What style/theme are you intending to use?

Don't get in over your heads, is all I can say. (happens to me way too often) 

Let me know if you want any map entities coded. 

If you need someone to handle your PR, I'd be honored. 

it would be cool if they were even bigger than Insomnia.

Infact, what is the single biggest Q1SP map? [purely in terms of size, not monster count, route taken etc]

I remember that
neh2m6: "your last cup of sorrow"
czg07c: "push underground"

both seemed huge. 

The theme is whatever the mapper wants, within a texture set. The texture set is from various sources, including Quake, Daikatana E3, Rune, Unreal, etc, mostly medieval-ish stuff.

My map is sort of a... Victorian rendition of a castle/manse, while Tyrann's is more of a surreal/fantasy deal, and Necros' borders on Runic and geometric.

Think a far more mature, detailed and open-ended set of textures, somewhat like that seen in Rapture and you'd be on the right track. 

it'd really be awesome if we could get someone to do a crazy looking start map... 

Tronyn, do you have any links to the texture wads mentioned above? 

all 3 map themes sound very interesting and original.

Necros: do the start map yourself :p
(just a suggestion)
(no rest for you!) 

there's NO episode theme? 

episode themes are overrated.

one of my favourite episodes is "Tides of War", its very diversity is its strength.

Of course something as brilliantly integrated as Insomnia is equally good.

The point is "episode theme" is not better than "no episode theme" per se.

IMHO. 

Alright this is an update on the status of this project:

RPG's start map is done
My map is close to beta
Necros and Tyrann's maps are at unknown phases
FC has coded most of the pakfile

Now, I need to know if someone wants to make a boss map for this pak. It doesn't have to be large, just some sort of arena big enough to house some boss, with cool architecture and maybe a few side rooms. The theme could be rapture-style (medieval gray stone) like the rest of this pak, or flesh, or something else. Anyone interested?
BTW: there wouldn't be a deadline 

this turtle map forever and a day now, but I'm willing to send it over. Take a look and see if it fits into the Arcane theme. It is two wizard metal style towers sorrounded by Industrial like lavaducts and pipes, a lava canal and a few other sparsely developed buildings sorround it at this point. 

I thought this was one of those vaporware projects. Good to see it's actually alive and going well. I'll take a 3 pak from tyrann, tronyn and necros anyday.