On Collaborations

Every collab starts somewhere small.

Sometimes it’s a fully formed pitch — someone arrives with a world already built, lore document in hand, ready to invite others in. Sometimes it’s a throwaway comment in a Discord server: hey, we should totally do a strip club collab. And somehow, six creators and a full demi-human universe later, Two Inches of Heaven exists and there’s a dragonfly-blooded aerial performer named Carina taking the stage twice a week at 777 Seraphim Ave.

That’s the thing about collaborative work in this space. It starts small, and then it doesn’t.

Two Kinds of Collabs (Sort Of)

There are two basic shapes a collab can take, though in practice the lines always blur.

Type one is the established world model. One creator — or a small founding group — builds the world first. The lore is set, the rules are clear, the setting has its own internal logic, and the invitation to other creators is: come build something here, within these walls. Norisor’s Askarra is the cleanest example I’ve been part of. It arrived lore-ready. The world existed before any of us showed up to populate it. Our job was to understand it deeply enough to create characters that belonged in it, not to reshape it around our own instincts.

There’s a particular creative discipline required for that kind of collab. You’re not building your own house — you’re furnishing a room in someone else’s. The constraints are real, and working within them well is its own craft.

Type two is the snowball model. Someone has a seed of an idea — a genre, a vibe, a single concept — and then a group of creators start riffing, and the ideas start feeding off each other’s energy, and before anyone has quite decided it’s happening, there’s a whole world. Two Inches of Heaven was built this way. So was The Cold Sovereigns with RaonLee, and Cage of Honor with GanGan, and the Shifter Olympics, and the War of Nine Moons with AvacynGrace. The Silverwood Legacy Saga is technically this too — Lemongal24601 brought her Blood Eclipse and Black Mountain characters into a world I’d built, and suddenly the world had dimensions it didn’t have before.

The snowball collabs are electric in a way that’s hard to describe from the outside. You throw something into a conversation and someone else catches it and throws something back and it lands somewhere neither of you expected, and then a third person adds a detail that reframes everything and suddenly you have a whole faction you didn’t plan and three characters who need to exist and a piece of lore that ties it all together. It’s a very specific creative high.

In practice, every collab ends up somewhere in between. Established-world collabs develop their own collaborative momentum. Ground-up collabs develop their own internal rules. Everyone brings something new to the table regardless of which model you start with, and the final thing is always more than any one person could have made alone.

The Moving Parts

Here’s the honest version of what a collab actually involves, because it’s a lot more than character sheets.

Lore comes first — the setting, the time period, the world rules, what’s possible and what isn’t. Someone has to hold this and make sure everyone’s working from the same document. In a big collab, inconsistencies in the lore are genuinely disruptive, and they happen when people are working fast and excited and not cross-referencing enough.

Art style is a conversation that has to happen early. Are we all going for a similar visual aesthetic or are individual creators free to do their own thing? What models are we using for image generation? Is there a colour palette or a lighting style that the world should feel like? This sounds like a detail and it’s not — a collab where the images feel wildly inconsistent loses something in the presentation even if the characters themselves are great.

Collab banners and HTML — usually one person takes the lead on building the shared visual infrastructure. In my experience this is one of the heaviest lifts of the whole thing, and whoever does it deserves a lot of credit. Getting everyone’s character cards into a coherent shared template, building the banner, making sure the HTML actually works across platforms — it’s hours of work that mostly happens invisibly.

Character cards for each character in the collab. Which sounds manageable until there are twelve characters and everyone has opinions about how theirs should look.

Canva templates — things like themesong cards, which I often take on. Small contribution but it matters for cohesion.

Scheduling — who drops when, in what rough order, across which platforms. This is where things can get messy. People’s real lives interfere. Someone’s character isn’t ready. Someone else drops early. The coordination required to get a collab out in a way that feels like a coherent event rather than a staggered pile of individual drops is genuinely challenging.

The bigger the collab, the more complex all of this becomes. Two or three creators is manageable. Six or seven starts to feel like project management. Ten or more — which I’ve been part of — requires real coordination infrastructure and someone willing to be the keeper of the timeline, which is a job that nobody officially signs up for and somehow always falls to someone.

I say this not to discourage anyone from collabs, because I’d do every one of them again. I say it because going in with realistic expectations about the workload makes the experience better rather than worse. Know what you’re signing up for. Communicate early and often. Be flexible when things shift — and they will shift.

What I’ve Been Part Of

For the record, and because I’m genuinely proud of all of them: Norisor’s Askarra. AvacynGrace’s War of the Nine Moons. The Shifter Olympics. Two Inches of Heaven. Precinct 47. SilkintheRibcage’s Bloodfall: Dusk (and Dawn, which is coming — watch for it). The Cold Sovereigns with RaonLee. Cage of Honor with GanGan. Silverwood: The Legacy Saga with Lemongal24601. Volara’s Federal Bureau of Sexiness. RaonLee’s Jealous Boyfriends League.

Each one of those is a world that exists because more than one person decided to build it together. Some of them are universes I’d never have imagined on my own. Some of them took characters I already had and showed me dimensions of them I hadn’t found yet. All of them have been worth the chaos.

The best thing about collaborative work in this space is that it makes you better. Working alongside creators whose instincts are different from yours, whose strengths cover your gaps, whose ideas surprise you — that’s not just fun, it’s genuinely formative. I am a better creator for every collab I’ve been part of.

Even the messy ones. Maybe especially those.

— Tae