I fully expect that everybody will bring something of their own perspective to this project no matter what direction it goes in. This, being the kind of collaborative work that it is, is going to run into decision making issues one way or another simply because it's asking for collective buy-in to a single idea, and that's generally pretty difficult to achieve no matter what the task is.
It is certainly possible to go with a number of options.
1 - Go generic, keep many people decently happy by playing to the normalcy of the setting, but you might disappoint people looking for something more unique and new.
2 - Pick a setting, have a vote, risk alienating a few people in favor of the popular opinion.
3 - Attempt some form of compromise. Pick a setting through popular vote, then deliberately apply a "reasonable and conceivable degree of ambiguity", and let everybody run with it. This method could help focus the project in one direction, without applying too strictly limiting factors on individual creativity.
For example...
A theme like "The Guilt That Haunts Me" actually plays in a positive way to that inherent problem of decision making by introducing a simple, core component. "This is a mid-fantasy setting in which moral and immoral actions have a tangible effect on the social and physical aspects of this fictional world through the manipulation of otherworldly beings." Boom, there's your unbreakable rule. The setting for each contributor has to stay in those basic guidelines, but the rest of the creative process can be left up to them. Much in the same way natural phenomena in the real world was described in different ways by different cultures prior to science deciding to show up and prove that Neptune does not in fact rule the waves and there are no sea dragons causing earthquakes because you didn't sacrifice fifteen sheep on the appropriate day in the appropriate way, etc.
One person may say it's caused by the way a soul's aura interacts with a naturally occurring catalyst prevalent in their region - we'll say, for the sake of argument, magically attuned crystal formations, and the spirits are selfishly growing on the power of soul's magical interaction with the crystals, somehow syphoning off their power.
Someone else may say "nope" to the crystals and decide people have a psychic link to an otherworldly dimension that pulls hungry spirits through to our world when a sufficiently enticing action makes them aware of the psychic link.
And yet another person may decide to go a strictly religious route and define the phenomena in a pure battle of good vs evil manner where our every moral decision increases the power of the beings on either side of that struggle.
That sort of avoids the whole "puzzle" issue. You have a unifying world phenomena, but with a totally reasonable degree of ambiguity that is very easy to play off as the differing explanations of various cultural perceptions that ultimately lets people still be highly creative without breaking the basic premise.
Then again, maybe nobody wants to do any of this, maybe everybody was happy with generic? lol.
I'm just one voice.
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