OngoingWorlds blog

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

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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Jul
30

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Why flashbacks are important

Category: OngoingWorlds site news Tags: , 1 Comment

Flashback week is a week-long writing event where writers and roleplayers are encouraged to think about something that happened in their characters past, and write it as a flashback. Flashback week is the 2nd week in August, starting Sunday the 14th. I’ve been spreading the word, to encourage writers and roleplayers to all write flashbacks together in that week. Here’s an article written by Mike, GM of Wizards Inc on why he thinks flashbacks are important.

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Jul
25

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10 Ideas for Babylon 5 RPGs

Category: Inspiration for writing Tags: 3 Comments

Probably the biggest obstacle facing the Babylon 5 roleplayer is the huge scale and undeniable canonicity of Joe Michael Straczynski’s original vision, which covers several decades of detailed history and spans 2000 years in total. While most science fiction TV shows (Star Trek in particular) occupy wider, very versatile universes – an open landscape with canonical building plots available – the Babylon 5 universe is structured very closely around the events of the show itself. The Babylon station sits at the very centre of this universe, a focal point through which all the most interesting storylines pass. Stepping out of its long shadow is not easy, as the two ill-fated Babylon 5 spin-off shows demonstrate.

The B5 roleplayer therefore has two options; attempt to avoid the Babylon station and its long legacy altogether, or meet the complex existing plot lines head on. Read More

Jul
21

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Announcing Flashback week

Category: Inspiration for writing Tags: 6 Comments

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

Last year we announced the first ever ‘Flashback Week’ a week-long writing event where writers and roleplayers were encouraged to think about something that happened in their characters past. The event isn’t held anywhere, 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!

Flashback week is the 2nd week in August, starting Sunday the 14th. If you’re writing in that week, make sure to include a flashback!

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Jul
10

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Games Directory re-appears after long hiatus

Category: Advertising your game Tags: , Leave a Comment

ScreenshotEdit: It appears not long after this website re-appeared, it disappeared again. Rubbish!!!

If you’ve been roleplaying for many years you might remember a website called the “Games Online Directory”. The directory was like a yellow pages for roleplaying games and was very popular back in 2000 -2004, when the website went offline very suddenly without any warning. Many people who used the site to advertise their games were not notified and lost all adverts to their site, and all the site’s banners and affiliate links suddenly turned blank.

 

Back when it was popular, the Games Online Directory had over 100,000 hits a year, it was a popular destination for people searching for games, and for people advertising their games. But with such a long absence, it’ll have to build up that audience all over again.

It might now look much now, but with some cool new features added, the Games Online Directory has the potential to really benefit the roleplaying community. We’ll just have to wait and see what Nick pulls out of the bag!

Jul
3

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Interview: Forever Searching

Category: OngoingWorlds site news Tags: , Leave a Comment

Forever Searching creepy houseIf you counted up all the play-by-post games that are currently being played across the world today I imagine that a huge proportion of them are spin-offs from Star Trek or Star Wars, and many more based on popular TV series and films. When I first created OngoingWorlds for a place to roleplay, I imagined lots of people creating Star Trek games and only a small proportion of games set around a unique idea.

I was very wrong! Looking at the current games, many of them are rich and imaginative stories based around a unique idea, and such great ideas too! I’ve already done an article about the games Terrifyingly Yours and Zombie Apocalypse 2, which were really interesting. This article is going to be all about a new game called Forever Searching, which is an ongoing mystery set in a creepy fictional town called Moonfall Valley where weird things start to happen.

Forever Searching was created last month by Izzy (see her profile here). I asked Izzy a few questions about her game.

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Jun
27

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Instant video game fun vs difficult roleplaying writing

Category: Play-by-post discussion Tags: Leave a Comment

Motprstorm Apocalypse
This is a subject that I’ve thought long and hard about, and I’d love to say that I always do the right thing here, but often I’m just as guilty as everyone else. Let me explain…

I love writing, and I love roleplaying, I’ve been involved in play-by-post games for about 15 years, and GM of my own game for over 10 of them. I write a new post about characters in my game about once a week, and if anyone ever asks me I tell them I love it. That’s true, I do love it.

I love roleplaying in play-by-post games so much that I want to encourage as many people to take it up as a hobby as I can, and I honestly believe they’ll love it too. For me there’s nothing better than being in control of a sprawling and unpredictable story that you’re constantly writing with friends.

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