2018 IRON DM Tournament

The Well of the Water of Life [MENTION=976]Imhotepthewise[/MENTION]

Pressing Deadline
Wishing Well
Time Flies
Unscripted Revelation
Saving Throw
Interminable Wait

The Finding

While traveling at the outskirts of settlement, the party will encounter a very pregnant woman who attempts to hide from them. The conditions for hiding will not be great, so it is unlikely they will miss her. She won’t seem to be afraid of them, just unwary. There will be a baby girl asleep in her carrying shawl.

The Discovering

Questioning will reveal her to be a survivor of a bandit attack. She will say she was nervous about being discovered by the adventuring party, but they presented themselves much differently than the bandit band. Because she was lost and had not eaten in days, she will be running out of options. The group she had been traveling with was large and well-armed. The bandits still overcame them and did not take captives. Her husband had ordered her to hide in a ravine until he came for her. He never returned.

She will say she was very sure the bandits would find her when they cleaned up after the attack. Alone, clasping a whimpering baby to her, she peered over the ravine seeing the bandits beating the bushes for anyone who attempted to hide from them. The baby began to cry as the bandits came near, so she quieted it by nursing. She prayed the bandits would not find her as she was. They never found her, even though they came awfully close and should have been able to see her.

The party and the woman will continue to talk, and the baby will wake let mom know she is hungry. She will prepare to nurse her and the party will be surprised as she and the baby vanish from sight. Sharp eyed bystanders (Illusion DC 25 faint magic aura) may see her translucent outline where she had been clearly visible. When the baby breaks contact, the mother and child will reappear, apparently unaware what happened.

However the party reacts to this, there will be no understanding on the part of the woman. She will have no idea how it happened. She just wants to go home. She will cooperate with any experiments the party wishes to pursue to find out what had happened. Her home is far away but is known to the party.

The Road Home

If the party chooses to escort her and her daughter home, she will be grateful. Her daughter is several months old and very cute. She will not be walking yet or talking beyond baby talk. She will charm the most grizzled of adventurers and will happily play with them. The journey will be long, but the baby will make it seem pleasant and quick. Not eating solid food yet, she will nurse with her mom. Whenever she and mom nurse, they will disappear as they did when first met by the party.

The Birthing

The party will still be not close to the girl’s community when they will see scouts of the bandit party. If they hide, or don’t hide well, the bandits may eventually find them. From what the girl as told them of the bandits, they will know that the party will not survive a fight. They must get moving. As they move, the woman will begin to go into labor. She will tell them from her last birth that the pains indicate the new baby will come in a few hours. The party must avoid or stave off the bandit attack. The baby is on its way, and they will not reach a settlement before it gets here.

Opposition and Assets

The bandit gang is large but not extremely specialized. They are a formidable bunch of thugs that will number in the highest of challenge ratings against the adventuring party. The land that the party is traveling through is not especially friendly to concealment, but is not void of it, either. A clever party can avoid or distract the bandits until mom, baby girl and new baby are home safe. A party that tries to fight it out is probably doomed.

Gradine said:

So, some post-judgment analysis:

I struggled a long time figuring out how to tie any of these ingredients together. It wasn't until I was trying to figure out what the heck to do with Affably Evil that I realized that all of the loose ideas I was jotting down belonged in a more comedic, Saturday morning cartoon type of setting. The other major revelation was in how to tie together Perfect Game, Idiomatic Confusion, and Disguised Warehouse. Meanwhile, Lost Minotaur and Perfect Game seemed to scream Labyrinth, and I love how between our entries we had a Labyrinth disguised as a Warehouse, and a Warehouse disguised as a Labyrinth.

In the past I've tried to write the best adventure I possibly could, then focused on whittling it down to fit the word count. What I was finding when I was doing that was that I was losing too much of the connective tissue, and sacrificing both tone and readability just to squeeze it within the limit. Sometime last year I decided instead to start simple and build up where I can. My first draft of Have You Seen This Calf? clocked in at about 530 words. This gave me room to expand, which was a much more liberating approach that I think led to a much more cohesive adventure. This additional room gave me space to, among other things, link the warehouse to Giveaway Games, and describe Minnie Taur's skill at navigating, both important points that strengthened their respective ingredients (the whole first paragraph describing the Little Bloodhounds, and all of the little details like Cheddar Hobbits, were also additions).

I can't say why tglassy went with Checkmate; for me it was a reference to "Atari" being the name of a Go move roughly relevant to a "Check" in Chess (Checkmate sounded better than Check).

@tglassy, let me say congratulations on putting together a great adventure and a great Iron DM entry (recognizing the two aren't always entirely correlated)! I know how frustrating and discouraging a first round loss can be, but try not to get too discouraged; you're already pretty damn good at this, as evidenced by the fact that in three matches you've knocked out one previous champ and came close to beating two others. Keep plugging away and I'm sure pretty soon you're going to win one of these. I look forward to seeing what you're able to put together next year

Edit: Man the WYZIWIG editor just cannot figure out if it wants to read my paragraph breaks or not.
Which reminds me: now that judgment is posted is it copacetic if I go back and re-edit my entry so the formatting is fixed? Won't change the content, but it will make it more readable.

Click to expand...

I appreciate the encouragement. Most of my losses are close ones, and they affect me the hardest. I tend to lose more often than I win, and since my losses are very often close ones, it's frustrating.

I'm a writer, and I've found that a strict word count tightens up my content. I like to write whatever I want to write, and prefer to wind up 10% - 20% higher than the word count, because then it forces me to cut things that aren't necessary. Cutting words, rewriting phrases to fit easier, finding whole sentences, or the jackpot, whole paragraphs, that you learn just aren't furthering the goal of the piece do great things to help the readability and tighten up the flow. You can cut too much, but there's a balance there. The good news is that nothing I cut wound up being anything that would have helped me.

I did really love the Idiom part. I brought up a list of Idioms and started reading through them. I've been practicing with writing poetry, and started writing a short one using as many idioms as I could find that fit the bill.

Come and play Devil’s Advocate! Well begun is half done, but can you whether the storm? Before you is a maze of magic and might, beyond young maidens do quiver with fright. You must continue through thick and thin, but you must also run like the wind. Leave no stone unturned as you riddle each gate but take too much time and you’ll be checkmate. For within I kill two birds with one stone, a Minotaur hunts, his bloodlust has grown.”

So that's what, 8 idioms? And then making the gates based on idioms was fun, too. I wondered if the party would get it, and realize that they needed to follow an idiom to answer the riddle. That's why I included so many in the opening poem, but I made them simple enough that even a party who, in reality, has dumped their Int as far as it could go and never got the idiom part of the riddles, a little trial and error should help them figure it out.

Also, I used Checkmate because it fit, and it rhymed with Gate. And I love Chess.

I wish I hadn't said "Whether" rather than "Weather". Would the omission of one grammar error have given me a point in readability? Probably not but who knows? That would have tied the points and made it even closer. Nothing else could really have been changed to make my work stronger.

It is interesting to note that Deuce gave both his points to Gradine for the same reason. Namely, that those two individual ingredients were connected to each other. I'll need to keep that in mind for next year. One connection between two ingredients lost me the match. Oh well. Good adventure, @Gradine! Now go on to win! If I can't win, I'd rather loose to the one who does!

Round 1, Match 4: LongGoneWrier vs hawkeyefan

[MENTION=6857996]LongGoneWrier[/MENTION] and [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION], you have 24 hours to post your entries to this thread. Please limit your entry to a title, a list of the ingredients used and 750 additional words. Please include your list of ingredients at the beginning of the entry and please do not edit your post once it is submitted. Please refrain from reading your opponent's entry until after you have posted your own. You are on your honor to do so.

Entries that are between 1 and 59 minutes late will have their word-limits reduced to 675. Later entries that are at less than 1 day late will have their word-limits reduced to 525. Entries that are at least 1 day late will have their word-limits reduced to 375. In addition, entries that are at least 2 days late may be disqualified at the discretion of the judge with consent from the match's opposing competitor. Entries that exceed their word-limits will be considered to end once they reach that limit; I will ignore everything after.

Your ingredients are:
- Ignorant Bliss
- Staged Takeover
- Usual Suspects
- Unfair Rap
- Eldritch Wonder
- Offensive Shibboleth

Can I just say this round has featured some of the most fiendish sets of ingredients I've ever seen in a first round?

Gradine said:

Can I just say this round has featured some of the most fiendish sets of ingredients I've ever seen in a first round?

Click to expand...

Seconded. I'm happy with the ones I got right out of the gate, I would have struggled with the ones you had, Gradine.

Judgement for Match 3 is incoming, folk, but I think I’d better give it one more pass after I sleep on it. Again. This one required significantly more read-throughs than usual.

Round 1, Match 3: Imhotepthewise vs. CleverNickName

I usually read each entry I’m judging a minimum of three times. I’ve read these somewhat more. And I’m still not sure if I’m missing something. One of these entries seems pretty incomplete – to the point where I’m having trouble even identifying the ingredients within it. The other is...confusing in other ways.

Where should I begin?

Let’s look at the shape of the adventures.

Imhotepthewise gives us “The Well of the Water of Life.” I’ll refer to it as “Well,” from now on. This starts out with an excellent hook that is very easy to place in front of the PCs and evokes perhaps the most universal of player motivations: curiosity. Added to that, the adventure as presented could pretty easily work with different genres. I can totally see it play out as a western, for instance.

Unfortunately, the structural problems start to creep in almost immediately. The piece is peppered with assumptions about the PCs that may seem pretty minor (little things like their knowledge of the unnamed mother’s home or their attitudes on the journey). These aren’t much of a problem individually and can certainly be adjusted on the fly. Collectively, however, they somewhat undercut the applicability of the very well-executed hook and, in some cases, limit the players’ options.

The basic skeleton of the adventure is both solid and intriguing. But the presentation makes it feel more linear than it actually really is beneath the surface.

Unfortunately, a lot of words were spent on setting up a mystery that is a distraction from the adventure (and frankly, a much more interesting thread than the mundane plot is on its own). That, along with the background, accounts for most of the body of the piece. And that creates the sense that there isn’t really much for the PCs to do, other than go along for the ride. Even when the PCs are set up to do some exciting and game-relevant things, almost nothing is offered to help the DM incorporate it into the adventure. Which is crazy, because this entry had 75 unused words to spare for fleshing out these things that really needed fleshing out!

But there is something more egregious that’s bugging me. Remember that very interesting mystery presented at the beginning? Why – and how – are mother and baby turning invisible? We never find out! The DM had better figure something out, because the players are definitely going to want to know!

Meanwhile, CleverNickName’s “One Soul’s Ransom” (“Ransom”) takes us in another direction. It begins with a specific and circumstantial hook, but not a particularly unlikely one. Additionally, the challenges of the adventure are not necessarily related to party level – unless the party chooses to fight a bunch of coloxus (coloxi?) – which is a good thing, given the nature of the hook.

Some of those challenges are left pretty vague and some seem to rely a little too heavily on dice rolls for my tastes. But that’s a play-style preference, not a flaw in the structure. Actually, the flow of the adventure is pretty good throughout, although I really would have liked more than a brief mention of the search for the soul, since that is likely to be a large chunk of the adventure.

My...confusion comes out of the appropriation choices. D&D has a long and varied history of taking inspiration from many sources and deriving many of its elements from those sources. Usually, those elements change from their originating sources. Sometimes they change a lot and in very big ways. Fundamentally, “Ransom” is following right along in those footsteps, which is not a problem. What I haven’t been able to wrap my head around is why it makes the choices that it does. Well, one in particular.

It all comes down to Purgatory. In “Ransom,” Purgatory is a kind of lesser Hell where souls go to languish. The transactional nature of the freeing of a soul (requiring a replacement, no less!) reinforces this and the devils who run and fill it enforce it. If it were named almost anything else, things would work fine for the adventure, but this one choice brings so many questions to the fore that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.

Let me back up a moment. It’s actually not a bad strategy to evoke the readers’ knowledge of real-world sources to reduce the burden of exposition, especially when you are fighting a tight word-count limit. Beelzebub does this effectively. What we expect from the name is pretty much what we get. When you go in the opposite direction, though, you end up fighting against that efficiency. Which is what we have with “Ransom” and its Hellish Purgatory.

I am, of course, going to be overly-simplistic in speaking, here, but I don’t know any better way to approach this subject in the very limited context of contrast with this one IRON DM entry.

In the real-world tradition-version, Purgatory is a place defined by its purpose. It is where Heaven-bound souls must go to be purged of the sins accrued in life so they can even get into Heaven (since, if Heaven could have sin in it, it wouldn’t be Heaven). Purgatory isn’t Heaven, but it is aligned with it. Being there isn’t comfortable and it isn’t likely to be quick – it can’t be in order to fulfill it’s function. One thing it definitely does not have – can’t have – is a bunch of devils running around (much less actually in charge). Because if it did, it simply could not fulfill its function.

That’s all well and good, but so what? The “Ransom” version of Purgatory is different, but what’s the big deal?

The better question is, what’s the purpose? If “Ransom” had called it pretty much anything else, I might not have even considered it, but introducing the contrast focused my attention to another curious contrast. Where the real-world tradition-version of Purgatory is defined by its purpose, the “Ransom” version appears to have none at all. And once that floodgate is open, the questions come pouring out.

Why is Beelzebub in this place? Why is he trading souls? Why are souls getting trapped by a faulty raise dead incantation? Was Beelzebub responsible? How? These are big questions and, while some of them might still come up anyway, at least a few would have implied answers if the setting was actually Hell.

Enough of that, though.

Let’s get to the ingredients.

Normally, I would do a point-by-point contrast between the two entries, but I’m having real difficulties with even identifying the ingredients in “Well.” I’m pretty sure half of them aren’t there, at all. It would probably be best if I explore what is actually present seperately.

Even these require some squinting. Pressing Deadline probably best references the imminent birth, although calling it a “deadline” would be a bit of a stretch. Other possibilities could include the husband’s expected return, or...maybe the point at which mother and children starve?

Time Flies during the pursuit, I suppose, but there doesn’t seem to be any kind of emphasis on it. If anything, the pace of the adventure seems to want to focus more on stretching time out. Which would seem to dovetail with the Interminable Wait, but there doesn’t really seem to be much waiting going on. The mother is waiting for the father when the PCs meet her, but that’s done with when the adventure starts. There doesn’t seem to be any waiting while everybody is on the move. The PCs are too busy to wait while the mother is in labor. And she’s certainly busy at the time!

And then there’s Unscripted Revelation. This must refer to the big invisibility mystery that never gets answered. That’s very meta and it’s very clever. It’s also something that I completely missed the first half-dozen or so read-throughs. And, as it happens, by its very nature, something that holds no relevance to the adventure. But very clever.

I don’t see any hint of Wishing Well anywhere but the title and that doesn’t really tell me anything. And Saving Throw? I wanted to see the part that talks about the baby charming the PCs call for a saving throw. It might have been a pretty weak use of the ingredient, but it would have been funny. Instead, nothing.

“Ransom” is mostly pretty solid across the board with its ingredients. The Wishing Well scene is evocative and works pretty well (except for the saving throw – but I’ll get to that). I personally would rather have seen the scenario presented as a type of puzzle than ultimately just hinging on the dice, but it’s functional.

The Unscripted Revelation (the lost ending) was presumably once scripted (before it was lost to history), but it works. It’s certainly nowhere as clever as the one in “Well,” but, on the other hand, it’s far more relevant to the adventure.

I was a bit disappointed with Time Flies. I was hoping to see at least one entry provide a cool new creature-type. I almost got that with “Ransom,” bu I can’t figure out what they actually do. Oh, Coloxus are some sort of Pathfinder monsters aren’t they? Probably in D&D somewhere, too. Wait, aren’t they demons? Why are they working for a devil? No, nevermind. I’m not going down that rabbit-hole again.

Then there’s the Saving Throw. We actually sort of get two. The first, most important one to the adventure is meant to keep the dead PC dead. But it isn’t even a real saving throw! Later, at the portal, the party is meant to make Wisdom saves to determine if their previous interactions worked. As this is entirely proactive on the part of the characters, ability checks seem better suited. Even better, no rolls at all! Why give them a chance to fail when they’ve already figured out the way forward?

Okay. Enough of that. I’ve saved the best two for last because I want to talk about how well they play against each other. The Pressing Deadline, the 10-day window for raise dead, is a solid, immediately relevant, and looming threat that cannot be ignored. And, even though I still don’t know why the Interminable Wait happens to the souls in the first place, the fact that it does means that the deadline must create a tension with it that forms the backbone of the adventure. Superb.

Wrapping up.

Imhotepthewise, I liked the kernel of your adventure. And I loved the hook. I really wish I could see the version of this that exists in the alternate world where your time didn’t get cut short, because the actual adventure probably wouldn’t need much polishing to get it to run very well.

The ingredients though. They needed a lot more attention than you were able to give them. This has got to be a frustrating judgement to read. It’s been tough enough to write. But I’ve seen what you’re capable of when the stars line up and I look forward to seeing what you give us in your next attempt. When you do, consider trying to prioritize working on your ingredients a little higher just in case real life intervenes again.

This time, CleverNickName advances to Round 2.

Thanks for the review, [MENTION=67]Rune[/MENTION]. I know we didn't make it easy on you this time around, and I appreciate the in-depth critique. At the end of the day, we are doing this contest to improve our Dungeon Mastery skills...and feedback like this is exactly what I need to hear. (However painful it ends up being.)

The hardest part of this challenge is the word limit, hands down...it forced me to be vague in places that I really needed to be specific, and forced me to use canned ingredients when I should have used homemade. By the time I realized the story I had chosen to write needed 2,000 words to properly link all of those ingredients together, it was too late to go back. I cut a lot of important exposition about the nature of Purgatory, mortals' souls, and the raise dead spell...I had to abbreviate the negotiations with Beezelbub, cut his escape story and his motives entirely...I was forced to use a pre-packaged monster (Coloxus) instead of the "Timekeepers" I had created (fly-like minions of Beezelbub)...and even still, I barely made it beneath the limit.

It boils down to poor planning on my part: I should have chosen a better concept, one that would require fewer words to glue everything together. I'll tighten it up in my next entry.

Even so, I will probably come back and refine "A Soul's Ransom" into a bone-fide adventure for my gaming group...and throw that infernal word count out the window. They are only 1st and 2nd level right now, so there's no pressing deadline to get it done quickly.

Good game, [MENTION=976]Imhotepthewise[/MENTION]! I'm dying to know: why were the mom and baby turning invisible? What sorcery is this?!

EDIT: [MENTION=67]Rune[/MENTION] asked me to copy this in from the other thread for posterity. I wrote this right after I posted my entry, while steam was still coming out of my ears and stars were still circling my head.

[SBLOCK=My post-writing thoughts--no judges allowed!]With so many time-related ingredients, my first instinct was to write a time-travel adventure, or some kind of modern adventure in a corporate bureaucracy setting. I decided to go with planar travel instead, and embraced one of the oldest bureaucracies I could think of--religion!

But whatever. The real challenge wasn't the ingredients; it was that 750 word count limit. Brutal. I had to cut away so much exposition...super-important stuff too, like the background info that ties the Bible passage I quoted to the demon, and the reason why the demon was holding the soul of that character. (The gist of it was that no raise dead spells work anymore because Beezelbub had been released.) Alas, it's all on the cutting room floor now.

Ah well. Win or lose, this non-Catholic writer learned a bit about Purgatory and the medieval church.[/SBLOCK]

PETALS OF THE MIND FLOWER, by LongGoneWrier

Ignorant Bliss
Staged Takeover
Usual Suspects
Unfair Rap
Eldritch Wonder
Offensive Shibboleth

ADVENTURE BACKGROUND
The Daijong-Elverez Group is turning heads with its meteoric rise through the corporate rankings. DEG started out unlisted only six months ago, and now it is well on its way to becoming one of the globally-dominant AAA megacorporations.

What is more, this success seems to come on the back of incredibly happy and productive wage-slaves. Everyone who works in their new main corporate tower in Bellevue seem to genuinely enjoy their jobs and love the company, which is baffling corporate lifestyle experts the world over. Even rumors of illegal and inhuman blood magic do not dampen the joy of the workers, or the interest of predatory corporations.

WHAT’S THE JOB?
The Johnson meet itself serves as a test of the runners’ infiltration and magical ability. Dinner in Dante’s Inferno gives the Johnson a chance to assess how well the team blends in with the other high rollers. Secondly, the Johnson quizzes the Awakened runners on their knowledge of esoteric magical trivial.

If satisfied, the Johnson lays out the job. Mr. Johnson will pay the runners 50,000 nuyen each if they can infiltrate the Daijong-Elverez corporate tower and acquire the secret of the new company’s prosperity. If the runners cannot, they are to disrupt or destroy it as much as possible.

GROUNDWORK
Given the level of interest in DEG, Mr. Johnson recommends that the runners at least initially infiltrate under the pretense of corporate agents on a mission to buyout DEG. To that end, Mr. Johnson can provide the runners corporate SINs and records with Saeder-Krupp Heavy Industries, the largest AAA megacorporation in the world. Mr. Johnson assures any runners nervous by the powerful association that this level of interest is to be expected with such a disruptive company.

Mr. Johnson leaves the runners with two more pieces of information. If blood magic is the cause of DEG’s prosperity, they are to terminate it with extreme prejudice; and if anything gets out of control, their bug-out code is “suck Lofwyr’s hairy balls.”

GET IN
Using the Saeder-Krupp identities provided by Mr. Johnson, the initial infiltration of DEG is relatively easy, but the executive giving the tour is slippery and coy when it comes to discussing specifics of DEG’s rise. He is adamant that DEG is not using blood magic, and will bend some security protocols to prove it. For other infiltrators, magical, matrix, and physical security are all tight, and the workers all know nothing.

Finding clues requires some digging. Abnormal amounts of power and water are diverted to central areas of the building and disappear. Workers walk in flowing, specific patterns, sometimes sideways, never deviating from an invisible course. Unusual magical talismans and symbols are incorporated into the architecture.

GET THE STUFF
Putting the right kind of pressure on the executive giving the tour, or succeeding with the right kind of magical investigation, can bring the truth to light. At the heart of DEG is not the expected blood magic, but rather something potentially more beneficent: a xin lian, or “mind flower”. A creature that exists both in the Astral plane and the physical one, the xin lian is a symbiotic entity that integrates with and directs the minds of those in the corporate tower. Seeing the xin lian in physical space is breathtaking; viewing it in the Astral leaves many mages speechless for days.

Acquiring a xin lian is a complicated process. Not only do samples need to be taken from both Astral and physical space, but the components need to be arranged in a specific order to maintain a stable bridge between the two planes. An unstable connection can cause volatile surges of power to devastate entire city blocks. Of course, DEG security will also be on hand to prevent runners from taking samples of the xin lian.

GET OUT
Getting the xin lian is tricky, but careful runners can manage it. If the runners botch the extraction, things go poorly extremely quickly, and the xin lian directs security forces to defend itself. If its degradation is left unchecked, however, the xin lian drives the rest of the tower inhabitants murderously insane.

Using the bug-out phrase Mr. Johnson provided, “suck Lofwyr’s hairy balls”, is no relief; it only signals for an orbital bombardment. Dragons are not known for their senses of humor.

After Judgement Discussion

After Judgement Discussion

First of all, I want to thank [MENTION=50987]CleverNickName[/MENTION] for being my honorable competitor and writing an excellent entry!

Secondly, I want to than [MENTION=67]Rune[/MENTION] for his fair and honest judgement. I appreciate he never belittles anyone and is always encouraging us to try harder.

I got the ingredients Sunday night and started to take them apart to see what could be done. Having so many time ingredients with only one “thing” in the middle was giving me the vapours. If the meaning of the ingredient is not giving me anything, I usually find something in the alternate meanings of the word to make it work.

After a couple hours, I gave up and went to bed. I woke up with another half-assed idea that went nowhere. Despondently, I wrote an apology to post to [MENTION=50987]CleverNickName[/MENTION] and my fellow Iron DM crowd that I forfeited. I just didn’t have anything. I couldn’t put three yet six ingredients together.

Then she showed up.

The mother is the well. The wish is her prayer not to be found. The unscripted revelation is the unknown effect of the visual obscurement of her that kept her from being found by the bandits. Nobody asked for it to happen that way, and nobody knows who or what made it happen. She hadn’t asked for anything karma couldn’t have given her without much to be expended. This happens in a magical world, shouldn’t it?

One of the things I have been pinged on in the past is either drop it in by stating the ingredient word for word or trying to cleverly state it differently. It is a fair gig, because the ingredient has to be part of the story, not just tacked on. This is the bedrock of Iron DM. In my last three Iron DM entries, I really have tried to NOT telegraph the ingredient, but to make it discoverable by the story.

Another problem I have had in the past is my use of tenses. I am a technical writer by trade, so I don’t mix tenses as often, so I have to really self-edit this. I tried to work hard on this in this entry.

I have found I often underuse the word count. I build my entry and when I see my word count, I usually have about 40 to 50 words to go. I read it again, and if I have said what I want to say, I am loath to add words just for fluff or to restate the obvious. This is a fight I have at work all the time. Keep it simple, say what you have to say.

So my girl’s story came together. She survived when it was nearly impossible that she would not. She was not totally safe (not totally invisible), but concealed enough for the bandits not find her. The fact that the party had a chance to see her was that they were smarter and more experienced. Looking for secret doors is a lot different than following victims on a dirt road.

Pregnancy brings a lot of time related issues to the table. There is the wait wait wait followed by the Oh My God the Baby’s Coming!

The absolute most miserable ingredient for me was Time Flies. I felt it was my weakest element, but I feel time spent with kids is the best example of this ingredient. As a parent of grown children and no grandchildren in the offing, I can tell you I miss this the most.

So, I was very happy with my entry. As far as an adventure I would like to play, it is my favorite entry of mine so far. I wrote it pretty generically because I think it would work in a lot of genres (fantasy, western, post-apocalyptic, etc).

So thank you to the judges and my fellow competitors for allowing me to join you once again. I hope to give it another try next time!