Is all culture just going to be a carbon-copy of Earth's? What kind of religion is appropiate?
Oh, and is there going to be some kind of galactic governing body?
Well, that's what we need to establish. I'd like to get a group of people registered to start a discussion on the starting point for the galaxy.
I was thinking of it like this - we have a present day. Everything prior to this is history, anything PAST this cannot be written yet. So we flesh out the galaxy as it is. Most writing would be 'history'.
Once we reach a certain point, we can advance the time line.
As for where we stand - I do like the idea of some sort of galactic mass near-extinction event, maybe a thousand years ago. (Fits into nbonaparte's humans being an extinct or near extinct 'elder race') The past hundred years or so maybe - species have been rediscovering interstellar travel due to artifacts.
But once we get a few more people who are ready to go on this, I'll set up a discussion thread on the Wiki to figure out how we're doing that exactly. But either way, any sort of race/species you want should be fine. Religions - that's fine, just please no Cult of Cthulu or anything. Culture - pretty much anything your imagination can come up with.
I think what we really need to discuss before we start going in earnest is:
1) Physics of this galaxy (FTL, FTL Comms, etc)
2) Magic/Biotech/Nanotech
3) Current state of the galaxy and some essential galactic events in the past as a framework
Updating first post with list of contributors. (I also realized I've been putting 'soap' in place of 'space' sometimes - lmao, whoops)