OngoingWorlds blog

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

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Some scene setting prompts from Starbase 118

writing-hand

There’s been a good article published recently on the Starbase 118 community blog, with some starting points which might encourage you to think about setting the scene in your own posts. They have some example paragrpahs showing how putting effort into describing the scene can make it seem so much more real, and I encourage you to take a look. Read More

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Tib & Xann awarded the OWCH

The OWCH awardYou might have seen a fair few blog articles recently written by Tib, in his “Tib’s corner” segment, and also Xan/Mike’s regular game summary articles. Bothe of these members have also been a great help in the chatbox, often at hand to help moderate spam and keeping things civil.

This is why I’ve decided to award Xan and Tib the OWCH (OngoingWorlds Community Honor)! Both of these members have been a great asset to our community. Read More

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Way With Worlds: Why Worldbuild?

Giant mushrooms

This is a segment of an article written by Steven Savage from his blog. Worldbuilding is really important to us in roleplaying, especially if you’re the one who created the game’s world in the first place, but not just that, a world can continue to grow and change of course over the months and years as you tell more stories within it. Here’s Steven’s article where he asks Why Worldbuild?:   Read More

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How to advertise your game without ramming it down people’s throats

MadmenAdvertising is hard

One of the most difficult aspects of creating a new roleplaying game is getting players to join initially. Getting people to join a brand new game without an established story or any guarantee it’ll not be a waste of time is tricky. Finding the members is difficult enough, so you want to make your game as visible as possible.

A lot of this involves putting yourself out there, self-promoting, and just generally shouting loudly about your game into the ether until someone hears you. Read More

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OngoingWorlds wins excellence in innovation award

2013-12-20-12.20.55Yes that’s a photo of me with the award that OngoingWorlds has won this year, awarded to us by Obsidian Portal, who announced it at their panel at Gencon earlier this year.

Obviously the folk at Obsidian Portal recognise what a great website OngoingWorlds is, and I’m so very pleased that all the hard work I’ve put in has got an award. But tbh the best thing about OngoingWorlds are you the members who’ve put in so much effort into writing excellent stories in your roleplaying games! Read More

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All-powerful characters are boring

I found this comic recently which expresses perfectly why all-powerful characters are boring: Read More

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RPRepository’s guide to preventing & dealing with drama in roleplaying games

rp-repositorylogo-ongoingworldsDrama happens. It happens whenever people care a lot, and in roleplaying we care a lot about the characters and worlds we write about. RPrepository have a great guide for dealing with drama, I won’t copy & paste it all here, but I encourage you to go read it on their page. Read More

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New chatbox

chat box

Hey dudes, there’s a new update to the chatbox that we use on OngoingWorlds. Read More

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Glossary of play-by-post terms

glossary of play-by-post terms

To a newcomer, the wordswe use in roleplaying can seem bizarre and confusing. So here’s a glossary of terminology commonly used in play-by-post roleplaying. Read More

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Recent activity feed

Here’s a new feature which I think was first requested by Alex Solvay ages ago, so thanks go to him for the suggestion. Quite simply this shows a feed of game activity which is shown in the left column on all game pages.

recent-activity-aro

Recent activity will also show on your logged-in profile, alongside each game you’re a member of.  Read More