OngoingWorlds blog

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

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SciWorld 21 is coming!

Hello,

So it is the time of year when you see information about another SciWorld; our twenty-first to be exact. As noted previously on Discord, we are happy to have co-hosts this year that hopefully will be able to add their own flair to SciWorld and make this year even more enjoyable than usual for you all. This year SciWorld will be hosted by RPG Writing and Star Army, with Amanda Rose and Wes, respectively, leading the charge as this year’s co-chairs.

When will this year’s event be?
June 24th 2023 at 10 AM Eastern/7 AM Pacific/2 PM UTC ( https://dateful.com/time-zone-converter?t=2pm&tz2=Coordinated-Universal-Time-UTC for help converting time )

What will be happening this year?
There will be a mix of voice presentations, text panels, and hopefully trivia this year. If you are interested in hosting a panel, please reach out to one of the co-chairs or post interest in #panel-signups in Discord.

Where will this year’s SciWorld be?
As with the last couple of events, in the interest of making things simple, all SciWorld’s will be hosted on the unified Discord. Here is an invite link: https://discord.gg/EGBwV54

How can I participate/help out?
We are always looking for people to host panels, advertise, spread the word, and be good community members by following the rules and contributing ideas and conversations before, after, and during SciWorld.

As always, if you have questions or need more information, feel free to join the Discord server at the link listed above, and someone from this year’s host organizations or SimmingHub will gladly help you. Thanks for reading, and we hope to see you at SciWorld 21 on June 24th.

Josh

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20 Years in Star Army

While 2021 turned out to be the year of the anniversary, we haven’t run out of anniversaries quite yet. Indeed, our friends at Star Army celebrated a big one earlier in 2022. Depending on how you count it, they were founded in either June or November 2002. Regardless, it’s still an incredible 20 years!

Read More

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SciWorld! Wow!


What a SciWorld we had last month!  In case you missed it, Bravo Fleet and Star Army partnered together to host the 2018 edition, which was an absolute blast!  As far as we know, this was the first time that two different sim clubs co-hosted the convention.  The first SciWorld was in 1999, and it has been held continuously since 2011.  We believe that this year’s SciWorld was the 16th, but we’re not positive as many records from the early 2000s are no longer available. Read More

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2018 SciWorld Online Convention

That’s right, SciWorld 2018 is today.  See you over there.

We would also like to give a special thanks to Alexander of Bravo Fleet and Wes Davis of Star Army for chairing this year’s convention.  Great work so far!  We can’t wait for SciWorld to begin!

2018 SciWorld Online Convention

 

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SciWorld ’18 is July 28th

It gives me great pleasure to announce that the 2018 SciWorld Online Convention will be hosted by 2017 Squiddie winner Bravo Fleet & 2013 Squiddie winner Star Army on Saturday, July 28th!  Obviously, we’re changing things up a bit this year.  We’re holding SciWorld in the summer instead of the spring and you get two hosts for the price of one (actually, it’s still free).

If you’ve never heard of SciWorld, it’s a time when the entire simming and online roleplaying community comes together for one day in online chat rooms for engaging discussions, interactive trivia games, and live chat role plays.  In short, we share ideas, information, and energy!  Bravo Fleet & Star Army are on point to plan, advertise, and execute the festival.  Indeed, it takes a lot of work to make SciWorld happen! Read More

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Announcing the Squiddie awards – The winners

Squiddie award for superior online roleplaying

Now that the Oscars are out of the way, it’s time to present the real awards, the Squiddies! The Squiddies (officially the OngoingWorlds medal for superior online roleplaying) are our own award for roleplaying excellence, where we invite all roleplayers to nominate their games, clubs and fellow roleplayers for an award. Nominations were given to us by a form on an article published back in January (we postponed our event to not conflict with SimEnc’s Simming Prize). We announced the nominations last week, and our judges have been working diligently to reach a consensus on the winners.

The competition was fierce as we received nominations for 19 individuals, nine sims/games, and six clubs. Read More

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10 ways to keep your newest roleplayers

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Your Dilemma

Wes Davis

This post was written by Wes Davis, founder of Star Army

You’ve worked hard setting up your online roleplaying or simming community, and harder still to spread the word about it.

A stream of new players is joining, but some of them are flaking out and disappearing without a trace. How can you overcome new players’ shyness and make them feel comfortable and included in your community? Read More

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How Star Army uses custom imagery

ketsurui_rikouOne of the most important and obvious aspects of a text-based roleplaying game is that it uses text. But we don’t just have to stick to the written form, many roleplaying games use imagery and cool graphics to convey ideas, places, characters and mood. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words!

One of the most illustrative roleplaying games I’ve seen is Star Army, which uses brilliant custom artwork. I recently spoke with Wes Davis, creator of Star Army about the amazing artwork they use. Read More

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Time distortions in roleplaying – Do your story threads match up?

Distorted clock

One of the most complicated aspects of writing for a roleplay online is one that I’ve actually never heard many people discuss, although every game and group probably has their own interpretation of how it should be handled. What I’m talking about is time.

Time is more or less constant (unless you ask an astrophysicist of course). And often days or weeks can go past between writing your roleplay post, and you often don’t want time to have elapsed since your last post, which means time goes slower in your roleplay. Read More

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Introduction to Star Army – a bespoke play-by-post universe

People and armour

Star Army is a play-by-post roleplaying game using a phpbb forum. The game consists of dozens of plots, all taking place in the same shared universe. They have about 80 regular members who write and roleplay for the site, and has been going since 2000.

I spoke recently with Wes Davis, creator and administrator of the game, and he was able to answer a few questions about Star Army.

Tell us about Star Army

Wes DavisRoleplay primarily focuses on military starships and their crews. We’re just coming out of a multi-year metaplot that was war-centric, so we’re starting to shift focus onto independent adventure plots on the dangerous frontiers of the major empires and improving the diversity of plot types and character types.

Star Army is a space opera setting with faster-than-light travel, aliens, space navies, and post-human construct races. Major themes include questions about what makes us human and what is worth fighting for. In Star Army, the galaxy is in the aftermath of an epic series of wars. Read More