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• Decide what you want to run. Make sure you want to run it. Don't just pick up a game, stare at it for a few seconds, then go 'gosh this would make a great PBP!' It won't. It should be a game you're invested in, a game that you have a deep and abiding love for that won't get marred by slow players, or people mixing up the rules, or that one player who always takes two days to update. Because all of that will happen and it will kind of suck and you need to be able to bull through it.
• Similarly, figure out your workflow ahead of time. I don't just mean 'decide when you'll update' - figure out ahead of time what you'll need to make an entire post. More on this when I talk about what software to use and how to use it, but you should at least go into the thread with a good idea of what you're going to do each update, right down to the zoom and size of the images to get the best filesizes. A little preparation now will do wonders later.
• It's your game. I am absolutely prepared to blackball people. Similarly, there's every chance I may have promised someone a seat if I know they barely missed out on the last game or they really want to take part. As the person putting in the most work you've got a right to include people that will make the game more fun for you, and a right to exclude anyone you know will make it too much of a chore. Just don't make a big song and dance over it. (That said, I have only done this twice.)
• Be dogged. Player gone silent? Message them, or find a replacement if the game's still in relatively early stages. Update often, even if it's just letting people know what's up because you're hammered that night. Part of figuring out your workflow should be knowing that you can devote sufficient time to the game to keep it going.
• ... but don't be too serious. Don't be a robot, c'mon. It's a game, so enjoy it like a game, and roll with whatever happens. You'll inevitably fuck up and make mistakes, and the players will call you out on them. Accept that, fix it and move on, and in return talk shit about them, or discuss what they're doing, or just be personable, and your thread will be a lot more readable and interesting for it.

• VASSAL: Is your game on Vassal? If so, there's a good chance you can cut out a lot of the work of making images and piecing together boards. Get the module - always remember to search BGG, because there's a lot of games whose modules aren't on the main site - and check it over. Does it look good enough to use? Does it have the Image Capture tool on every image you want to screenshot? (If not, check down the post.) Are the images good enough that you can blow them up to a suitable size?
• GIMP: Defacto standard for those of us too lazy to get Photoshop. If your game isn't on Vassal you're going to need to either find or create scans of the board and appropriate pieces - time to get good with a digital camera, and carefully cut out and size everything. Remember to either crop pieces very close or put them on a transparent background, because a 640x480 white block with a tiny token in the middle isn't going to help anyone. Make a base board image, then make a layer for every type of token you're going to use - this will allow you to easily move or remove some of them without impacting others.
• Dropbox: Commonly seen in my Mage Knight games, installing the Dropbox client gives you a directory where any named image you drop into it is automatically uploaded to a static filename whenever it changes or is updated. This is bogglingly useful if you don't care about keeping a turn-by-turn record of something in the thread - I'd never use it for a main game map, but for player inventories or hands it's invaluable, especially as you can give the player a secret link and they can just reload it each time.
• ImageMagick: Incredibly powerful batch processing for images. Not that useful if you're using GIMP to build a board, in which case you can save it in whatever format you like, but for some arcane reason Vassal only saves images in .png, which will create incredibly large files given that its pieces are usually photographs with indistinct colours. A quick shortcut to 'mogrify.exe -format jpg -quality 90 *.png' will solve that problem right quick.
• imgur Tools: You'll be uploading a lot of shit to imgur. The more of it you can automate, the better. Get one of the many, many tools people have made to help cut down on the amount of fiddly shit you need to do, but remember that imgur may choose to resize and squash down any image that goes over about 1.5Mb - you may need to adjust the size and quality of your images until you end up under this amount, and bear in mind how many updates you might have on a single page.
• BBcode: No, I'm serious. In games where a lot of your update is going to be text, make sure it's readable. Pick out the most important information so it's easier to find, but make sure you don't overwhelm your players with bold. If you need to, work out a couple of designs, and make a template you can quickly update each time. Be prepared to change it as you go through as you learn what works and what doesn't. See my old Eldritch Horror updates. They're still not as good as I'd like, but imagine trying to read that and make sense of the wall of text without some kind of decent formatting.

• In all cases, I use Dropbox for most files that aren't the 'main map'. If players have any secret information, set it up at the start of the game, save it in the Dropbox foldr, right-click, Share Link, give it to the player. As long as you keep the filename the same, the link to it will never change and will be very difficult for others to guess, and so you've saved yourself from having to constantly PM the player with updated hands or hand checks. e.g:

Hey, Player 1, here's the link to your hand. It'll update throughout the game.


• The same goes for images - if there's an image you're not particularly worried about keeping for historical purposes, stick it in dropbox and let it autoupdate. Just be aware that, by default, an image will load up within Dropbox's UI. You need to change the link a little, so that the link you're given e.g.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/u1gcr5c29r6wkw2/norowas.jpg?dl=0

becomes

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/u1gcr5c29r6wkw2/norowas.jpg

Click the links to see the clear difference.


• If you're using Vassal, that's cut out a lot of the work for you, but you will need to make sure you can actually output images. To edit a module, go to the main Vassal window - the one that lists all the modules you have - and right-click Edit Module it. This will pop open a window listing all the different components in your game. Let's say you want to add one to the Mage Knight main map - scan down this list for Main Map [Map Window]. Right-click it, and select Add Image Capture Tool, then click OK. Save the module, and repeat for every window you need to capture. Done!


• However, be aware that Vassal will only output in PNG. As I mention above, this is enormous for any game that uses photo scans of tiles, so you will want to set up a couple of shortcuts using ImageMagick. For Mage Knight, I had the following shortcuts:

mogrify.exe -format jpg -quality 90 *.png is a command to batch-process all png files in the directory into high-quality jpgs. This is used for the player boards and hands.

convert.exe map.png -quality 82 map.jpg is a command to convert the main map into a slightly lossier jpg, for space concerns.

Once both have been run I have a collection of jpg files. Any that aren't the main map get moved to the dropbox folder, whereupon they immediately update. The main map gets right-clicked, and sent to imgur via a system extension that automatically copies its url to my clipboard. I paste it into the update, and I'm good to go.


• If you're not using Vassal, there's a lot to bear in mind. You should have all your pieces ready, preferably cut-out or else on a transparent background. For Keyflower, for instance, I have 24 pngs per season, one each of the front and back of all twelve tiles that season. Additionally I've got an image for each colour of meeple and resource. Having lots of little images allows me to drag one straight into GIMP and paste it onto an image, anchoring the layer once I've got it in the position I want.


• To add on to that, if you're going to be building your own images, learn to love layers. You should have a GIMP file with several transparent layers, one for each category of pieces and one for any specific piece that's going to move around a lot. Separating them in this way will allow you to quickly delete or move some components without disrupting and having to redo the rest of the image. For Keyflower, for instance, I have the following:
• The basic image, with people's villages. The tiles have enough definition on the edges that I can easily cut one out if it gets upgraded, replacing it by pasting the image of the back of the tile onto the layer. Other than that, players are never going to lose or move their tiles once they're placed, so this can be the basic image.
• The season's tiles, and the meeples on the boats. These are all going to get replaced at the end of the season, so they might as well all be on one layer. At the end of the season I wipe the layer and place the next season's tiles.
• The current bids / meeples. These might move around a bit, but there's enough space between each group of tiles that I can easily cut some of them out and replace them. Adding bids is just a matter of pasting in an appropriate number of the right colour of meeple, then merging them down onto the bid layer.
• Resources. These are separate to bids because there are times I'll want to clear off meeples while leaving resources intact - the end of each season, for instance. Again, easy to delete specific resources, easy to place more by pasting in symbols and merging them down.

For Eldritch Horror, much the same thing applied - a separate layer for all the gates, for all the monsters, for all the clue tokens. However, in this game I made sure every player piece had its own, specific layer - and whenever the player moved, all I had to do was move that layer around a little, leaving the rest of the board intact.

When update time comes along, just export the whole thing as a jpg and it'll export everything visible. One complete game image.


• Finally, if you're not using Vassal then keep copious notes, whether it's the templates you use to do your updates or just the notes involved in keeping track of everything going on in the game. There aren't any hard or fast rules here, and it will depend on what game you're doing. For Eldritch Horror I had a text file full of bbcode, but then I had several card stacks set up on my desk and I'd just draw from them whenever I needed. For Keyflower, I have a text file telling me how many meeples of each colour are left, to ensure I get the right probabilities on draws, but I'd just as soon keep the bag next to me on a shelf.