One thing that a few of us did this week at game night was to spend some time doing "world creation" for Diaspora, an RPG that we're interested in.  Diaspora is a hard sci-fi game that uses the FATE system, but also includes some additional "mini-games" that add to the experience.  

An interesting thing about the game is that the setting is defined only at the most basic level.  Humanity once expanded throughout the universe and colonized countless worlds through the creation of "slipstream points" (something like hyperspace or jump points).  At some point, however, the human "empire" fractured and fell apart, with different systems falling into various states of isolation and technological regression. 

So when you start a campaign for Diaspora, the first thing you have to do is to create the "cluster" you will be playing in, which is a collection of planetary systems connected by known slipstream routes.  In our case, Kenny, Tom and I worked together to iron out a cluter that came to be known as "Fathers' Children".

I won't get into too many details, because Kenny did a great write-up of the results of our session over on his blog  (The Lead Cotillion).  But I will quickly point out how different this process is from the world generation that happens in most traditional RPG's.  I'm assuming that Kenny will be the main Game Master for our campaign, which would normally mean that he would sit alone at home and work really hard to make a uniquely cool and compelling setting spring forth fully-armed and operational from his head like one of Zeus' kids or something.  He'd then have to work even harder to convince us that his idea for the campaign is really the bee's knees and that we would be incomplete human beings if we didn't completely buy into it. 

But in Diaspora, the whole setting creation shebang is done collaboratively by the whole group.  There's a process defined in the book, and it did a fantastic job of leading us from the skeleton of randomy generated statistics for the systems all the way to having a fully-baked and interdependent Cluster.  Since everyone is involved creatively from the beginning, there's a ton of excitement about and investment in the game generated right along with the actual setting itself.

And it sure worked for me, 'cause working through the cluster has made actually playing Diaspora a big priority for me now.