Alicornutopia

Unfamiliar settings, definitely, I'm following all the almost-peal things and the cardverse things when I brain but mostly nothing else because of that unfamiliar settings thing.

How to fix the unfamiliar settings thing?

That’s also one of the reasons that I haven’t read much of Lighthouse.

I tend to prefer reading threads either in settings I’m already familiar with or that feature contact between characters from an unfamiliar setting and characters from a familiar setting. This is because I find that an easy way to get to know an unfamiliar setting is to read a thread where characters from that setting have to explain their setting to characters from an already familiar setting. I generally find this to be a better way to get to know a new setting than reading a forum thread describing the setting or reading a thread in which all the characters are native to that setting. I recall others saying something similar elsewhere on the forum, several months ago.

As far as I can tell, Lighthouse seems to be largely set in newly invented settings that haven’t crossed over much with more common glowfic settings.

That's true.

Was that also a problem for new settings in, say, Effulgence and Incandescence when those were happening?

It mainly applies to current glowfic, when there are so many threads that it’s impossible to keep up with all of them, making it necessary to choose between them somehow, and the above reasoning is one of the main ways I choose which ones to read.

When I was first reading Effulgence and while Incandenscence was happening, there wasn’t much other glowfic at all; it was easy to read all the glowfic there was, though I do vaguely recall some of the less familiar settings generating a similar problem in some cases (fun side note: Effulgence was my first exposure to some of the established settings too, I’d never seen any of the Marvel movies or any BtVS before I read those parts of Effulgence; rereading them afterwards was very different). Lighthouse, on the other hand, started when there was already too much glowfic to read all of it, and started off (as far as I can tell from the index) with an unfamiliar setting that seems to be currently unique to that continuity, so I just never got around to reading it.

I have added a couple of things to my list including Dissonance, Floating Point, and Unspeakable (Abigail's world).

In the spirit of linta's initial arda post I have a post about the Guild Wars (2) setting. These are the relevant events that might see someone dropped in to prevent:

- the arrival of the gods (bringing humans with them from another world and promptly erasing their memories of their previous world)
- the gods find a stone with sealed magic and use it to give all the races of Tyria magic; this goes badly with lots of wars and genocide
- a human king called doric pleads with the gods to take magic back; most of them do, sealing it back away into the bloodstone and shattering it, but the god of secrets rebels against this and is imprisoned in another reality and in the war between gods one of the seas boils and becomes a desert
- scarab plague decimates the population of a bunch of countries (in elona), then disappears
- lich king (palawa joko) builds bone palace, invades aforementioned countries, is defeated by a hero and sealed
- another country (cantha)'s emperor's advisor (shiro tagachi) tries to assassinate the emperor, fails, his dying breath turns a forest to stone and another sea to jade
- charr (race of cat-cows) use a magic to destroy most of a human kingdom. humans from that kingdom flee to other kingdom (sadde is alted as that kingdom's prince, dies when leading them to safety)
- in response to that, king of island country of beauty (orr) and paradise uses a magic that sinks the entire island
- shiro tagachi comes back to life, tries to kill canthan emperor, fails and is sealed away again
- god of secrets tries to break free, palawa joko is unsealed to help defeat him, he is defeated and a human absorbs his power to ascend to godhood. energy liberated by this starts the cycle of awakening of eldritch beasts ("dragons") that will eat all of everything.
- gods leave the world.
- palawa joko takes over elona and becomes god-king.
- undead dragon (zhaitan) rises orr from the sea and makes lots of undead. crystal dragon (kralkatorrik) awakes and flies over places and turns them to crystal. fire dragon (primordus) awakes but stays still in a volcano. ice dragon (jormag) awakes and corrupts northern races. deep sea dragon (?? bubbles????) awakes but no one knows what it's doing.
- zhaitan is killed.
- plant and mind dragon (mordremoth) awakes, is killed, people find out that if a third dragon is killed the world ends.
- god of war (balthazar) returns, tries to kill primordus and jormag, is thwarted, tries to kill kralkatorrik, dies instead.
- kralkatorrik absorbs god of war's energy and becomes even more powerful.

I know this is a lot but I have no idea how to condense it further and I'm already eliding over lots and lots of details, if you have questions or are interested hit me up.