[quote=@Shorticus] But... what if the Marshmellow Queen wants to MARRY King Edward Longshanks? That's not a bad thought. But it means splitting your playerbase into three groups, limiting interaction between them. I dunno. This is a hard problem to tackle. One thing that might be important to ask is this: what are the origins of the different species and cultures on this planet? Was everything born on this planet naturally? Are you going for a traditional fantasy background? Or is there maybe a splash of science-fiction in this planet's history? Personally, I'm not against the idea of distinct cultures slowly homogenizing, but you'd have to enforce that somehow. That'd be the problem. [/quote] Maybe we're over thinking things - aiming for too much realism. Perhaps go with 3, and just let anyone do anything - cultural homogenization be damned. Then we're all real close with our whacky ideas, competeing at home and abroad to spread aforementioned whacky ideas. Everything was intended to have been born onto the world naturally (yay evolution!). Though I heard someone yell "I WANNA PLAY ALIENS :D", in which case I could be swayed to allow for the survivors of a doomed expedition (stranded without their technology) to exist; although it would be easier for you just to brew your "alien" species on the planet. I mean what's an alien anyway? Just a creature from somewhere else, right? I mean we could take this anywhere; if you wanted sci-fi, we could give each civilisation its own moon, and link them with something akin to Star Gates, and have ourselves some inter-planetary ancient warfare. But that's probably pushing things into the realm of FUBAR. Everything is in a really early state atm, so now's the time to debate everything to death.