OngoingWorlds blog

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

Sep
4

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Flashback story – Commander Dietrich Vonrose

Category: Competition entries, Flashback week 1 Comment

This is a story submitted as part of the Flashback week competition. It’s a Star Trek story written by Roman Gitlarz, the roleplaying game is USS Discovery on Star Trek Borderlands. 

Commander Dietrich Vonrose

October 4, 2409

Dietrich smiled as he made his way through the ship’s corridors.  The slight smile on his face and the bounce in his step visually demonstrated the pleasure which he felt, and it wasn’t in regard to his work earlier in the day.  After all, being XO of a starship was not anything to sneeze at.  He had countless duty rosters to approve, systems reports to analyze, and rounds to make… not to mention his Bridge duty.  His contentment was a result of the game of poker which he played regularly with his crewmates on Friday nights… and which he had just won minutes earlier. Read More

Sep
4

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Flashback story – Fredda, Lady Winter

Category: Competition entries, Flashback week Leave a Comment

This is a story submitted as part of the Flashback week competition. It’s written by Charlotte Willow-Edwards from the roleplaying game Shattered Realities.

Fredda, Lady Winter

The bitch was dead.

Dead, or at least gone forever. It seemed to be generally accepted now and she hoped, she desperately hoped, that it was true. There was no place in the world for that one.

While Lady Winter had no illusions about how she herself was viewed, she was surely a shining light in comparison to the pretty little girl who could, and had, ripped out human souls and ruined lives in a moment’s pique. Pretty child in her little pink dress, with her simpering smile and her recently assumed false air of servility. All an act to hide the demon beneath. Read More

Sep
4

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Flashback story – Roquel Atrell

Category: Competition entries, Flashback week 1 Comment

 This is a story submitted as part of the Flashback week competition. It’s a Star Trek story written by Richard LeValley from Star Trek Borderlands.

Roquel Atrell

Roquel stepped inside her quarters and shut the door. Her need for another connection to the K.I.S.S. simulator would have to wait. She only hoped that the engineers and Marius could fix the units like they wanted to before it really got out of hand.

She humphed and flopped down on the bed. ~If I had the resources that I used to, there wouldn’t be any need for the third rate connections on a backwater planet like Setlin.~ She closed her eyes, and fell to sleep with thoughts of days past lingering on her subconscious. Read More

Sep
3

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Interview with Izzy and her game 'What will be, will be…'

Category: OngoingWorlds site news Tags: , Leave a Comment

With all the fuss over Flashback week, and judging the competition, I didn’t notice that the roleplaying game What will be, will be… has now surpassed 100 posts, only the 3rd game on OngoingWorlds that has reached this landmark (see the interview with Duri from Terrifyingly Yours whose game surpassed 100 posts in march). So I interviewed Izzy, who started the game in June and asked her about the game and where it’s going next.

What inspired you to create a roleplaying game?

IzzyI’ve always enjoyed writing fiction and such like for fun, and when I discovered OngoingWorlds I thought it would be awesome to create a game and see what people thought of the idea and what they would do with the story.

I set my game in a school as I am currently still in High School, and as I bore in several lessons I often start day dreaming about things that would make my school day more interesting. I thought it would be fun in some way to go through the lives of both teachers and students in a school and remind everyone that what you see isn’t always the full story, whether its an awkward school girl, or an annoying teacher.

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Aug
27

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Pressing the reset button on your story

Category: Inspiration for writing, Play-by-post discussion Tags: , 3 Comments

I’m sure you’ve seen TV series where no-matter what happens in the episode, everything is back to normal again by the end, ready to start next time. TV Tropes calls this the “reset button”.

The Reset Button is any means by which previously occurring drastic events are made partially or wholly irrelevant by the end of the story. This is very common to American TV shows both live-action and animated, particularly from The Sixties through The Nineties, because programming directors like to have the luxury of repeating episodes in any order or no particular order at all.

TV Tropes – Reset Button

Resetting the story is way to make sure that the viewer/reader doesn’t have to sit through lots of episodes of back-story to understand the characters, or what’s happened to get them to the current point in the story.

fry from futurama“It’s just a matter of knowing the secret of all TV shows; At the end of the episode, everything is always right back to normal.”

— Fry, Futurama

It can be extremely limiting because you can only go so far with a story before you have to reset it all, but also can be very useful.

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Aug
19

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Why we love flashbacks

Category: Character Development, Inspiration for writing Tags: , , Leave a Comment

Flashback week write and roleplay about your character's pastIf you’ve not heard about Flashback week, see the details here and remember to enter the competition here.

In my last article I explained that flashbacks are great ways to help build your character, and they’re also really great fun to write because it gives you a totally open canvas to put your character anywhere and in any situation. If you’re writing about them with others as part of a roleplaying game, this can sometimes be quite a difficult thing to do, because you’ll have to get everyone else to agree that the story is taking a turn in the direction you want it to. But as anyone who’s ever done collaborative writing knows, the story won’t always go in that direction!

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Aug
17

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9 more movies with character flashbacks

Category: Inspiration for writing Tags: , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

You might need some inspiration for flashback week if you want to create a really good back-story for your character, and want to enter the competition. We’ve shown you movies with flashbacks in them before, but there’s just so many, so here are some more to inspire you to write your own! Well you can watch all your favorite movies freely at https://freecouchtuner.com/years.

Eternal sunshine

Eternal Sunshine of the spotless mind

Despite not flashbacks in the conventional sense of cinema, we see glimpses of the main character’s life (Jim Carey), including many moments he shared with his girlfriend (Kate Winslet) as they are being erased by a company he’s paid to eradicate memories of their relationship.

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Aug
11

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Flashbacks help character building

Category: Character Development, OngoingWorlds site news, Play-by-post discussion Tags: , , 3 Comments

someone sleeping on bench

Only a few days to go now until the start of Flashback week, and already the response has been positive! I’ve chatted to a few GMs of roleplaying games, who’ve told me they’ve spread word to their members about the Flashback week competition, and even planned their own smaller, in-game competitions. A great way to do this is if your game is on OngoingWorlds is to use the awards, that’s what they were created for!

But Flashback week isn’t just about winning the competition, there’s also a decent reason for using flashbacks in your story; it helps develop your character.

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Aug
8

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Flashback week competition

Category: OngoingWorlds site news Tags: 9 Comments

Flashback week - write and roleplay about your characters past

This competition is now closed. See the announcement about the winners here.
Flashback week is a great opportunity to write some back-story for your character (more details here), but more than that it’s a chance to enter your stories into a competition! Simply write your flashback story and then send it to us, for a chance to win! But you should get cracking, flashback week has already started and you only have until the 21st August, which is when the competition closes!

Who will judge the competition?

We’ve chosen a panel of 6 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!

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Aug
5

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Maintaining a sense of danger, and getting your players to post

Category: Play-by-post discussion Tags: , 2 Comments

Captain Kirk fighting the GornIn tabletop RPGs, and computer game RPGs there’s always a risk of your character dying. Players will spend a long time building their character stats, collecting items so the danger of their character death makes them take great care in trying to stay alive.

In play-by-post games, players are in control of the story, and write as if writing interactive fiction. There’s no real risk of a character being killed, unless it’s something you want to happen yourself. Killing other player characters is against the rules (in every play-by-post game I’ve ever seen), so there’s not much chance it will happen.

We all need danger

Danger makes good stories. Nobody wants to read a story about a man walking to the shops to get an ice cream, but if it were a dangerous journey over rivers of hungry crocodiles, past an erupting volcano and past deadly ninja warriors, it suddenly becomes much more interesting.

So there’s a chance that your players might get complacent because they know their characters aren’t really in any danger. Like main characters in a long-running TV show, you know they’re not going to die really, because they’re essential to the show. This doesn’t stop the series writers from putting them in trouble though, and making things extra difficult for the character.

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