OngoingWorlds blog

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

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Designing great factions for a great game – Tips for the perfect imperfect factions

This article is written by Kim Smouter from the New Worlds Project, which we’ve blogged about before (see other articles here).

Berleos class light destroyer

Getting your factions right is key to a setting

With New Worlds Project launching on the 2nd January 2016, I was reminded of a series that I wrote for OngoingWorlds a few years back in anticipation of our Reboot. In looking for themes for a new article, I decided to concentrate on an aspect which can make or break a role-playing game, and that is: it’s setting and particularly its factions.

Every role-playing game master will face this choice. Whether they will base their setting on an established setting like Star Trek, Harry Potter, or The Hunger Games or whether they will take that leap and create their own where everything has to be built. And such games aren’t like word games where you can work your way around using Wordscape answers you get off of the internet. You have to pass the levels with great diligence.

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The story of New Worlds Project: #8 – Rethinking roleplaying

Imyt by night

By Kim Smouter, Co-Founder of New Worlds Project. See part 1 of the story of New Worlds Project here.

One of the things which we’re experimenting within New Worlds Project is a concept we’re calling 360-degree creativity, and I see it as a real experiment that I can only hope will prove successful once we get underway. Read More

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The story of New Worlds Project: #7 – Rebooting New Worlds Project through visual art

Life slowly returned to normal

By Kim Smouter, Co-Founder of New Worlds Project. See part 1 of the story of New Worlds Project here.

Fast forward to 2013 and a series of circumstances led to a rekindling of interest in revisiting the concept of New Worlds Project. It had been nearly three years since I as a co-founder had done anything substantive on the site, aside from answering the odd customer service request from a user unable to access their account… but in any case, the circumstances came together and the admins came together to discuss whether it was time to bring back our community to life. Read More

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The story of New Worlds Project: #6 – How we reached the “F” Word…

New worlds project spaceship

By Kim Smouter, Co-Founder of New Worlds Project. See part 1 of the story of New Worlds Project here.

When I began writing this story, I didn’t want to just write about what I thought we had done to make New Worlds Project a unique endeavour but I also wanted to reflect on what had made the project fail so that others can see the signs and help prevent the demise of their play-by-post projects. Read More

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The story of New Worlds Project: #5 – Designing the ultimate website for your ultimate game…

New worlds website timeline

By Kim Smouter, Co-Founder of New Worlds Project. See part 1 of the story of New Worlds Project here.

The website is the engine room of any decent play-by-post role-playing community, and as a result, it deserves as much attention as you give to the setting and game design process. In this chapter, I intend to cover in greater detail how the past, current, and future websites of New Worlds Project were designed and brought to life, in the hopes of inspiring greater deployment of efforts within our community. Read More

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The story of New Worlds Project: #4 – Keeping the excitement going

arnou

By Kim Smouter, Co-Founder of New Worlds Project. See part 1 of the story of New Worlds Project here.

It might be worthwhile having a refresh. Chapter 1 introduced this series as a story of the up and down and hopefully up again that New Worlds Project has experienced in its 10 year history. This chapter covers what we did to keep it going and can perhaps serve as a checklist for others… Read More

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The story of New Worlds Project: #3 – Launching the saga

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Written by Kim Smouter, Co-Founder of New Worlds Project. Read all articles about New Worlds Project

Getting the setting right was just one of the many challenges facing our launch. We had to get the word out that we had created this setting. We wanted intrepid writers to come join us to test whether it could serve as a decent platform for collaborative writing and role-playing. We’d been working a few years towards achieving this, whilst keeping our responsibilities at Star Trek: Independence where both of us were quite key players. Read More

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The story of New Worlds Project: #2 – Crafting an Original Setting

patton-class600

Written by Kim Smouter, Co-Founder of New Worlds Project. See part 1 of the story of New Worlds Project here.

What we did in 2003

When New Worlds Project was launched in 2003, Alex and I were both excited, and relieved to have passed the development stage of the initiative. Developing an original setting is no small feat but it is a deeply rewarding experience which became a central unique selling point of the initiative in its heydays. What I want to do in this chapter is to really go through the ingredients and approaches that really made this work at the time to enable you to have a recipe that could be followed by game-masters looking to launch an original concept. Read More

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The story of New Worlds Project: #1 – 2001, a Space Odyssey

New worlds project

Written by Kim Smouter, Co-Founder of New Worlds Project.

From successful launch, to project failure, to reboot – my journey as a co-founder

In 2001, the world was a very different place, the idea that a mixed-race man would become the next President of the United States was a dream we all thought would only become a reality in a century, and I was still years away from graduating from school. The term ‘social media’ to represent weirdly named sites like Facebook or Twitter did not exist in the English language. Read More