OngoingWorlds blog

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

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Some useful articles for writing about characters

many individual roleplay characters
SEE ALSO: A character doesn’t breathe until that first post

There’s quite a few articles on this website with advice for creating & writing characters that you might have missed. Here’s a list of some useful ones:

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2019 ToS Winners

It’s time to announce the winners of the latest Tournament of Simulations (ToS). Finally! We asked for nominations back in February, and you responded by nominating 29 absolutely incredible games from across the community. After a few delays, here we are with this year’s champions. In case you were wondering, this is how we select the winners. This is an extra special ToS as it marks twenty years since that first tournament back in 1999.

As I say every year, evaluating sims is a subjective art, and this is certainly true with ToS.  We’re not here to identify the best games as this is impossible.  Instead, we’re here to identify what we think are outstanding role plays that exude excellence.  A different set of judges may very well chose a completely different set of winners.  And that’s okay!  With that on the record, here are your 2019 anniversary year tournament winners:

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July the 1st is Moderator Appreciation Day!

July the 1st is Moderator Appreciation Day! Please let the moderator of your game know you appreciate them by sending them a message!

If you’ve never heard of moderator appreciation day, there’s an article here, and a good video with Kim from RP Repository explaining it here.

I would like to thank the moderators of OngoingWorlds for making it a creative, engaging place for many different types of roleplaying games!

If you’d like to become the moderator of your own game (of any genre), you can create a game here.

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5 tools to create a new alien species for your story

You might be writing a science fiction story, like one of the many sci-fi roleplay stories here on OngoingWorlds, like Jericho or Star Wars: Balance of the Force.

At some point your characters might find themselves on an alien planet, about to meet a new race of unfamiliar aliens. Or visit a spacestation of a different alien culture. You might want to make that species as different as possible, to give it an exciting bit of flavour, and put your characters completely out of their element.

Maybe the aliens are hostile? Maybe they’re friendly. Here are some tools that can help you come up with some unique aliens:

Fantasy Name Generators alien description generator

This page will generate a short alien description. There’s also a page for creating a unique alien name here.

Sci-fi Ideas Alien Species Generator

This creates an alien description & goes into a lot more detail than the one above, as it can create a lot of detail about the culture. Also there’s a page to generate an alien planet name for this alien species here.

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5 random generators for creating a spaceship name

Stuck for creating a name? You could use a random generator. We’ve got a big list of links to random generators for all sorts of things, character names, planet names, Elf names, etc.

But the lists below are specifically for creating a spaceship name. Different scifi universes have different rules of spaceship names. For example the Star Trek universe normally has spaceships named after famous explorers, or positive-sounding words. Whereas the Star Wars universe has aggressive sounding names.

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SciWorld 2020 Style. Thank you.

What a fantastic celebration SciWorld 2020 was! It was outstanding from start to finish with excellent discussions and really, really fun trivia games. We’re all obviously in a situation wholly unfamiliar to us: the novel coronavirus pandemic and everything that it affects. However, SciWorld helped us break through that barrier and connect with each other just like we always have.

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Star Trek Short Story Competition

The following is information about a short story competition ran by the STF roleplaying community:

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2020 SciWorld Online Convention

SciWorld 2020 is today! The fun begins at 1730 UTC / 1:30 PM EDT (New York) / 10:30 AM PDT (San Francisco). Head on over:

A special thanks to Josh Hina of The New Universes Project for serving as this year’s chair.

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Why You Should Attend SciWorld Tomorrow

That’s right: SciWorld 2020 is tomorrow, Saturday, April 18th.  Join us then at 1730 UTC / 1:30 PM EDT (New York) / 10:30 AM PDT (San Francisco) for the Opening Ceremony. Josh of TNU Project and the rest of the event hosts have a fantastic line-up ready for us.

It doesn’t matter if you’re into Star Trek, Star Wars, Dr. Who, or something else entirely.  Or if you prefer chat sims, play by e-mail, or message boards.  If you’re a simmer or online role player of any persuasion, there will be something there for you!  But what do you really get out of SciWorld?  Here are 4 reasons you should attend:

  1. You’ll get to rub elbows with many prominent members of our community.  In fact, some of the most successful and influential role players and simming leaders in history will be attending and facilitating events.  Learn from the best!
  2. You’ll hear about the latest and most innovative techniques and strategies for leading a successful role play.  Indeed, there will be multiple events dedicated to running better games.  Discover what’s working for others now!
  3. You’ll be able to role play with others from different clubs and genres.  With a diverse set of hosts and settings, you’ll experience a wide range of concepts and ideas.  Challenge the simming norms and help break barriers!
  4. You’ll have fun!  All simmers and online role players, regardless of rank or club affiliation, are invited to attend and participate.  There’s no way to energize your sim than to come back with a fresh perspective.

As always, if you would like to host a one-hour discussion, trivia, or sim and there’s still space in the schedule, please contact Josh immediately at jhina [at] tnuproject [dot] org with “SciWorld” in the subject line.

See you tomorrow at SciWorld!

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Latest sponsors

Each month, the OngoingWorlds website has hosting costs that are in part covered by our Hero Members. However, we currently don’t have enough Hero Members to cover the entire month’s hosting, so it’s always nice to receive a whole month’s hosting up front (there’s an option here).

Our latest sponsors are:

Mario Gomez aka Hextor312 and J Conrad Quinn.

Thanks very much to both!

If you’d like to donate to our ongoing costs, you could donate regularly and become an OngoingWorlds Hero Member (which shows on each of your posts), or donate for a month up front, which I’d be totally grateful for!

See our donation page here: http://www.ongoingworlds.com/blog/donate/