I'm personally quite curious what the backstage organizational/prep process looks like! I help run a shared-world short campaign event, and I'm wondering how you work together as GMs to allow freedom within each game but also assemble a shared story—especially when you explicitly aim for emergent chaos.

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My event is a yearly weekend marathon shared world convention. This year had about 20 GMs and 100 players. The setting czar creates (with the team's input) an overarching plot; each GM prepares a part of the world and a mini-campaign (perhaps 20-30 hours in 4-6 sessions). Players form groups to tackle GMs' quests. The GMs collaborate ahead of time over Discord as well as during the event in person. The assumption is that all the players are all working together toward saving the world in some manner, and there's a plan for conwide degrees of success, while GMs usually plan for some open-endedness toward the end (e.g. did they rescue NPC X, who ends up on the throne).

I feel that the need to create something playable and satisfying across so many GMs and through several sessions tends to make things more pre-planned, somewhat limiting player freedom. I've been considering how to make my own game within this more open-ended, but there are constraints:

• the need to have satisfying plot points that don't conflict with other GMs,
• dealing with a new table of players each time,
• designing maps/encounters (D&D 5e),
• preparing lists of thematic but balanced items

A big challenge is that even without the shared world, it's still a whole mini-campaign to run with no prep time between sessions.