OngoingWorlds blog

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

Nov
22

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Roleplaying Focus – Plot and Storylines

Category: Behind the scenes - running RPGs Tags: 1 Comment

Leon Archer

Leon Archer, GM of Spellbound

Hey hey hey! Leon Archer here, more commonly known as Phantasmagoria on Ongoing Worlds. It’s time for another Roleplaying Focus. The topic of discussion is Plot & Storylines.

  • So, a big question I’ve been asked to talk about is how much should you plan your roleplay?
  • Is it’s appropriate to make an epic arc storyline that spans for several years worth of roleplay and continues for years to come furthermore?
  • Is it more appropriate to simply just wing it, and go with whatever you think out of your head? Read More

Jul
12

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Spellbound Narrated – Requiring Voice Actors!

Category: OngoingWorlds site news Tags: , Leave a Comment

Leon Archer

Leon Archer, GM of Spellbound

Hello everyone, Leon Archer here – also known as Phantasmagoria.

I’m here for something a little bit special today.

Today I have started to record some of your stories into fully voiced episodes that I’m hoping will be available on a weekly basis.

But to do this, I am going to need your help. Read More

Jul
7

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Interview with David Ball about Blue Dwarf, going 13 years strong…

Category: Interviews, OngoingWorlds site news, PBEM games Tags: , , 2 Comments

Blue DwarfSo David, give us a little introduction to Blue Dwarf. I assume it is related to the classic Red Dwarf Television show?

It’s based on a British TV show called Red Dwarf which is a scifi comedy about a small group of characters adventuring in space, trying to survive. When I started Blue Dwarf I wanted a game that had the same feel, but didn’t want to be limited to the few main characters, so used the same universe and set the game on a similar ship, the Red Dwarf’s sister ship. Read More

May
8

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Dungeons and Dragons Interview

Category: Interviews, OngoingWorlds site news Tags: , , Leave a Comment

Hello again to another interview with one of our newer members that has been making waves with his latest game, Dungeons and Dragons. Allow me to introduce Daniel Penfold to you all, also known as Dungeonydan!

So for those who have never played or heard about the D&D experience, what is Dungeons and Dragons and what is it about?

dungeonydanDungeons and dragons is a fantasy based game set in a medieval style world filled with magic and monsters. Players are essentially heroes for hire doing quests for various individuals, defeating monsters and finding treasure. A lot of the basic framework I use is from classic D&D. The first post for example was a typical D&D starting point, a group of strangers enter a town and whilst there monsters attack. In addition we have a very diverse group of characters but between us we cover all the traditional D&D roles.

Read More

May
3

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Mary Sue: Defeating The Beast

Category: Character Development, Play-by-post discussion Tags: , , Leave a Comment

MarySueBeast

We’ve had a lot of discussion here on the blog about Mary Sue and her many tentacles of slimy perfection and personality as realistic as Wayne Rooney discussing fine art over a bottle of vintage ruby port whilst listening to classical. It’s a beast we all want to avoid meeting or even worse, creating. So how do we do this?

This Roleplaying Focus is about just that with I have affectionately dubbed Mary Sue: Defeating The Beast. Read More

Apr
14

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Roleplaying Focus – An Interview with John Bromin of New Zion

Category: Interviews, OngoingWorlds site news Tags: 1 Comment

New Zion

New Zion, a Star Trek RPG by John Bromin

Today is a special day, because I have someone very special to talk to here about his new Star Trek game that is beginning on Ongoing Worlds. This is hopefully to be the flagship of many interviews I will do with old and new games alike within the roleplaying universe.

So let me begin by introducing the person I shall be interviewing today. John Bromin is a role-player here who always seems to come up with unique and interesting stories with this writing style. It’s always made very fun and interesting reading, so I’m very excited when he wanted to tell me about his new game on Ongoing Worlds – New Zion. Read More

Jan
7

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Roleplaying Focus – What would you do?

Category: Character Development Tags: , 1 Comment

Hello there!

Leon Archer

Leon Archer, GM of Spellbound

I hope everyone has had a grand Christmas  Personally have been introduced and discovered the wonders of Sodastreams. Equally, I hope New Year was great – my latest ambition is to move into a new four bedroom house come March, which will be nice and a MASSIVE improvement over where I am now, although the train journey may or may not be a welcome change. Sorry I’ve not been able to post recently, my excuse is that I may of had a digit severed and reattached recently – kinda makes typing a little on the difficult side! I certainly didn’t do what most of the heroes I’ve written about would have done, namely shrug it off and continue on like nothing had happened. No, it was a case of wincing in pain and feeling a bit ill at the sight of my bone. Which brings me to my topic for this time.

What would you do?

This time, I’d like to discuss roleplaying in character.It is an important aspect to roleplaying, be it play-by-post, tabletop, or humble literature. Read More

Nov
12

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Roleplaying Focus – What’s Your Genre?

Category: Inspiration for writing, Interviews, PBEM games, Story summaries Tags: , , , 2 Comments

Leon Archer

Leon Archer, GM of Spellbound

Hello, and welcome to another Roleplaying Focus.

Today, I’d like to talk about various genres people play in their games, and why they play that particular genre. For this I’m going to need a some of the OngoingWorlds players to join in!

Leon Archer, GM of Spellbound
Spellbound is a high fantasy game involving students at the mage academy of Aetherion.

I’ll shamelessly start with my own game in OngoingWorlds, Spellbound. It’s a game with magic, mages, ethereal creatures. castles, and dragons. I like to split fantasy into two sub-genres into itself, just because fantasy involves such a wide variety of themes. For me, there’s high and low fantasy. High fantasy, such as Spellbound is all about being as far away from the norm as you can. It’s allows players to be completely creative at time, which is why I love it so personally. The tricky part is generally to avoid clichés or becoming so powerful and nothing is ever going to threaten that character. Although, through experience I have certainly have developed ways of doing so, heh heh. For me, I’ve found that because of sheer scope of a high fantasy game, it allows players a much easier time in accessing a roleplay without having to worry so much about the constraints of the world their character is in, or fitting his character perfectly with the lore. It’s a much more flexible genre. Read More

Oct
8

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Roleplaying Focus – Avoiding Alienation

Category: Inspiration for writing Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

Man sat on a beach

Sorry for the long pause since the last blog in Roleplaying Focus. Blame my power supply on my computer, don’t cheap out on inferior PSUs folks!

Anyway, yes…hello there. Welcome to the second post of Roleplaying Focus. I’m back from a rather lengthy absence as my computer has been all kinds of messed up over the last few weeks. Been rather disconnected from the world of roleplay which brings be to this post’s topic. This time I want to talk about engaging players into the game, and a few tips on how to avoid alienating your players. Your world is the way players connect with your game, so shutting them out is something you would never want to do because naturally they the the lifeblood of any good roleplaying game. 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