NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="CleverNickName" data-source="post: 7503873" data-attributes="member: 50987">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.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />  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]</blockquote>

Verification