Re: IRON DM SUMMER 2003 JUDGMENT!
Rune said:
Which means, Nemmerle is the IRON DM SUMMER 2003!
And well earned!
Now I'm going to nitpick a few things that bothered me
(and sincere apologies for the nitpicking).
I think both entries used the Horn of Valhalla paricularly well. I especially liked seeing a well-fleshed out artifact version in Seasong's entry, but the link to the dream-city in Nemmerle's is also exceptionally good.
I am unhappy with this ingredient, both its inclusion and the judgement rendered on it. I know I screwed up enough things in my scenario that this doesn't really affect the judgement, which is why I call it a nitpick.
If the horn is of Valhalla, that requires that Valhalla exist. You could name any old thing Valhalla, and make a horn that is from it (which is essentially what nemmerle did), but, and this is important to me, you could have called it the Horn of Vuggrematch and nothing in the scenario would change. Or, given how it was used, you could have called it the Whatsit of Vuggrematch and nothing in the scenario would have changed.
In order to use it properly, I took the Proper Noun that was part of it, and I made that part of the background. I think I did a
smashing job with it (not only did it tie nicely into the entire mythology of the scenario, but someone had to
blow on it to achieve their aims, thus justifying why it was a horn), and if there was one ingredient in my scenario that I thought deserved huge kudos, it was this one.
My other ingredients, I was considerably less pleased with, but I want my props for this one
.
Both entries use the Dark side of the moon effectively.
Really, I didn't feel like I did. Nemmerle's use of this ingredient was needful. For my use, it made a good domain (I thought) and was cleverly inserted, but there was no reason that the domain
really needed to be the "dark side of the moon". I also forgot to include any notes on what fighting there would be like.
I loved both Wuxia cats, even while I was disappointed with them. Their characterization was excellent, and both were quite evocative, but neither needed to be a cat and both looked like they were cats, merely because cat was part of the ingredient.
This ties into the horn of Valhalla issue. If it's part of the ingredient,
it should be there. I toyed with a number of other ways of handling this one, but the fact is,
there's not a lot of meanings for the word 'cat'. The best alternate I could come up with was a tattoo of a cat, or a cat sculpture that provided wuxia advice (or powers)... but those worked very weakly in the scenario. So I opted, as nemmerle did, to go with a cool character instead.
This was sort of like the Awakened Camel (or whatever animal it was, I forget) that incognito did as an ingredient a long time ago. When the camel seemed silly to him later, he was disappointed in the use.
The only thing I would have improved with my use, given the ingredient, would have been to work in some way in which a cat's unique traits were needful to the scenario - perhaps keen hearing, or maybe requiring the PCs to groom the obnoxious thing before it would help them.
Seasong's partial explanation for the form went a little ways toward solving the problem, but not far enough. Another problem with the ingredient use is that Seasong's character is way too heavy-handed, so much so that he smacks of railroading.
Yup, I think I even pointed it out in the text (as part of my stream of consciousness writing) that it was heavy-handed
(I would have editted that out if I'd had time this morning to look at it - no use in giving the judge reasons to shoot you down). However, I will point out that heavy-handed plots are part and parcel to most wuxia film, with most things being overstated or made as obvious as possible, and that the wuxia cat was the only such element in my scenario
That was probably too subtle, though, and a bad gamble.
... Seasong does include a poor one, which I can't let slide. I really think calling Asgard and other mythological locations a "fairy-tale land" is just stretching it too far. You wouldn't call them that if I hadn't included it as an ingredient, would you?
Depends. If you'd asked me if Asgard qualified as a fairy tale land, I would have said yes. If you'd asked me what Asgard's dominant quality or descriptor was, fairy tale wouldn't have been the first word to pop to mind.
However, it is a grey area: fairy tales are not actually about fairies. Most of what we call fairy tales are Russian, and most
actual tales about fairies we call Celtic Mythology. I took you to mean the word as "the cultural equivalent" - that is, the Other World for whatever culture we set things in. Since I set things in the Norse mythology, I used the Norse Other World, and I even picked the one that had dwarves and beautiful/immortal non-gods and eternal hunting and other traits in common with the Celtic Summerlands.
But I can answer your rhetorical question even better than that: I wouldn't have included
Asgard if you hadn't included fairy-tale lands as an ingredient. The ingredient is what brought using it (and having Ing invade) to mind.
Seasong, I really like the form of this one, and the epic scope could be unwieldy, but isn't. If you had submitted something of the quality of your last entry, I probably wouldn't even have bothered reading an opponent's (that's hyperbole, by the way).
As I said when I posted that one, I knew I'd killed myself for round 3 when I wrote it. There's no way I'll match that again, not any time soon. If I could have saved that inspiration for last, I would have.
For the form, that's what my posts usually look like before I start editting them for clarity. Very linear, top-down list of elements as I think of them. I re-ordered a few things as I went (moved random stuff to the Miscellany section, and added the Overview and Cast & Crew sections), but reading that entry is pretty much like watching me think.