I've been doing some reading on how to go about it. In some cases, successions die before they begin. In other cases they go quite far and get plenty of playtime until the succession burns out. Unlike a DF succession, cataclysm DDA successions cannot end in !!FUN!!, because there is no ultimate game over state. I have two ways we can go about this. Continuous, and competitive. There is only one main difference between them.
In continuous, players play until they don't feel like it anymore, a year in game time has passed, or their character dies (whatever happens first) and then the save is passed on and someone else does the same. Play continues in rotation between all the participants. When a player is killed, they may create a new character should they choose to take another turn.
In competitive, players play until they don't feel like it anymore, a year in game time has passed, or their character dies and then the save is passed on and someone else does the same. In the case of death, gameplay ends for that player and they may not make another character. They are "out." The last player with a still living character "wins." The upside to this over the continuous style is that this version has a definite end point.
We would have to decide on settings and mods to use, unless we want to go for simplicity and go with a full vanilla world. If that's the option we go with, if we decide to do this, I must insist on wander spawns. Once everything is decided, I can gen a world according to how we decide to do it.