OngoingWorlds blog

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

Jul
7

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Subjective point of view in your stories

Category: Inspiration for writing, Writing tips Tags: Leave a Comment

tree at night

As First Person Fortnight starts tomorrow, I’ve been posting some tips on writing in first person perspective. I’ve already posted some benefits of first person over on RPG-D, but wanted to get more into the details in this article.

Everyone knows that first person is from the point of view of a character. One of the main advantages of this is the freedom of telling the story how you want to tell it (or more accurately, how your character wants to tell it). Read More

Jul
2

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A nail in the coffin for Yahoo Groups

Category: Behind the scenes - running RPGs, Roleplay Systems Tags: 8 Comments

CoffinYesterday I received an email which makes me worried about the future of Yahoo! groups.

Yahoo! Groups have been around for over 10 years, and before that they were called eGroups. This was where I played my first roleplaying game, as Yahoo! Groups was popular with roleplayers as it was free and easy, and allowed users to send emails out to members of the game. This was a proper PBEM (play-by-email) game.

I used a Yahoo Group to run my Blue Dwarf game for 10 years and in that time there were no new advancements made to the system, giving me the impression that Yahoo had abandoned the service, only continuing to run it for legacy purposes. That’s when I moved Blue Dwarf over to OngoingWorlds (If you want to know more about this process, here’s an article I wrote at the time). Read More

Jun
28

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Moderator Appreciation Day – July 1st

Category: Behind the scenes - running RPGs, Events Tags: , Leave a Comment

DavidDo you appreciate your moderators? If you haven’t shown your appreciation, there’s now a full day where you’re encouraged to show your appreciation. This article is written by Kim, the creator and admin of RPrepository.com, a social network devoted to Roleplayers and their characters. Despite its huge range of unique features, feedback from its community of thousands consistently names the open, friendly atmosphere as the #1 thing they treasure about the site.

Kim from RP Repository

Kim from RP Repository

The internet is an unruly and sometimes dangerous place. When you find an oasis where people are friendly and capable of having civil discussions, you know you’ve found something special. Often these utopias are ephemeral, here one year and then gone the next. To survive its own success, an internet oasis needs some truly great moderators to prevent its culture from drying up.

As the admin of a large roleplay site, the RP repository, I have the pleasure of working with an outstanding moderating team. Every month, I hear from countless users who have nightmare stories about the behaviors of other moderators on other sites. And I hear how surprised they are to have discovered a place where they can be on friendly terms with the moderators, rather than living in terror of them. It’s enormously tragic that these tales of moderation woe are so common, but not surprising. Read More

Jun
27

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The First Person Fortnight competition

Category: Competition Tags: 16 Comments

First person fortnight

This competition is now closed. Thanks for everyone who submitted. Please subscribe to this blog if you want to be emailed when the winner is announced.

First Person Fortnight is a great opportunity to really get into the head of your character (more details about the event here), but more than that it’s a chance to enter your stories into a competition! Simply write your story and then send it to us, for a chance to win! The final date for competition entries is the 22nd of July.

Who will judge the competition?

We’ve chosen a panel of roleplaying professionals to judge these stories. Each is a veteran of a different roleplaying game, so there shouldn’t be any favouritism or bias. Just so there’s no lobbying going on, the identity of the judges will be kept secret! Read More

Jun
24

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Roma – Historic roleplaying

Category: Behind the scenes - running RPGs, Interviews, PBEM games, Story summaries Tags: , Leave a Comment

DavidI love history, and especially the Roman period. As a kid I loved visiting ruined Roman forts, which is why I’m really excited to see a Roman-themed roleplay created on OngoingWorlds. This article was written by Edward Willems, the GM of Roma.

RomaThe idea for Roma came gradually, mainly through watching far too many films about ancient Rome and Greece – Come on, what GM hasn’t had a game at least partly derived from a favourite book or film? Anyway, the idea basically solidified when watching the film Troy. The thinking was effectively: “Brilliant, great film, historically accurate, good battle scenes, where are all the gods and monsters I wanted to see?” In the actual myth gods and magic frequently pop in and out, and the story’s pretty flat without them.

It occurred to me that this is true of roleplaying games too – Historical ones are great fun because it’s basically a fantasy setting that’s more believable and comes with its own inbuilt backstory. But the same problem applies: stringently detailed historical accuracy and ruthless realism take the bounce out of any game. Read More

Jun
20

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Announcing First Person Fortnight

Category: Competition, Events Tags: 15 Comments

First person fortnight

First Person Fortnight is a 2-week event where writers and roleplayers are encouraged to write a story in first person perspective. Submit your story to us to be judged by a panel of expert writing ninjas! (I’ll post a link to a form where you can submit your story closer to the event).

First person perspective isn’t usually used, in favour of third person perspective, so this will be a good exercise to get inside your character’s head and really get to grasp with how they think, and their outlook on life. If you’re not familiar with writing like this, give it a go, it’s only for 2 weeks! If you write like this all the time, great! You’ll find it even easier!

First person fortnight will take place between the 8th – 22nd of July. If you’re writing in that week, make sure you’re writing first person. Read More

Jun
14

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Wreckage: A survival roleplaying game

Category: Behind the scenes - running RPGs, Interviews, OngoingWorlds site news, PBEM games, Story summaries Tags: , 1 Comment

Wreckage

David

I’m always glad when I see a new game created on OngoingWorlds, and I especially like the bespoke games with a very stand-alone story. A story created recently that looks extremely promising is Wreckage, created by Mike, who recently wrote some articles for this blog. Stand-alone games (and I mean games that aren’t based on an existing franchise like Harry Potter, Star Trek etc) are often tough to get started because it can be difficult to attract players, but are great because you’ve got complete freedom over the world and characters, and Mike’s game has made a brilliant start at creating a gripping story.

I asked Mike 3 questions about his game, and here’s what he wrote:

Read More

Jun
11

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Introducing the fly-out character summaries

Category: OngoingWorlds guide, Website Improvements Tags: , 1 Comment

It’s been possible to tag characters in your posts for a while now (see the article where this was introduced here), which gives readers a quick and easy way to view the character profile for a character mentioned in a post. Sometimes this isn’t quick enough and readers might only need a quick recap, rather than to read a character’s full biography and history. That’s why we’ve introduced the character fly-out summary.

Fly-out summary example

Hover over a character tagged in a post and you’ll see a summary bio fly out from the side. This will show the character’s gender, age and character group, and a character summary (if it has one). Read More

Jun
6

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Creating groups in RP Repository

Category: Advertising your game Tags: , 3 Comments

This article was written by Mike from the game Wreckage, played on OngoingWorlds.

Mike

Mike Krueger

In the last article I explained how players could create a webpage for their OngoingWorlds characters on the RP Repository site.  This not only helps advertise our PbP games on another awesome site dedicated to Roleplay, but allows us to include information and widgets that may not be possible in their OngoingWorlds profile pages.

This time I am going to show players and GMs how to join or create groups for their OngoingWorlds games on the RPR site.  Doing so is a great way to recruit new players for your PbP games as well as show how the characters involved are connected.

So let’s begin by logging into the RPR site. If you have not done so previously, please do sign up for an account, then log in.

Now click on your “Dashboard” link near the top of the page. Again, a page will display showing your characters as well as any groups you have joined. Note, you may need to click the arrow icon next to the headings in order to show them.

Dashboard

Both players who are seeking to join an existing group and GMs preparing to create a new one will now click on the “Join A Group” button toward the middle of the page. Read More

Jun
1

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Roleplaying Focus – Should a GM Make Player Characters Die?

Category: OngoingWorlds site news Tags: , 4 Comments

Leon Archer, GM of Spellbound

Leon Archer, GM of Spellbound

Hello everyone! I am Leon Archer, also better known as Phantasmagoria on Ongoing Worlds. I’m the creator and GM for the popular game Spellbound as well as a few various other little projects I shall be working on over the next few weeks (Shameless Advertising :D)

Right, I am hoping that this will be one of many articles I will be writing on the Ongoing Worlds’ blog. It’s my little bit I’m calling Roleplaying Focus. Every couple of weeks I’ll be writing up on various techniques used by myself and my fellow roleplayers to create interesting games, creative characters, and entertaining players.

Today’s topic is about death. Not the existence of an afterlife sort, mind. No, I’ll be discussing about killing off player’s characters in-game.

  • Is it a bad thing or a good thing?
  • Should players ever die as a consequence of their actions?
  • Can killing a player be used a powerful storytelling tool? Read More
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