This is a fairly new site, it just branched off from theRPGsite, earlier this month.

They seem like a friendly and welcoming community and I wanted to share the love. 

http://www.therpghaven.com

As per China's request, here's a link to a free RPG that I think would mesh well with the NextGenRPG's style:

The Window

The introduction gets a bit preachy at times, but the mechanics are very simple and, at the risk of overusing the phrase, story-oriented.

To give you an idea, here's a link to the three Precepts which define the game's philosophy:

The Three Precepts

 http://arsludi.lamemage.com/

A great gaming blog. Mostly relevant to FtF gaming. The updates are fairly sparse, but in general I find the articals very insightful.

NaNoWriMo

What is NaNoWriMo? 
http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/whatisnano

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

When is NaNoWriMo?  November 1st - November 30th

How does NaNoWriMo Work?  http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/hownanoworks

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I was thinking that if some of our members were going to do this, this year, I could start a thread/support group for it.   

If any of you have done it in the past and want to tell us if it was a rewarding experience, I'd love to hear about it.  Or...on the contrary if it was a waste of your time.

I had a lot of fun doing this last year and I plan to do it again this year. I completed the 50,000 words but not the novel. You do need a plan on how many words you are going to write per day and stick with it though. I got behind when our dog got lost and just did manage to catch up by putting in some late nights.

I highly recommend it to anyone who likes to write and has the time to put into it.

Thanks rgordona, that's a really cool link. On thing that jumped out at me is that the blogger is developing a game called Microscope and is looking for playtesters. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around it but it sure sounds interesting:

Microscope is a roleplaying game, but you don’t have your own character. You don’t play in chronological order. You know how things end before you know why they really happened. Yeah, it’s a bit experimental.

You start with the big picture, the grand scheme of your history, then zoom in and explore all the nooks and crannies. The more you play, the more complex the history becomes. Your once simple summary becomes a detailed tapestry, full of meaning and surprises.

It’s fractal gaming.

Want to leap a thousand years in the future and see how an institution shaped society? Want to jump back to the childhood of the king you just saw assassinated and find out what made him such a hated ruler? That’s normal play in microscope. You have the freedom to move around and examine whatever you want, defying limits of time and space.

Want to do a game spanning centuries or thousands of years, like the Silmarillion, the Foundation books, or the entire Dune series? Microscope says yes.

It's a "no-prep, no-GM" game, so any intrepid bunch of folks could start it up here.

Bouncing around that blog led me to www.story-games.com, a cool resource and a place for very interesting, albeit often abstract, discussions about gaming mechanics, styles of play, stuff like that.

I'm so glad you put up that link, I've been meaning to do that as well.  That's another place I'd love to get a quick ad up. 

From the discription it might work really well in this format. Ben Robbins talks about the difficulty of keeping all the facts in your head because anything can become important at anytime as you zoom in and out. Which would not be a problem with an electronic format as the archive is always available. The simultaneous nature of play here with game moves and JPs and blog pieces all being developed at the same time might also work well with the zoom in and out nature of his discription.

Of course the opposite might also be true. There are photos of maps being drawn on the table as the game goes along, and others where key notes are just jotted down and added to as the games goes on. I can see that real colaborative style of game suffering when comunicaton is not as good as around a table. 

I also think that the rules are not published  freely so we would have to ask for permision to playtest the game here. (And potentially that would mean distributing the rules. I can see that as a potential problem.) On the other hand My experience of Ben is that he is a pretty cool guy and I know he was watching and helping a GM who was running one of the Lame Mage modules for M&M on EnWorld.

If there are poeple who are interested in testing the game here then I am happy to ask if we could. 9As you say it is  supposed to be. no gm, no prep so i have bno idea how that would work.

I also recomend Storygames.com los if interesting stuff even if it is often quite high level. I also like
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/ - The Forge. There is lots of stuff about publishing which doesn't interest me much, but also a lot of stuff on game desing and balance which is good if you like that kind of thing.

Yeah, I'm planning to participate in NaNoWriMo this year. But really, 50,000 words isn't enough. If you have any hope of writing something you can sell, you need to produce at least 80-90,000 words. Or more.

50,000 words / 30 days = 1, 666 words a day, every day. Or 2,380 words a day M-F with weekends off.

90,000 words / 30 days = 3,000 words a day, every day. Or 4,285 words a day M-F with weekends off.

Since I'd want to try to sell my novel, I'll be shooting for 90,000 words. I'll probably also use the Snowflake Method for planning my novel before I start: The Snowflake Method

Basically, you write a one-sentence blurb for your novel. Then you expand that to a paragraph--four of five sentences, each describing one of the scene-ending disasters (turning points) and the climax. Then you expand each sentence into a paragraph. And so on and so on, until you've worked your way up to a fairly complete description of the story (and the characters). You also flesh out characters along the way. And you can and should go back and revise earlier items as the story starts to take shape and deviates from the starting point--which will likely happen once you're in the groove.

By the time you're done, you've got a story mapped out and should be ready to sit down and pound out the text.

Thanks for the link and the word/day break down. 

Will this be your first year doing it?

If I do it, it will be to try and release my creative energies.  I used to have a lot of great ideas and my mind to output was easily accomplished.  ...but for some reason, since I've picked this back up in the last couple of years, I can't do that.  I get so stressed out about quality and editing/proofing and such, that the solo writing is hard for me.

I think that if I could just write to win, cuz anyone can be a winner, and let go of my tedious editing issues, it might help me.

Yes, this will be my first stab at NaNo. I don't think I'll have any trouble with the word count. The question is whether I can write something coherent over that length.

If you don't normally use an outline, do so for NaNo. It makes it a lot easier to stay on track.

If you're interested, I'm finding this software incredibly useful for writing the novel I'm working on:

http://www.spacejock.com/

It's free, there's a Linux version for those of us not afflicted with Windows and it makes a lot of sense.  Damn sight better than trying to do this in Word.

One caveat about the linux version. yWriter4 works under wine but there is a noticeable lag behind typing and the keystroke appearing on the screen. I've noticed it and others have reported it. yWriter5 needs the very latest version of mono to work and people are still experiencing errors with it. I haven't tried version 5 on linux yet because of all the problems reported so I can't tell you for sure.

This is very good software though. It helps a lot with organization for those of us who don't think linear.

yWriter combined with Freemind http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page make plotting and writing a whole lot easier.

I've downloaded yWriter4 and it seems to work on my system (running in WINE under SuSe 10.3). But I'll have to play with it later and figure out how to actually use it. In the mean time, I have stories to work on using OpenOffice.

Yep, Mono 2.4 is a basic requirement.  And the microsoft core fonts.  If you're running Ubuntu (or any of the Debian variants) then this repository should help:

http://ppa.launchpad.net/mono-testing/ppa/ubuntu

They've got a build of 2.4 that works perfectly.  Been running it for a couple of months or so and I've found it to be very stable.  Haven't lost anything yet (touch wood!).

I'd forgotten about FreeMind!  You're right.  Lovely tool.