Big Ideas Week on SciFi Ideas

The website SciFi Ideas (www.scifiideas.com) is planning a special event this February. “Big Ideas Week” will celebrate the website’s 1-year anniversary by posting lots of new ideas and articles, and encouraging readers to take part.

I caught up with the creator of SciFi Ideas, Mark Ball. Here’s what he had to say…

What is SciFi Ideas?

The idea behind SciFi Ideas is simple. Too many great ideas go to waste. Sometimes they come to you in the middle of the night and you forget to write them down. Sometimes they stay in your head for months and eventually transform into something too big and unwieldy to use. Perhaps you just have so many great ideas that you don’t have time to use them all. We want to rescue these unused ideas and use them to inspire other writers.

Roleplaying story summaries from 2011

 

2011 was a great year for OngoingWorlds, we had over 200 new members join up, and 148 new games were created (almost double the amount of games created the year before!). Also the game Blue Dwarf was moved to OngoingWorlds from aYahoo Group, instantly making it the game with the most posts on the entire site.

2011 was also a great year for many roleplaying games. Here’s some story summaries of other roleplaying games from 2011:

Simming History: In the Beginning

Tigra Tigress has been roleplaying online since the beginning, and has been very influential in the Star Trek communities. She claims she’s one of the longest running Play-by-Email people on the web, and is still simming! The article below was originally discussed in her chat seminar at last year’s SciWorld convention, which she’s continuing in the 2012 convention.

Here’s Tigra’s article: 

Aeterna Roma: Roleplaying in the Roman era

There are many different worlds you can use as a setting for your roleplaying game (I’ve even listed a few ideas here), and here’s a game that’s set in the Roman era. Here’s an explanation of a forum-based roleplaying game Aeterna Roma by its co-founder, Gothy.

What’s your RP doing for Christmas?

 

I’m writing this on Christmas eve, eagerly awaiting a fantastic Christmas day tomorrow with my family. This month I’ve been wondering if December is a good time for roleplaying, as many people will be travelling to spend time with their parents over the holidays and might not have much time for roleplaying – but at the same time many people will have days off work so might have even more time than usual to spend writing and roleplaying.

I’ve been asking some other roleplayers what December is like in their own games.

In Breeding – Simulation Style!

Inbreeding: When closely related individuals mate and produce offspring, which tends to increases the number of individuals that are homozygous for a trait and increases the appearance of recessive traits.

In online roleplaying, as in life, inbreeding is a dangerous state.  When your game comes to rely on the same core of individuals ideas become homogenized, energy becomes stale, and the recessive dominates.  How can you identify inbreeding in your game?  What can you do before it’s too late to reverse?

Interview with Tristan Wolf from Starbase 118

We wrote an article about UFOP: Starbase 118 back in October (you can see it here). I was able to recently ask some questions to the group’s founder Tristan Wolf. Here’s the interview:

5 dystopian worlds in science fiction

Science fiction can show us many different worlds, and I don’t just mean different planets. Different governments and different ways of living are interesting too. One of my favourites is the dystopian world, showing a parallel or future world where things aren’t quite as nice and rosy as they are now.

Here’s some examples of dystopian worlds in science fiction.

Interview with Elena Vasilescu, from Before the Mast RPG

Last week I interviewed Elena Vasilescu from Before the Mast RPG, with a few questions left over, I wanted to ask how the game came about, and how someone from Romania who speaks French and Spanish, and with players across the world ended up creating a roleplaying game written primarily in English.

Before the Mast has been running since the 6th of August 2010, and has been very active using social media, especially on Twitter and Facebook. I interviewed their moderator Elena Vasilescu and asked her about the game.

Spotlight on Pure White Moon’s character: Piper Keller

Pure White Moon is a roleplaying game set in a parallel London, where Vampires and Werewolves prowl the streets at night. But the twist is, that these are the good guys, killing only the true madmen lurking the streets and keeping the population safe. However, people known as “The Hunters” are hunting down these immortal creatures.

Players of this game are encouraged to create a character as either a Vampire, Werewolf or Hunter. So far the game has been going since October. I asked Izzy, a member of Pure White Moon who plays Piper Keller, a trained Hunter who doesn’t understand the immortals, and wants only one thing – to destroy them all.

How to give awards to members of your game

Why not reward the members in your game for taking part, and writing great posts? Some players work really hard to create an interesting storyline, and write great dialogue between characters. It’s time you gave them a little something for their effort!

We’ve been testing a new awards feature that has previously only been available for a very small amount of games. To have the ability to give awards to your members you had to sign up for it here (but now they’re available to everyone!

Don’t turn new members away!

Recruiting new members into your roleplaying game can be very difficult. Roleplaying is quite a niche hobby, and not everyone has the patience and the writing ability to roleplay properly. Also it’s sort of difficult to get your head around understanding what roleplaying actually is, unless you’ve done it before.

2011 Tournament of Simulations

Two months and 27 sims later, the best games – the winners of the 2011 Tournament of Simulations – have been announced.

The Federation Sim Fleet (FSF) and the Starfleet Legacy Alliance (SLA), both venerable clubs noted for their chat sims, captured top honors in the chat sim category, with the USS Lionheart of the SLA winning as best Star Trek chat sim, and the Paragon of the FSF named the best Star Wars chat sim.  Starbase 27 of the SLA and the USS Providence of the FSF also earned marks, with Starbase 27 noted as the most creative chat sim, and the crew of the Providence named the best chat sim crew.

Before the Mast, roleplaying in the Age of Sail [Interview]

Before the Mast is a forum-based roleplaying game set in the ‘age of sail’, a term I’ve only recently learned – I’ve previously just called it “pirate times”, but it’s clear there’s a lot going on at this time in history, which is where Before the Mast RPG comes in. Fixing itself firmly in history, this is a roleplaying game (or “writing community” as Elena prefers) for history fans.

The game has been running since the 6th of August 2010, and Before the Mast has been very active especially on Twitter and Facebook. I interviewed their moderator Elena Vasilescu and asked her about the game.

Streamlining the games list

I bet you’ve seen hundreds of websites claiming to be an awesome play-by-post game, and you might have even got excited about the game and wanted to join – but then realised the game stopped running 5 years ago (or maybe even longer in some cases!).

Some play-by-post games fail, it’s a fact that we have to live with. Some are fun for a while but then go stale and close due to inactivity, maybe the members had an argument, maybe they all went on holiday or moved house and forgot about the game until it was just a distant memory. Or maybe the game just wasn’t attracting members, maybe it was too complicated, or maybe it wasn’t advertised enough to new members.