comes Next for Project Opulent

I think some folks thought I would take the results of these polls and spin them into my own lore, which I would then write back to you.

Thanks, but no thanks!

Zemaryth is meant to be a shared construction. That means your contributions—from one-line rumors to entire myths—will directly shape the setting. That collaboration, however, requires structure—a format that will facilitate banter, arguments, ping-ponging ideas, and more.

With that said, here’s my first stab at how I think it will work:

1. Chat Threads: As you may have noticed, I’ll regularly post open-ended discussion threads focused on a single topic (like the Shattering, the Princes, or the Houses). Each will include a few guiding questions and prompts, but feel free to take the conversation wherever intrigues you.

   Why Chat Threads? Because they allow for topic consolidation (people who want to talk Merchant Princes aren’’t getting drowned out by people who want to talk about the Shattered Sky) and they allow for search. They also don’t expire.

2. Contributions: You can contribute however you like—one proverb, a detailed backstory, an illustration of a character, or even a name. Small or big, all contributions matter.

3. Curation: After a week or so, I’ll do a follow-up post summarizing what the community has built. This means your comments will get canonized into usable lore: myths, d6 tables, play hooks, rumors, and more.

4. Iteration: Some ideas will contradict each other—that’s a feature, not a bug! In Zemaryth, truth is fractured. Disputed myths, rival cults, and contradictory histories all add richness.

Why This Matters

In the early days of RPGs, zines and shared campaigns thrived because people weren’t afraid of getting their hands dirty. Settings were rarely polished or final. They were living things, stitched together from table notes, house rules, and the half-legible photocopies mailed across the country.

The messiness was the point. Each addition, whether it was a dungeon map scrawled on graph paper or a new monster scribbled on a napkin, added texture to a world that belonged to no one and everyone at once.

This project is my attempt to capture some of that magic for our own corner of the hobby. Myths won’t always agree. Histories will clash. Merchant Princes will be both larger-than-life caricatures and grounded, human schemers. Out of those collisions comes vitality.

I doubt Zemaryth will ever be a tidy “setting book.”

Truthfully, I don’t want it to be, either.

It will be a mosaic of voices: myths layered over trade rivalries layered over ruins layered over scandal. Some layers will be polished; others will be rough and jagged. Some contributions will slot neatly into place, while others will resist coherence—and that resistance is part of the world, too.

If we keep at it, a year from now we’ll have something far stranger, richer, and more alive than any of us could have made alone. A place where your proverb, their map fragment, and someone else’s cult rumor stand shoulder to shoulder—woven into a
living archive of our collective imagination.

The real goal is to build a world imperfectly, collaboratively, and with a thousand fingerprints in the clay.

The First Threads

So let’s begin. By going to your messages and finding me (Grinning Rat), you’ll find the first three community threads:

• The Shattering of the Sky

• The Merchant Princes

• The Nine Red Houses

Jump into as many or as few as you like. Drop in one sentence or a whole essay. React to other people’s ideas. Build on them. Argue with them. That’s where the best sparks come from.

Together, we’ll find out what lives under a broken sky.🟦

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