OngoingWorlds blog

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

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Some of our best writing tips

some of our best writing tips

We’ve got new members joining OngoingWorlds all the time, and new people discovering the blog, and subscribing. But there’s a lot of old articles that new people might have missed, so here’s a list of some good stuff we’ve already posted. Read More

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What does Batman have in common with Mary Sue characters? More than you think!

This article was written by Jenn Lyons, and originally published on the blog ‘Rewriting Mary Sues’, I’m republishing it here with permission because I thought it was relevent to roleplayers. 

Batman is a Gary Stu (Mary Sue)

I hate Mary Sues.

It’s not, however, for the reason that you might think. We’ve all encountered Mary Sue characters — a product of fan fiction (typically an author insert) who can do everything, fix all problems, knows everything and knows exactly how to solve any given mystery. Read More

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Sci-fi western? Zombie romance? Multiple new categories available

Cowboy aliens roleplay

This feature was requested a while ago, and I forgot who asked for it (own up in the comments below!). And I thought it was a good idea. Instead of having just one game category, you can now have several Read More

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Enhancing collaborating storytelling with open roleplaying

Collaboration effortI created a discussion on RPG-D a few weeks ago (also mentioned in this article), about open roleplaying. Elena from Before The Mast wrote a great comment which I want to show here because I think it does a great job of explaining the benefits of open roleplaying. Read More

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A list of great random character name generators

a random collage of characters

Coming up with a new character name can be hard. Sometimes you want it to be memorable, sometimes you want the name itself to reflect the personality of the character in its meaning. Or sometimes you just need a name quick because it’s for an NPC you’ll never mention ever again. Read More

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Blog ideas – “How to write” articles

ideas for writing blog articles

Hey roleplayers & writers, normally on this blog we post articles by several people with tips on how to write and roleplay, but it occured to me there’s loooooads more topics that we’re not covering. Read More

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Human characters are boring right? Here’s a few ways Humans are special

Humans are coming

Are Human characters boring?

If you’re a RPer you likely make characters all the time. It’s fun to make an alien character, or a non-Human fantasy character. But Humans can also be pretty special. Read More

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A big long list of personality traits

Personality traits

It’s always good when a character has some unique personality traits. Here’s a big long list of personality traits grouped into positive, negative and neutral. Just… because… you never know when it might come in useful!  Read More

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November Thanksgiving writing challenge

Johnny recently won the Halloween writing challenge, and in the comments of the announcement set a challenge to everyone else to write a thanksgiving story. The following was written by Johnny:

Thanksgiving turkey dinner

Thanksgiving Day is a national holiday celebrated primarily in the United States and Canada as a day of giving thanks for the blessing of the harvest and of the preceding year. Several other places around the world observe similar celebrations.

In the English tradition, days of thanksgiving and special thanksgiving religious services became important during the English Reformation in the reign of Henry VIII. That was in 1536. Read More

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Does your character have unique traits?

The Oatmeal eating spiders

We all put effort into creating our characters. Some of them are unique, some are not. We might think about what their personality is like, and what traits they have. There’s some ideas listed in the article here, which lists believable traits. But “believeable” isn’t always unique.  Read More