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Spring Ceramic DM™: WINNER POSTED!
- Thread starter Piratecat
- Start date
cool hand luke
First Post
good grief, waiting is killing me!
judges, please, be as specific and cruel as you can in your evaluation. I know I am not good at these things currently, and value your ideas on how to improve!
judges, please, be as specific and cruel as you can in your evaluation. I know I am not good at these things currently, and value your ideas on how to improve!
RangerWickett
Legend
At the end of the single-elimination challenge, I hear they're going to have a special 'boss' writer that we have to beat to really win the game. The rumors aren't clear, but someone mentioned a seance. I'm thinking either the spirit of J.R.R. Tolkien or George Lucas.
Ao the Overkitty
First Post
And what a cruel joke it is. But funny, cause it's not me. It's better torture than any gnoming. I think Pkitty has finally upgraded his revenge for the Pkitty picture threads. 
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tzor
First Post
Macbeth said:
One cannot stress the importance of doing one more proof read. To use my story as an example. I looked over the story several times at different points in the day. I had it printed out as well. I gave it to a second pair of eyes. Neither one of us saw the fact that one of my characters uses the same verb twice in consecutive sentences, followed by the other character asking "Are you saying that you (verb)ed ..." making it three times in a row.
(Funny Microsoft joke: Apparently Word didn't think that "scrying" was a validly spelled word; I had to check with webster. This is quite odd; Mr. Gates has been scrying on his competition for ages.)
Piratecat
Sesquipedalian
Judgment of Match 1-1: Alsih2o vs. cool hand luke.
Maldur:
Wow, great stories, and allthough Cool Hand Luke made me want to know more. AlSiH2O made me gasp. great new magics, and some really nifty imagery.
This round my vote is for AlSiH2O.
Arwink:
Cool Hand Luke
It’s hard to respond to Cool Hand Luke's story, mostly because for every element in there that worked really well there was something that just didn’t seem to fit. The style of it wavers backwards and forward, and although one of these styles is really effective the other needs more development in order to make it cohesive.
This story confused me a great deal in the beginning – the off-hand tone of the first few paragraphs didn’t really work for me, and I didn’t really appreciate the bluntness of the info-dump. If you dump the first five paragraphs and start with the return down the dead-man’s path, you’ve got the kind of story-opening that grabs you and refuses to let go – strange world, high weirdness, and an immediate personal conflict for the character. It has a nice resonance with the tropes of detective/noir fiction as well – a sort of super-natural Sam Spade story in its larval form. The setting is built far more effectively and subtlety here, with off-hand statements about the relatively common nature of the narrators resurrection beating us with a much more subtle clue stick than the current opening. This alternation continues for the rest of the story – the dialogue isn’t particularly strong, and the story itself gets kind of lost among the jumble, but the more subtle elements of the world have a great deal of impact. With time and a little more focus, I can picture this being a very different story, but as it stands it works as a draft that shows a lot of future potential.
Alsih2o
While a thousand monkeys on type-writers may produce the completed works of William Shakespeare, I’m far happier reading the work of a single monkey with a Popsicle whose work has really evolved over the course of successive competitions.
A really nice opening – the conflict inherent to Yun Soo Lee’s character is nicely foreshadowed in the confusion over who, exactly, she is at this point, especially with the contrast to who she once was. From there things continue to get more and more intricate, the real feel of the location and the characters seeping through the story like a warm and very gentle breeze (and, having read a bunch of Alsih2o’s stories in previous competitions of Ceramic DM, it’s nice to see the control over the setting elements starting to become more conscious and directed).
Although the story is strong as it currently stands, the splitting of the story into three parts didn’t really work for me – it seemed like it was taking only a half-step towards a style. I would have preferred to see the story take the entire bound – constructing the narrative through a montage of fragments and moments that skip backwards and forwards through time – or to work the shorter introductions into a more cohesive narrative that flows naturally without being separated.
I also tended to loose track of the narrators mother and suitor in the course of the story – I couldn’t really place why they were there and how they arrived when they re-appeared in the conclusion. I was aware that it had happened, but it somehow just slipped through the cognitive cracks when reading the story.
Judgment
While both of these stories are strong and could easily be stronger with continued work, I give this round to Alsih2o – his story is a lot more even and shows a great deal of care in its crafting, and while Luke’s had a lot of shining moments where it really came together, it just didn’t manage to match the evenly distributed nature of Clay’s narrative.
Piratecat:
Luke starts off with an excellent opening sentence that totally grabs you. The story has some typos, some tense problems (it changes between past and present tense), and some extremely run-on sentences. Nevertheless, he sets a mood and keeps it nicely throughout most of the story. It’s clear that the world has character, and it is slowly reeled out for you to see. If he can communicate this type of feel in a D&D game, I'd want to play in it.
For picture use, the candle “melt” photo and the goblin picture are both nicely woven in. I was a little disappointed by how the chair photo was used – it wasn’t clear why it was grabbing ankles, and what it had to do with Vea – and I think the usage of the green tunnel road as a celestial meeting hall worked well enough.
I noticed that the story starts strongly and gets weaker as it goes on. The ending has little to do with the first three quarters of the tale, which seems somewhat tacked on and disjointed. I think the problem is that there’s no foreshadowing of Vea’s return, and so it seems to have nothing to do with the murder plot. The lack of resolution in the conclusion worked against the effectiveness of the story as a whole. Darn it, I want to know who murdered our hero and why! Ancient goddesses provide an epic feel that works against the gritty beginning. This reads like he was running out of time and had a much larger story to tell, and so included the grander idea instead of narrowing his focus.
Alsih2o also starts with a strong opening paragraph. The use of sections/chapters is an attention-getting stylistic decision here, and for me it works. He paints a vivid image of the protagonist and surroundings, one that lets you feel like you actually know her fairly quickly. She quickly becomes alive.
I felt like I missed a piece of the plot, though. Chapter two seemed disjointed; it abruptly segued from the mother’s visit into a flashback, and then right into the confrontation with the heatwitch. The lack of clear time transitions in this section lessened the impact. This led to confusion of what was happening when. The concept of a wood-themed witch is incredibly imaginative, but this pacing weakness distracted from the thrust of the story.
Most of the picture use was excellent. The one relatively weak photo was the green tunnel road, occurring as it did as a footnote to the story as a whole.
My judgment goes to Alsih2o. His richly drawn characters are the equal of Cool Hand Luke’s fascinating protagonist, and Clay added exciting mystery and conflict around that character that Luke’s story lacked.
FINAL JUDGMENT: 3 out of 3 for Alsih2o, who will go on to the second round.
Maldur:
Wow, great stories, and allthough Cool Hand Luke made me want to know more. AlSiH2O made me gasp. great new magics, and some really nifty imagery.
This round my vote is for AlSiH2O.
Arwink:
Cool Hand Luke
It’s hard to respond to Cool Hand Luke's story, mostly because for every element in there that worked really well there was something that just didn’t seem to fit. The style of it wavers backwards and forward, and although one of these styles is really effective the other needs more development in order to make it cohesive.
This story confused me a great deal in the beginning – the off-hand tone of the first few paragraphs didn’t really work for me, and I didn’t really appreciate the bluntness of the info-dump. If you dump the first five paragraphs and start with the return down the dead-man’s path, you’ve got the kind of story-opening that grabs you and refuses to let go – strange world, high weirdness, and an immediate personal conflict for the character. It has a nice resonance with the tropes of detective/noir fiction as well – a sort of super-natural Sam Spade story in its larval form. The setting is built far more effectively and subtlety here, with off-hand statements about the relatively common nature of the narrators resurrection beating us with a much more subtle clue stick than the current opening. This alternation continues for the rest of the story – the dialogue isn’t particularly strong, and the story itself gets kind of lost among the jumble, but the more subtle elements of the world have a great deal of impact. With time and a little more focus, I can picture this being a very different story, but as it stands it works as a draft that shows a lot of future potential.
Alsih2o
While a thousand monkeys on type-writers may produce the completed works of William Shakespeare, I’m far happier reading the work of a single monkey with a Popsicle whose work has really evolved over the course of successive competitions.
A really nice opening – the conflict inherent to Yun Soo Lee’s character is nicely foreshadowed in the confusion over who, exactly, she is at this point, especially with the contrast to who she once was. From there things continue to get more and more intricate, the real feel of the location and the characters seeping through the story like a warm and very gentle breeze (and, having read a bunch of Alsih2o’s stories in previous competitions of Ceramic DM, it’s nice to see the control over the setting elements starting to become more conscious and directed).
Although the story is strong as it currently stands, the splitting of the story into three parts didn’t really work for me – it seemed like it was taking only a half-step towards a style. I would have preferred to see the story take the entire bound – constructing the narrative through a montage of fragments and moments that skip backwards and forwards through time – or to work the shorter introductions into a more cohesive narrative that flows naturally without being separated.
I also tended to loose track of the narrators mother and suitor in the course of the story – I couldn’t really place why they were there and how they arrived when they re-appeared in the conclusion. I was aware that it had happened, but it somehow just slipped through the cognitive cracks when reading the story.
Judgment
While both of these stories are strong and could easily be stronger with continued work, I give this round to Alsih2o – his story is a lot more even and shows a great deal of care in its crafting, and while Luke’s had a lot of shining moments where it really came together, it just didn’t manage to match the evenly distributed nature of Clay’s narrative.
Piratecat:
Luke starts off with an excellent opening sentence that totally grabs you. The story has some typos, some tense problems (it changes between past and present tense), and some extremely run-on sentences. Nevertheless, he sets a mood and keeps it nicely throughout most of the story. It’s clear that the world has character, and it is slowly reeled out for you to see. If he can communicate this type of feel in a D&D game, I'd want to play in it.
For picture use, the candle “melt” photo and the goblin picture are both nicely woven in. I was a little disappointed by how the chair photo was used – it wasn’t clear why it was grabbing ankles, and what it had to do with Vea – and I think the usage of the green tunnel road as a celestial meeting hall worked well enough.
I noticed that the story starts strongly and gets weaker as it goes on. The ending has little to do with the first three quarters of the tale, which seems somewhat tacked on and disjointed. I think the problem is that there’s no foreshadowing of Vea’s return, and so it seems to have nothing to do with the murder plot. The lack of resolution in the conclusion worked against the effectiveness of the story as a whole. Darn it, I want to know who murdered our hero and why! Ancient goddesses provide an epic feel that works against the gritty beginning. This reads like he was running out of time and had a much larger story to tell, and so included the grander idea instead of narrowing his focus.
Alsih2o also starts with a strong opening paragraph. The use of sections/chapters is an attention-getting stylistic decision here, and for me it works. He paints a vivid image of the protagonist and surroundings, one that lets you feel like you actually know her fairly quickly. She quickly becomes alive.
I felt like I missed a piece of the plot, though. Chapter two seemed disjointed; it abruptly segued from the mother’s visit into a flashback, and then right into the confrontation with the heatwitch. The lack of clear time transitions in this section lessened the impact. This led to confusion of what was happening when. The concept of a wood-themed witch is incredibly imaginative, but this pacing weakness distracted from the thrust of the story.
Most of the picture use was excellent. The one relatively weak photo was the green tunnel road, occurring as it did as a footnote to the story as a whole.
My judgment goes to Alsih2o. His richly drawn characters are the equal of Cool Hand Luke’s fascinating protagonist, and Clay added exciting mystery and conflict around that character that Luke’s story lacked.
FINAL JUDGMENT: 3 out of 3 for Alsih2o, who will go on to the second round.
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