Mar
2
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?
Read MoreJun
28
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…
Read MoreJul
10
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:
Read MoreJun
9
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:
This page will generate a short alien description. There’s also a page for creating a unique alien name here.
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.
Read MoreJun
5
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.
Read MoreNov
27
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
May
22
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
Apr
8
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:
Read MoreMar
21
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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