Didn't want to clutter actual story threads with this. Was talking to my brother though, and he suggested hosted forum services rather than buying a domain and embedding our own forum. So after looking around, there's quite a lot of interesting ideas out there. All kinds of customization options, the ability to make public/private, automatic or approved access to new users, etc etc. Some of these are really pretty powerful and are cheap or free. Although I will say that a lot of the free ones require an upgrade or something for full functionality.

http://www.lefora.com/
Best looking free one that I saw in my search.

http://www.invisionpower.com/products/board/
Best looking pay site. A little expensive to start up, but only 50$ per year after that.

Anyway, food for thought.

awesome, i'll take a look at these when i get a chance. would make things a lot simpler as we start this thing up.

http://www.ipage.com/ this is the site i was looking at as a host/domain. its gotten good reviews (better then most of the others) unlimited space and bandwidth, a domain name and a lot of other stuff. even supposed to have a website builder toolset or something. still, i'd like to work smaller as we first start out, learn a little html and then jump into the paid services when we open the world up to others for use.