User blog comment:Jed Revenant man/Suggesting for a possible collaborative idea./@comment-1824611-20130907121825

Ok, so I've started to coalesce some of the ideas that were floating around the previous posts and I think now is the time to - as it were - start the ball rolling on the thing. Nothing's concrete yet, if people have different ideas then by all means share them, but no one's raised any objections on anything so far so I can only assume people like (or don't mind) the general concepts that have been thought up. Again, nothing here is concrete.

First up: the general premise. I think - despite not liking to write plots spawned by MacGuffins as a general rule - that having some kind of item drawing various factions to one place would be a good way to start. I've had a think about what the item in question could be, and I've come up with a few ideas.

1: Chaos Warp Artefact: this is my personal favourite idea, since there's a lot of motivation for various factions to want to take it/destroy it. The specifics of it could be anything from "it makes a warp portal" to "it contains a really powerful Daemon lord" to "FUCKING BIG WARP BOMB", or maybe no one even knows and it's just "the thing of whozit" that does something and they want it for the sake of it, but in general, a warp artefact is something every faction imaginable can have a motivation to seek, whether to use or to prevent from use. Problems with that idea include predictability, mainly: lots of Chaos shit happens in canon, so it isn't the most original idea. Having said that, my gut feeling says we should be aiming for good instead of original.

2: Experimental device: something created by the Imperium, be it a new super weapon, some mess of an Inquisitorial program, an anti-psyker "blank bomb", or something else entirely. Shades of "Space Marine" perhaps, but given the right treatment it can be the same kind of motivation as anything else.

3: Ancient Eldar relic: Eldar want it, Dark Eldar want it, Chaos and Necrons want to blow it up to fuck the Eldar over, and the Imperium just wants everything else to DIE AND GTFO OUR PLANET.

So obviously, whatever the MacGuffin is, I think that Jochannon's suggestion of having the fighting start small with two factions and then build up is a sound one, which brings me onto my second point.

Like I said - we (that is, everyone who joins up for this collaborative thing from the get go) write a few "collaborative" articles - twoish factions, a couple of characters - to start off with, that way these factions are everyone's. I think one would definitely have to be Imperial, the owners of the planet the war starts on (a Space Marine Chapter on their Homeworld, maybe an Inquisitor?), and the other faction depends on what people decide the MacGuffin should be (Eldar, Chaos, Rogue Imperial, Necrons, take your pick). From there, the conflict escalates, and we start throwing factions in there.

As to how the actual article should work, I think once everyone's agreed on the exact form the MacGuffin should take (or even if there is a MacGuffin), and the collab factions, we should create a separate blog - or just go on chat at a prearranged time - to discuss the article and what happens.