So, I was busy converting and uploading Planes from my backup copies into the Archives here. In doing so, I came across a small, hardly developed plane.



Now, I have it marked in my backup that this plane was Open , but I wanted to be sure that was the status, so I go hunting on the Mothership.

No voting thread.

Huh... Okay, let's do a quick google search. Search the entire Wizards forums for "setoran". 12 results. Only one result worth noting: a Random Planeswalking Table constructed by arcadessabboth, which included a sub-table for M:EM planes. Three planes are included under Sertaria with the note "(moon)" -- Circuin, Forbidden, and Setoran.

Now I do a full scour of the voting threads. Nothing. I check the Archive Adjustments forum. Nothing. The Dross. Nothing. Works in Progress. The one thread I haven't checked is the original worldbuilding thread for Sertaria, and I don't see it likely to contain the information I want (namely, the privacy level of Setoran and how well-voted it was). I found a small whiff of information in the General Discussions forum -- it seems Setoran was one of the planes that got in from a Design A Plane Contest where the winner was supposed to be automatically entered into the M:EM.

So I looked up what I could for Plane Design Contest. I found Yxoque's original entry but could not find talk of it winning. Or even being part of a vote for the contest in question.

Now I have an issue: I have one stub of a plane that doesn't seem to have gotten in by our regular means, and mentions of two other sub-planes attached to a world that is already huge.

Which now raises two questions:
What do we want to do with Setoran? There was never, to my knowledge, a vote for it, meaning at the moment it is in the Archives by technicality and attached to a plane that is already large enough to be five smaller planes. I would like to have a proper vote on its inclusion, or at the very least for someone to contact Yxoque to see his thoughts on the matter.
Does Sertaria need to have "moons"? Sertaria was originally envisioned as some huge well for small planes and some hub for planeswalkers, but as recent talk has suggested, that plan has sort of fallen apart. There is not even any mention of it remaining in the Style Guide. I'd like for the notion to be dropped, and have Sertaria stand on its own legs.

I swear that got in for legitimate reasons.

God knows what they were though.

It's been in the archive for ages, to the point where I'm not sure I really remember a time when it wasn't in the archives. It was one of the really early entries. I dunno, I can ask him about it but I don't see a great reason to ditch it just yet...

To be clear, I'm not calling to remove it, but personally I would like to see a full vote performed here, since I cannot locate the original reason it got in.

I am of course open to suggestions and may be swayed by popular opinion. I am, of course, just an extension of the community here.

Hell you could be literally me right now. Wouldn't that be funny, if I was just here talking to myself?

(That's not what's actually happening though.)

I wish I could remember that far back. I know it was a contest plane... Did we maybe just take everything from the contest? What wasn't included from the contest?

Well, we've gone this long without it attached, so I think it's a situation where we might as well proceed as we have.

I always liked the moons idea but I'm not sure how much ultimate point there is to it beyond it just seeming like kind of a cool idea.

Not like anyone's done much with Sertaria in general, so adding more stuff for people to not do stuff with seems redundant.

Valjan got its very first start with the Petrified forests during the same week that Setoran was written/submitted. It was the most voted on out of five for that week (though there was not a running tally) and Setoran never actually received a vote. Muraganda (with "panther riders" -- centaurs with panther lower bodies instead of horses), an expansion for Ikass called Thanth, and an art plane called Nourel didn't make it as far as I know.

Valjan was further developed in the second week and Zent was created in addition to either the creation or expansion of Aldis -- I'm not sure if Aldis had been around before this, as there was much talk of "seeds" for ideas and the entry only included the Sentrus that are now part of the plane. Siraus was submitted as a late entrant as the second challenge was extended another week. The failures this time were Ingridor, Quedmalik (ku-wed-mah-lick), and Cerbaron.

The last challenge week saw an expansion to Zent, kor for Ikass (which I don't believe was officially integrated), then two entries that I had never seen: an expansion on Moag, and a plane called Robaan.

Here's a link to the thread in question if you'd like to review yourself.

As all of this was before my time, I can only say: "interesting."

As for including or excluding the moon, I don't see a problem with including it. To take Keeper's point in a slightly different direction, if no one has really used Sertaria yet, then "adding" in the stuff with the moons won't be stepping on anyone's toes.

Wow, well, among other things this apparently was the origin of the Sertarian centaurs. And the Crafts of Ameran. Wow. And in fact... M:EM as a whole, arguably. At least, people were talking about a shared fanon at that point, but it was pretty nebulous.

Ha! I am unintentionally the great grandfather of the MEM then!
Because the plane design contest was born of the walker design contest!

ALL THINGS FLOW FROM ME! ALL IS ONE, AND ONE IS ALL!

Wow. Yeah in retrospect you kinda were. o_o

Also, early on part of what prompted the project was a discussion about having multiple linked worlds in an internal continuity... and someone suggested that an easy way to limit the scope of the project to a manageable size (lololol whoops) would be to have the worlds be a sack of powerstones.

I'd have to look again, but I'm pretty sure the person who pitched that idea... was Barinellos.

(It's a pretty good idea, too. We might want to consider revisiting that at some point.)

Men in Black was a really good movie.
Now pardon me while I imagine someone playing marbles with Jakkard...

Personally, I think Sertaria became too broad on its own to not need the additions of half-planes as its moons. I mean, it is a very neat idea to have little windows into other, smaller worlds on a plane, but I don't think Sertaria is the place to do it; it already has five continents as unique as any shard of Alara (and rightly so, since it was largely based around mirroring Alara's shard setup), and it would cause added confusion for anyone digging into it/them.

I could probably dig through the old worldbuilding threads of Sertaria to see when the moon idea got picked up and which, if any, were voted on -- but if they got accepted as "part of Sertaria" then they are in theory already part of the Archives by virtue of that ruling determining majority of voting M:EMbers working on a project, etc, etc.

What we could do is just remove their attachment to Sertaria and make it a feature of a new plane. Probably a relatively simple plane in itself since the main focus of it would be these mini-planes that could be defined by one or two mana sources or a single hook, like with Setoran. Keeping them attached to a central plane within the forums might be a small headache depending on its popularity, but with the wiki it should be relatively painless to update the connections and keep everything smooth. How would that idea work?

Well Setoran wasn't a moon to begin with. Someone (me, I think) suggested that after the fact, but to my knowledge it wasn't created that way. I'm not opposed to keeping it a moon, it just wasn't conceived that way, as far as I recall.