It's a game concept that's been rattling around in my head for years, so, yeah, I'm a little excited I actually got to build it. I'm looking for players, but players will also be help, really. They'll be bringing the ideas to the table, after all. And I definitely assume that anyone who creates a species will subsequently be 'in charge' of that species and its development. I will also be happy to elevate players to Actual Staff with time and familiarity.
Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. Sounds crazy, no? But here I am, long-time player, first time game-runner, giving it a go.
The Centaurea Cluster is a polyzoötrophic star cluster on the border of the beta and gamma quadrants and close to the galactic threshold which boasts over two hundred life-sustaining planets. Players will be encouraged not only to create characters from these planets, but to create whole species and cultures to inhabit these worlds; to collaborate with other players to interlink their cultures with alliances, rivalries, cultural misunderstandings, trade deals and rocky histories; to fill out the cluster into a rich tapestry.
This isn't to say that the standard Starfleet favorites are nowhere to be seen. The nearest major canon planets to the Cluster are Betazed, about an 8 hour journey at warp 1, and Risa, about a 6 hour journey at the same speed. But there are also two Federation postings at the Cluster's edge: a combination science station/diplomatic outpost with an interesting history and a brand new engineering research station. These areas are considered neutral ground for species from the Cluster and are often used as meeting places for sensitive talks; vetted members of Cluster species can even take on honorary ranks and work alongside Federation officers and one another in an experiment in unity.
My major notions of what the game will be like include:
lots of fun worldbuilding, but without the need to be down to a nitpicky level of detail. Ever wake up and go, "Hey, I wonder what would happen if there were a species on Star Trek with NO ARMS"? Well, make one. Go for it. Play with the implications and have it ripple out from there. We have 200+ planets to blow through. If you get tired of your arm-free species, well... how many alien species show up for one episode of Star Trek and are never seen again? It's fine. Make a new one.
lots of room for people to advocate for what they want in storylines, both for their planet/culture/species and for their individual characters. I don't have any sort of metaplot in mind here. Tell me what you want to happen. Let us lift you up, and then help lift other people up in their desired storylines, as well.
ample opportunities for preferred sandboxing. If all you want is to have a ship of your own and fly around with the two other people you like to RP with, I mean. OK, sure! Want school/young adult RP? We have a satellite campus of SFA on the outpost. Heck, want to app a species of pre-spacefaring technology and just hang out on your own planet doing medieval-ish looking stuff? Sure! I mean, you might end up with alien anthropologists hanging out in your midst or with your deity actually turning out to be a lost piece of technology or something, but sure! Do you just want to get straight to figuring out the complexities of interspecies mating? I mean, go for it. We're all just here to have fun, aren't we? 
Anyhow, that's it. That's the pitch. Please be advised that it's really just me and one other person there right now and neither of us are online 24/7 or anywhere close to that. Feel free to drop +mail to Sagittarius there or just message me here with interest or questions.
Oh, hey. This reminds me of the quests from DragonMUD and gives me all kinds of nostalgia fuzzies
I like this game, so far. Staff are really helpful and welcoming of player direction, theme is extensive but not unmanageable with every nit-picky detail. I got burnt tf out on the Lords & Ladies genre, but this is a nice welcome back.
@Cupcake Here's the blurb from the wiki, which is also at grimwood.wikidot.com/start
Welcome to Grimwood, pardner.
Colorado, 1861.
Civil unrest is boiling into civil war. Union and Confederate armies posture and threaten, both Native Americans and Mexican landowners feel the pressure in an increasingly unfriendly area.
The young town of Grimwood endures, founded in a gold rush this burgeoning town now supplies itself from nearby ranches and farms, trade and travelers provided by the railroad at Grimwood Terminus.
But there's always trouble on the frontier, armies are about to clash, there are bandits in the hills, it's almost noon and someone called you yeller.
Keep your hand near your iron, cowboy.
About
Grimwood is a MUSH (Multi-user shared hallucination) set in early 1860's Colorado. The game is based in and around the young town of Grimwood (founded in 1860) with it's multitude of businesses, houses and nearby farms and ranches.
Don't get lost, there's a Map!
We use the PennMUSH codebase, currently version 1.8.6p1. Installed is Faraday's FS3 system.
Connecting
You can get to the game by either raw telnet (not recommended) or one of the many and varied MU* clients available. We suggest MUSHclient for Windows, but most installed or java clients should work just fine.
You can find the game at:
Address: grimwood.ddns.net (46.231.13.192)
Port: 4201
I'm enjoying Grimwood a lot. The game just had a bout of downtime but is back up now. Small, cozy, everyone's friendly and it's really laid back.
@Sunny Am... conflicted. Really miss our story. Really not a fan of how it ended 
@Lyanna Hey! Awesome! Yeah, you know who I am on KD now (It's listed up in the post above) so toss me an @mail so I know who you are 
Hey-a. Six months since I did this thing, six months and a bunch of new games. Time for an update!
After things blew up on KD I started scouring around for new places to play. I found Mythara, which is largely focused on FCs from a bunch of TV shows I've never seen. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, Teen Wolf, stuff in that vein. I made a Wendigo, Harlow Tjader, based on my most recent One True Love, Hannibal.
I also got contacted by someone I knew from back in Sweetwater Crossing, who invited me back to Game of Bones to give that game another try. My character there is Cayt, but I haven't really found my feet with him. I'll probably try something else, soon.
I also got invited back to a place that was open, then closed, and is now open invite-only, so I probably shouldn't name it, but oh, my 
does well knowing this place is here.
I picked back up a place I'd played on last summer and I don't seem to have remembered it on my previous list. Another superhero place, I gave up on my Clara Munch dreams and made a dreamwalking hippie feels-hero named... well, Joss. Completely different from Josse, nomenclature merely a coincidence.
Another couple of places I'm poking around, but nothing's really stuck, and I think I've got a full enough plate right now, considering that my summer is going to be busy busy.
@Cobaltasaurus Heh, when I was a kid my dad would always obsess over putting the items on the belt in the order he wanted them in the bags. I still do it today, I can't not.
@icanbeyourmuse I wholeheartedly second the desire for a MASH MU.
Also, a Wodehouse/Jeeves & Wooster style theme would be great. There's already a 'Drones' RPG floating around the internet for CG.
This sounds like a lot of fun. I wonder how many of my characters/games I can actually remember.
I remember my first MU* was DragonMUD; I was in middle school and obsessed with Les Miserables so I played as my favorite character, Javert. My boyfriend at the time played Gogol there and he was the one who introduced me to the platform.
Then I took Javert to AnkhMUSH and built a Paris sector for Les Mis RP.
I also played Mocky, a Mock Turtle (from Alice in Wonderland) somewhere... I want to say it later turned into a place called Seasons.
I got drawn into a lot of Disney-themed places (Lion King, Robin Hood) while I was still young enough to kinda be into Disney and before I found out about the whole furry thing. That was an eye-opening experience, lemme tell ya. But I had a lot of cool characters I kinda half-remember, and did a lot of research on obscure African animals so I could play, at various points, a jerboa, an okapi, and a ratel based on Lenny from Of Mice and Men. I also once played an adult grasshopper for the exact lifespan of an adult grasshopper. It was a moving experience, I seem to remember. Also, one of my formative early characters was a donkey named Pylades on a Robin Hood style medieval game, who was basically Grantaire from Les Mis (with which I was still obsessed).
I took a break from MUing when I went off to college and started tabletopping and LARPing with people in real time. I played a lot of World of Darkness games, and when I got back to MUing the first place I went was a Changeling game, I think. What it was called or who I played, I couldn't say. I also played on Achaea, a sort of MU*-with-stabbing-rats-involved, where I was a Satyr named Pylades the Cad (see above) who was a poet. I wrote about 50 actual poems as him, and some of them I even kept because they were OK.
Next I found Star Trek MU*s. My first and favorite by far was Star Trek: Gibraltar. I played my space mutt (some seven or eight different species in various combinations, but mostly human/vulcan) engineer Bunni Aventino, my hypochondriac doctor L'Hannets Setlalaktsosi (10 years ago and I can still remember that name)... and possibly a third. On Among the Stars I pulled a brief stint at a doofy Bajoran priest whose name I don't remember. I also played on a number of those play-by-report Star Trek places, but they all kind of blurred together for me and the only characters I really remember pulling together were a Grazerite diplomat and a Bolian with Klingon tendencies.
Then I jumped ship to BSG MUs because I got really into BSG when I was in grad school. Oh, all the BSG MUs. Can I remember them all?
I logged onto Pacifica as a guest literally the day the game ended, and everyone looked at me like, 'Um...'
I feel like there was one that was set pre-Cylon stuff on a planet-side station where I played the first iteration of the Priestling, but, anyhow...
Genesis! My priestling in all her glory, Greje Karthasi. The fucking dialect I wrote for my rough and rustic engineer, Mopsus Doe (aka Snatch). My brief stint at the end of things as psycho killer Ettakana Gosling. Oh, what a game
Kharon! Kissy Matto, developed entirely from a tarot card, and who would take up a great chunk of my brain and just live there for a few years. I also had the cylon-obsessed engineer sluagh, but that wasn't nearly as entertaining. Except for her weird mechanical spiders.
Cerberus! I was seriously so sad about losing Kissy on Kharon I had to make him over again, in the form of Evan Doe. And while I was replaying my BSG greatest hits, I brought back the PRiestling for another run at her. And I smashed together the rustic boorishness of Snatch and the pure evil of Ettakana and got a marine named Lady, somehow.
In the middle of all this BSG stuff I followed Faraday to a game set in Australia where I developed Carmine, a guy who had been raised as a girl for the sake of a circus act and who was just trying to make a living as a convict after having been framed for murder. Later on that character and her husband ran away from Australia to a different MU*, Sweetwater Crossing, which I remember fondly.
I also dipped my toe into the Lords & Ladies genre, playing Igara Frey on Steel & Stone.
After this I kind of faded off of the MU* scene for a little bit, while I was getting used to not being in college anymore and trying to make my way in the real world.
Around the time I finally was feeling on track, I went back and started dabbling in the now-pervasive Lords & Ladies genre again. I tried to reboot Igara with Igdahn on Game of Bones, but in the end wasn't really feeling the reboot. Then it was Tales of Daeren with Kierne Kincaid, then Eternal Crusade with Bryad Arkanin, 'Stonewall' Atreis, 'The Captive Knight' Dacian and my courtesan Bes. Now I'm over at Kushiel's Debut with Josse Grosmaine (who's a lot like Kierne, but everyone here's like Kierne, so he really fits in and is sort of just an average horndog), my courtesan Bromot, and Bodeyn Adolphe, who's kind of like if Bryad from EC and Igara from Steel and Stone had a baby.
What else am I missing? Oh, yeah! World of Darkness games. My fondness for World of Darkness generally sticks to tabletop, but I have been on a few WoD MU*s. I was Josephine and still occasionally am Nausi on City of Hope. I played on Oathcircle for a while and my Redcap Zenobia, who was a grump version of a childling Redcap I played in a campaign when I was in college, made me so sad I very nearly Nanoed her story this November. Also I played a shifter for the first time and my Gurahl Naomi was highly amusing.
And I missed a couple iterations of BSG MU*s, but got back in time for Deimos' rise and flare out. I was Endymion there.
Some others I remember but can't really place in my timeline:
Lantern Hill: Etienne, Tabitha
Pacific Rim: Reboot of Atreis from EC with the name Bunni as a tribute to my old ST:G char.
Serenity: I managed to make the EXACT SAME CHARACTER twice with so many years intervening I had forgotten about the first time by the time I came around again. The first time it was a girl named Ino Mai An. The second time it was a guy named Juno. But aside from names and genders, basically the same person.
Some Superhero Game: I played Clara Munch and I loved her so much I keep trying to go on superhero games to see if I can do something similar. But I never can get through CG anymore.
Well, that's depressingly like a history of my entire life from middle school to present day in terms of what I've been up to online. I should make a list like everyone else has for the tl;dr version. Meh.