What are Campaigns and Story Books?
Each game is considered a campaign, and the pages that make up the game moves and eventually the game history are referred to as the Campaign's Story Book.

What are PMs?

What is the Control Panel?
This is your key to control the content that you want to see at NextGen RPG.  We are trying to keep the site as customizable as possible, so that our users have the flexibility to set things to their preferences.  Your Control Panel will allow you to turn off any blocks of content that you don't want to see or find useful.  In addition, this is where you will go to subscribe to the content that you want to see and to request email notifications of when your selected content has changed.  This is also the place to find and edit your account information and to tell us a bit about you.

What is the WYSIWYG Editor?
NextGen RPG utilizes a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) Editor.  We are striving for a gaming environment that is intuitive and that requires a minimal learning curve.  This section will explain the WYSIWYG Editor, any known issues with using it, and details on how to turn the editor off, for those that prefer to use straight html coding.

What is the Blog for?
Every user account comes equipped with a blog.  We encourage you to use this space for your character related game material.  You can be as creative as you like!  Some examples of blog entries are; side fiction pieces, joint posts, diary entries, newspaper articles, letters, and character blogs.  Blogs are very intuitive, but come equipped with a lot of options related to assigning them to books and subscriptions that might cause some confusion. 

Please make sure that your blog entries are contributions to the site and if applicable, to your game.  Does it tell a story or provide insight into your character?  If it's informational in nature, it is more suited for the Forum, most games will have a 'Getting to know the Cast' Thread.  If it is personal in nature, as in player related, it is more suited for the 'Real Life' section in the Forum.  If it's incomplete, please wait until the piece is completed to post it.  This will help ensure that the rest of the community have a chance to read your completed blog entry. 

There are always exceptions, but generally a quality blog entry will be at least one page long in a traditional word processor.  If your peice is long, over ten pages, it might be a good idea to separate it into two parts to allow for easy viewing.  There are no rules in place for this, but personally - I find that a blog entry over 10 pages should be broken into two parts.

What are Game or Story Guidebooks & Wikis?
For every game, there is information that needs to be made available to the players.  Things like, how to create your characters, information about the game system and world, character profiles, and any other little thing that the GM may feel is important.  Our Guidebooks and Wikis contain this information.  These are optional resources, and if a GM prefers to host something off-site, that's fine, and we'll add links in it's place.

What are the Notes for?
Sometimes during game play, it becomes useful to have a place to make notes to yourself.  Things that you want to keep private, whether it's secrets that you've uncovered during game play, or lines that you want to use, or things that you don't want to forget, etc.  This is a place for you to create notes that will only be seen by you.  Some other uses might include, posting character sheets or stats, spell lists, power lists, catch phrases, verbiage of arcane spells (so that you don't have to get the Latin translation or equivalent each time), and clues.

What are Galleries?
Each game is assigned a game gallery, with any subcategories that the GM requests.  Common categories include; Cast, NPCs, Villains, Maps & Misc.  When you have a bodycast or picture that you would like to share, you will upload it into the proper gallery.  If the picture is only related to one story, and not important to the over all game, you can upload it directly into the game file, if you prefer.  This way it will be available to anyone reading that game piece, but will otherwise not remain to clutter the game galleries.

What part do the Forums play at NextGen RPG?
The forums are not used for playing the games at NextGen RPG.  The forum is a community tool to allow our members to keep in touch and get to know each other better.  In addition, each Game will have it's own forum to discuss the out of character aspects of their game, make story request, and deal with any comments or game related critiques that they may encounter.

What are Tags?

What is the Content Directory?

What are Subscriptions?
Subscriptions will allow you to subscribe to your games, blogs or authors that you would like to follow.  Go to your Control Panel, Click on your Subscriptions Tab, and Select which items you would like to send you email notifications when they're updated.  I will warn you that they can sometimes be prolific, so be ready to tweak them until you're happy with the number of email notifications that you are receiving.

What are Users?
Each person that creates an account is considered an authorized user at NextGen RPG.  As an authorized uses you will have privileges to view and comment on all of the material, unless it is marked as Adult or Private.  Additional permissions are sometimes required to access some sections.  As an authorized user you can post to forums and comment on blog and story entries.

What are Permissions?

What are Roles?