OngoingWorlds blog

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

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Fallfest is next week – make sure to register your chat

fallfest banner

Hey dudes, if you’re not sure what FallFest is, click here and find out 🙂

Not all of the chat slots are yet filled, and we need to fill them – so if you’ve got a good idea for a topic to chat with people about for an hour, make sure you sign up and let the organisers know the title of your chat.

See schedule & sign up for chat 

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Adding details to secondary characters (aka NPCs)

Police chief Wiggam from the simpsons

I found this good article with advice for creating characters by Lori L. Lake, and there’s a great section about creating secondary/minor characters (in roleplay we normally call these NPCs because nobody specifically controls them). Read More

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Creating Well-Rounded Characters

round characters by Øyvind Rønning

This is an extract of an article by Lori L. Lake (see the original here) which I thought was great advice, not just for writers, but for roleplayers too. Read More

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5 tips for creating your next character

Create an interesting character– you can easily get bored of writing about a character who doesn’t interest you. Others only like reading about interesting characters also. Read More

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Creating a good character

This article was originally written by me for the Blue Dwarf website, but most of this applies to most other roleplaying games where you need to create a character. 

player 1

The character you play is probably the most crucial part of your role-playing experience. Your character will be your outlook onto the crazy world of Blue Dwarf, and how you interact with it. It is your character’s actions that you will write about, so they should be interesting! Read More

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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.

Read More

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How to twist your plots – subtlety & consequences

Plot twist aheadThis is part of an article written by Johnn Four from Roleplayingtips.com, I thought this was useful not just for tabletop RPers, but for play-by-post RPers too. So have published it here – but you really should read the original post (you’ll find it here).

Be Subtle

Give clues about the surprising truth but don’t tip off they’re clues. And play the long game. Traditional advice has you ensuring players pick up your clues and creating clue redundancy in case players miss your first hints. With twists, we go the other direction. We put stuff in plain sight but give no indication it’s special. Keep your poker face on, keep your voice steady, don’t give away anything. Read More

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Top Retention Tips

 

This article was written by James Drysdale from Starbase 118 (visit their website).

welcome mat won't you stay a while

Recruitment and retention have been hot topics on OngoingWorlds lately and they’re both important. Attracting players to your game is essential to keep it viable because no matter how good you are, people’s circumstances change and there are many things outside a GM’s control that can take players away from the game, from education or new jobs to expanding family or even caring responsibilities. New players are the lifeblood of our games, so what can we do to increase retention and as ensure our new players want to stay? Here are a few of my favourite tried and tested tips: Read More

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What’s more important, recruiting new players or keeping existing ones?

people being social

Last week, Charles Star posted an article stressing the importance of recruiting new players (read it here). Crimsyn had an interesting point about this in the comments, I’ve pasted it here in case you missed it: Read More

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Some random planet/world name generators

coruscant from star warsApologies if I’ve posted many articles about random generators, they seem to be the most popular, so here’s another!

Here are some useful links to random generators for naming your planets/worlds/realms, ideal for sci-fi or fantasy games:

 

Planet name generator

http://enneadgames.com/generators/planet-name-generator/

Simple, interesting names that can be used for a planet, or for a world/realm in a fantasy setting. Read More