Mini Encounter Competition - Voting Over - We have a winner!

This round determines finally which six lucky winners get the Fiery Dragon prizes:

• Of Sound Mind - a psionics-based adventure by Kevin 'Piratecat' Kulp. Piratecat has been a moderator on the messageboards here for a long time, and was one of the original playtesters for the Psionics Handbook. He was also one of the judges in last year's ENnies and has been named the best RPGA DM at GenCon two years in a row. Of Sound Mind was illustrated by Claudio Pozas, webmaster of EN World hosted site Claudio Pozas Art & Design.
• Counter Collection I - hundreds of cardboard counters drawn by Claudio Pozas, and accompanied by a short adventure by Todd Secord.
• Counter Collection II - written by Claudio, Ryan 'RangerWickett' Nock (who is a regular contributor to Asgard Magazine, a long-standing member of the EN World messageboard community and author of Natural 20 Press' Wild Spellcraft sourcebook) and James Bell. This counter pack was, of course, illustrated by Claudio Pozas.

There were eight heats, and each had one winner. This means that six of those eight entries will win the entire competition, and two of them will lose.

In addition, the FIRST PLACE WINNER will receive, from me, $30 worth of RPG Books from the EN World Online RPG Shop!

Here are the winners of the previous eight heats:

• Heat 1: Put to the Sword
• Heat 2: Crocodile Tears
• Heat 3: Dark Valkyrie
• Heat 4: An Imp in Set's Clothing Gets Help from Scaly Friends
• Heat 5: The Encounter at Landsend
• Heat 6: Mom's Butcher Shop
• Heat 7: The Fire Pool
• Heat 8: Hunt of the Black Hound

I'm going to leave this poll running for approximately 10 days in order to give everyone a fair chance. If you aren't interested in the contest for whatever reason, don't bother wasting your time to say so yet again.

Good luck to everyone!

I've got to say all of these encounters are very, very good. It's hard to make a choice, especially without putting them through a playtest. Congrats to all those shortlisted and the participants!

Yeah would love to grab some addicts and play all encounters for a testrun

"Put to the Sword", "Crocodile Tears", and "An imp in Set’s clothing gets help from scaly friends" could all be used in the same campain very easily.

"Hunt for the Black Hound", feels like it would also fit well with the others.

FWIW....

To win, th' entry's gotta have an interesting location, compelling NPC, and well-polished scenario. A bit like th' recent "Iron DM" contest, now that I think o' it. And yet: it's all gotta be "separatable". Yeeeesh. That's tough.

Of th' eight we've got here, I think only 3 have all th' qualifications:

Dark Valkyrie

Great NPC, and "gritty 'n dark" location. Much could be made of this one, given a bit more work. That's th' only downside of this one; the location screams out for so much more....whispered secrets an' forgotten shadows an' so on.....had these sort of things been there, I would 'ave voted fer it.

Crocodile Tears

Of th' "lizardman" scenarios, this one's pretty good. Th' hobgoblin ranger is simple, and yet there's more to 'im than meets th' eye. Not jus' a quick hack 'n slash, unless th' PCs want it that way (and a quick death). The lost temple stuff is..somewhat more "pedestrian", but okay. I'd use it.

An Imp in Set's Clothing Gets Help from Scaly Friends

But this one's inspired. Th' location is quite unusual, and yet "ordinary". I'm liable to use it for a memorable combat. The NPC and his goal is also pretty simple, which is good: after all, these things are supposed to fit wherever they're needed. I can use any part of this one and have somethin' fun to use. Good job, Mr. Author, sir.

.....Well, good luck to all. I have t' admit I've changed my mind about th' best one since this contest started....

my campaign logs

I just had to vote for Put to the Sword.

For a mini encounter this was the simplest and most easily
inserted. But while being simple there were so many
possibilities that you could do.

I also like the Imp in Set's Clothing.
And it almost got my vote. The idea of having a traffic
jam in a river and a combat there is something I'm looking
forward to using.

I liked Crocidile tears as well.
Dark Valkyrie had a nice mystery.
And the Hunt of the Black hound was good. But there was
something that just seemed contrived. Maybe it was the
way they were looking for silver?

I don't know. But thanks to everyone for the work you put
in. Even thanks to the people who wrote the encounters
that I thought were awful It took a lot of work and
I'm certain you've helped a lot of DM's with ideas.

thanks again. I hope I can enter the next one... But I hope
it doesn't take so long

Put to the sword was a decent encounter and is better if you ignore the stat block which doesn't reconcile with the enounter or rules at all. The lizardman doesn't have any less str or dex as in the flavor text and doesn't have AC 20, especially against touch attacks. I justify it to myself as the lizardman being a 1st level barbarian (instead of fighter) at 0 hp and gets 6 hp by raging, after which he will die. This would make his AC lower and his attacks and damage higher and would have valid game mechanics. The stat block isn't even necessary as the lizardman will be dead no matter what in a relatively short time. I'd say it was a level 1-2 encounter since it only takes 1 hit, 2 at most from the party to down the lizardman. I read this one first and thought about voting for it for a while. Kudos to Terva for defeating the crocodile, I would have thought it out of his league and I guess it ended up being that way.

Anyone going to land's end just gets screwed because nothing good can come of it. The druid is hopelessly grumpy and doesn't seem to hold any promise of reward or even success at whatever the original goal was. The premise is flawed since a party of 12th level would never need to climb the tree since they would all typically have flight at that point. 8th level druid spells would slaughter a 12th level party however.

The boat adventure is definitely different and exciting. I voted for this one.

Mom's butcher shop is easy to drop in and a good read. Definitely my second place pick.

Valkyrie seemed a bit odd but a somewhat reasonable mini-encounter. Why does the spellbook not have all the spells Swanhild has memorized? Doesn't seem very tough for a CR8 encounter. I found the premise a little hard to buy. The stat block isn't flawless (feats, bite damage, scythe damage) and do you think guards would be consistently defeated by that?

If people's submissions won their heat they should be allowed to fix them up a bit and resubmit before the final round of voting. A quick read over and a few typo fixes are something I would want to do if I was being considered for a prize and lots of people were going to look at my work.

Congrats to everyone who made it this far.

After rereading, have to agree that 'Imp' is the most original. I voted for 'Mom' but after reconsidering I think I would have changed my vote to Imp, but since I've cast it I won't recant.

Great contest despite the hiccups. So are we going to do it again next year?

I voted for Mom's Butcher Shop because it had a summary and from reading the summary it sounded to be the most useable encounter.

I voted for "Imp", because I thought it had the most interesting location - and one that was very easy to use outside of the other bits of the scenario. Moms butchers shop was OK - but a bit of a normal setting for wererats in my mind.

It is nice to see that it is a close race, even if I didn't care for some of the others personally

Good luck, competitors!