I originally talked about this in a reddit community. Suffice to say the gamut opinions there was rather narrow. Thus I want to poll RPG about this as well. Maybe an interesting discussion will spawn.

I have a world of the sci-fi variety called [i]Stardust[/i] that I've built up. It originally started as a setting born out of a roleplay, but those of us that created it kept it going as a worldbuilding project long after. All of the other participants have since dropped it but I keep working and tweaking at it. By this point, well over half the body of work is mine alone and I'm a little attached. Suffice to say, the project has become pretty massive over the years it's been developed. The written documentation is over 150 pages (none of it formatted for ease of reading) and the unwritten documentation - stuff discussed and decided but just never made it to written form at the time - is equally as plentiful, and gets bigger anytime a new question gets asked.

The sheer volume of the body of work, the immensity of the task to distill it down into something more digestible for an unfamiliar reader, and my personal attachment has led me to be pretty closed off about it in the roleplaying world. I'm afraid that people will get key relevant details wrong that I'll need to correct and that I then look like an ass for it. I'm hesitant to let other people back into a position to have significant effect on the lore of [i]Stardust[/i]. The people I originally wrote it with have since become close friends and I trust them and their visions for this. But introducing new faces to it brings unknown variables.

So I present this to all of you to ask whether or not this phenomenon of extreme stinginess with my world is not limited to me. The world is incredibly detailed and dense and I'm fiercely protective of it to the point it's likely to never be used in a roleplaying setting ever again, since that opens it to interpretation and adaptation that isn't within my control. Beyond “just learn to go with the flow” which is quite predictably out of the question at this juncture, what are you people's thoughts on potentially working past those mental blocks? Or am I completely justified in my overprotectiveness? Discuss.