OngoingWorlds blog

News & articles about play-by-post games, for roleplayers & writers

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Need ideas for monstrous villains?

While some monsters are cute & cuddly (Monsters inc etc), mostly monsters mentioned in stories are are deadly creatures that send shivers down our spine. 

If you’re writing about monsters, you might want to provide a lot of detail to scare your readers, emphasising how ghastly and gruesome your scary monster is. Or maybe you just need to mention it by name? 

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Spelling Tips III

If you’ve been around here for a while, you might have already seen Spelling tips – It’s your game they’re looking for and its sequel, Spelling Tips: Part Deux. But that was seven and three years ago, respectively. Now seems as good a time as any for the next in the series. However, we all know that most franchises tend to go downhill with the third installment…

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Some useful articles for writing about characters

many individual roleplay characters
SEE ALSO: A character doesn’t breathe until that first post

There’s quite a few articles on this website with advice for creating & writing characters that you might have missed. Here’s a list of some useful ones:

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5 tools to create a new alien species for your story

You might be writing a science fiction story, like one of the many sci-fi roleplay stories here on OngoingWorlds, like Jericho or Star Wars: Balance of the Force.

At some point your characters might find themselves on an alien planet, about to meet a new race of unfamiliar aliens. Or visit a spacestation of a different alien culture. You might want to make that species as different as possible, to give it an exciting bit of flavour, and put your characters completely out of their element.

Maybe the aliens are hostile? Maybe they’re friendly. Here are some tools that can help you come up with some unique aliens:

Fantasy Name Generators alien description generator

This page will generate a short alien description. There’s also a page for creating a unique alien name here.

Sci-fi Ideas Alien Species Generator

This creates an alien description & goes into a lot more detail than the one above, as it can create a lot of detail about the culture. Also there’s a page to generate an alien planet name for this alien species here.

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5 random generators for creating a spaceship name

Stuck for creating a name? You could use a random generator. We’ve got a big list of links to random generators for all sorts of things, character names, planet names, Elf names, etc.

But the lists below are specifically for creating a spaceship name. Different scifi universes have different rules of spaceship names. For example the Star Trek universe normally has spaceships named after famous explorers, or positive-sounding words. Whereas the Star Wars universe has aggressive sounding names.

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Unique Holidays

So, you want to include a holiday, but don’t want to have the traditional names so you don’t upset anyone who doesn’t celebrate the upcoming event. Well, why not invent your own name for it and send an OOC to your players? Read More

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Putting Pictures in Posts

holding a photo above a canyon

Many of us have wanted to put pictures in our posts because we often can’t describe something, but a picture helps. After all, they say a picture is worth a thousand words. But sometimes, those words are blocked. I’ll tell you what I mean in a little bit. Read More

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Largehobbit Guide to Avoiding Overwhelm

Recently there was a discussion on the OW Community Platform started by Nim, titled: Another Moderating Discussion: How to Manage the Load?

This reply by Largehobbit I thought was worth highlighting, so I’ve posted it here (with permission), because being overwhelmed is something we all might feel at some point. Here it is:

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The Top Five Most Misspelled Words According to Oxford Dictionaries

This article was submitted to us by Stephen Benton.

There is a quote attributed to South African writer Gugulethu Mhlungu stating that the English language is not an actual language but three, stacked on each other and hiding under a trench coat. And it seems to be nothing but the truth: the language we use today has had quite a few others influence it over the centuries, from Latin to German, and French, giving birth to the one we all love today.

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Two big things I’ve learned by being on OngoingWorlds

This article was submitted to us by OngoingWorlds member Phineaus

There are two big things that I have learned by being on the site.

The first is that while I may enjoy reading different genres of writing, writing in them is not as easy as I thought it would be. I have jumped into two games and learned quickly that my style of writing did not fit. I have been enjoying reading the post and following the games, but it is hard to jump in a meaning full way. Because my writing style feels like a flat tire.  Read More