Personally, I would scrap this ‘starter’ concept completely. There’s more than enough starting material in Witnesspedia for a competent writer to write a story in, and another person writing the first 3k is only going to shoehorn a writer into a scenario and characters they may not care about.
I would organize it as -
Writing competition, use Witnesspedia, write a story set in any distrikt of your choosing. 3K top prize for best story (or stories, you pick n). 1k each for n finalists where n is what you can afford. Explain the judges (community? panel? if so, who?)
Conditions:
- Cannot retconn the canon (ie: you cannot change the past written in Witnesspedia) but you can affect the future.
- Your story has to be centered around the economy and the livelihoods of people of the district you choose, either as a key part of the story or a major piece of the background of the narrative.
This way you’ll get a number of good stories, incentive to write well, without the limitation of having to fill in the blanks for a prose piece that someone else started.