OngoingWorlds blog

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

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Flashback week 2013

Flashback week - write and roleplay about your character's past

Flashback Week is a week-long writing event where writers and roleplayers were encouraged to think about something that happened in their characters past. The event doesn’t have a physical location, there’s no fee, and there’s barely any rules – only to write a flashback about your character and your story and tell everyone about it. Oh, and to have fun! There’s also a competition for the best flashback story (see below).

The competition is now closed. The winner was announced here. Read More

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4 websites all roleplayers should know about

RPG DirectoryRPG-Directory.com

RPG-D is a social network for roleplayers. There’s a directory section where you can place an advertisement for your game, which will slip down the list over time, so it’s worth coming back once a month to bump it back up to the top. You can do this by simply writing “bump” or anything tbh, but I find this a bit tacky, so what I do is write a short summary of events that’s happened since the last time I posted, which is much more interesting to read, and useful for any users reading the advert. What I usually do is copy the summary from my game’s featured story summary. RPG-D also has a popular discussion forum where you can discuss all aspects of roleplaying with other interested roleplayers. Read More

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Some alien inspiration from “Alien August”

Alien august

If you’re roleplaying in a scifi universe, it can be a challenge to keep coming up with interesting aliens & creatures, especially if your characters are encountering new ones every week. The website SciFi Ideas has plenty of interesting concepts to choose from or inspire you to invent your own. This month especially they’re dubbing “Alien August” and publishing at least one interesting alien profile every day. Here’s a few of the best that might inspire you in your own story. Read More

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How to celebrate your RP events with activities & prizes

Happy 3rd Birthday to Before the Mast

This article was written by Elena Vasilescu.

My site, “Before the Mast”, has just turned three years old. In a world where many RPGs are created on a whim, going belly up before their half year anniversary, each new year a RPG is marking is a reason for celebration. Therefore, anniversary celebrations, events of all kind and prizes are the subject of my present article.

I had seen, on resource sites, several people asking “my site’s first anniversary is approaching. How should I celebrate it? What can I do?” Read More

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Alien August wants to highlight your best aliens – The Laudeans

Alien august

SciFi Ideas is a blog dedicated to publishing cool scifi ideas, concepts and aliens to get those creative juices flowing. A very valuable resource for scifi writers! This month they’re running an event called Alien August (more info here), where they’ll be publishing interesting alien profiles that have been submitted, for example here’s some they’ve published already.

As roleplayers we have to come up with new ideas all the time, and if you’re a roleplayer in a scifi game you might already have some aliens you’ve already invented, which might be worth submitting to SciFi Ideas, if published it’ll attract attention to your roleplay and might even get you some more players.  Read More

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The day OngoingWorlds ate all its bandwidth

Munching bandwidthAs OngoingWorlds gets popular, good and bad things happen. Good things = a great community is forming, great games, great roleplayers, great characters & story. Bad things = more pageviews means we hit the bandwidth limit.

The site went down yesterday, and was replaced with the scary message “Bandwidth Limit Exceeded”. This tbh has been a problem building for a while now, and each month we’ve been getting closer and closer to the limit as the site gets more popular. Read More

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We’ve reached 47%. More donations please!

donate-to-ow

Each month we get closer and closer to hitting the OngoingWorlds website gets closer and closer to its bandwidth limit. It’s now so close that I got an email earlier that we’re at 95%, and with only 4 days remaining we might *just* scrape by.

I’m not complaining of course! Over the last few months and years, OngoingWorlds has got more popular, which is amazing, it’s been great to see it used to create the most amazing roleplaying games. The only problem with increased popularity though is increasing costs! Hosting, traffic, email usage & domain name all have to be paid for. Read More

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The new way to select characters mentioned in a post

Select a character is now easierHere’s an update that was originally asked for by Phantasmagoria, who a while ago asked in our Facebook group for a better ways to select characters mentioned in a post. The problem was, that games with too many characters got too difficult to select them from a drop-down box. Read More

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Add your Facebook & Twitter URLs to OngoingWorlds

Social iconsHere’s a very simple addition to OngoingWorlds that we’ve added this week, social icons on your profile.

Adding your Facebook or twitter allows an easy way for your fellow roleplayers and OngoingWorlds members to contact you.

To get a link to your Twitter or Facebook account, simply edit your profile and add the URL for your public profile. For Twitter this will be your username (but don’t add the @). For Facebook this will be your username, and the URL in your browser’s address bar when you click on your own profile. Read More

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10 roleplayers to watch on YouTube

Kim from RPRepository

Gorgeous Kim, the creator and site admin of RPRepository often uploads videos for her community like the “Epic Anniversary Adventure”, created using 3D animation software, and voiced by her members. You can see Kim herself do wacky things like stick her face in a cake (no joke!), or even bellydance for the Geek & Sundry vlogger contest.

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