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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Radiating Gnome" data-source="post: 7832956" data-attributes="member: 150">Iron DM 2019 Round 1 Match 3 Judgement I love it when the decisions are difficult.  The two entries provided by our worthy contestants are evocative, interesting, and at first blush appear to be making reasonably good use of the ingredients.  So we're going to have to look closely.  We have Sacrifice (by Psykick), the tale of a town beset beset by a coven with a hurricane.  In this adventure the party is asked to help in the recovery efforts by Magale, Mayor of the city and lynchpin to the story, and the big bad is a coven of witches that Magale was once the leader, but has left after some personal grief. And we have The Storm Prophet (Prohpet), in which the party is shipwrecked by a storm in a coastal town, where the town barber and recently-dubbed Prophet is rebuilding the town, despite his secret connection to a coven of pretty nasty witches.  Lets jump right into examining the use of ingredients.  Secret Admirer. This is an ingredient that I imagined would be very difficult to integrate into an adventure in a meaningful way -- making it a meaningful part of the player experience. In Sacrifice, at first I thought that Magale's romantic connection to the dead inkeeper was how the entry was handling the secret admirer, but then in the very end there is the revelation that Sariah, one of the witches, was secretly in love with Magale -- and her thwarted love for Magale was how the big bad, Noxical, to influence the coven. This meets the need to include the ingredient, but it's not particularly good use of the ingredient because, while it's part of the motivation behind the adventure, it's not something that the players discover until the adventure is over. Meanwhile, in Prophet, the secret admirer is Titian the barber prophet who has secretly pledged his love and support to the coven.  In this case, his love and devotion isn't hidden from the object of affection, which is a core part of the 'secret admirer' trope. So, I don't see this as quite meeting the needs for the ingredient.  So, Sacrifice is stronger on this one.  Serene Coven. So, this is another challenging ingredient because of the adjective "serene." We typically imagine that covens are a source of twisted evil, and anything but serene. So I'm looking for a use that makes that modifier an important part of the story.  In Prophet, the coven is the big bad of the story, and doesn't even appear to be a serene influence at any point along the way.  In Sacrifice, the coven was at one time ultimately good, but were tricksters like their namesake dragon.  I don't think either use is particularly good, but there is a whisker of an advantage to Sacrifice here. Belt of the Copper Dragon.  This is an important item in both adventures.  In Sacrifice, it's worn by Magale, and never really is something that the players interact with. In Prophet, it's an item that the coven uses to impersonate the copper dragon protector of the town, and that falls into the player's hands at the end of the story.  So, that gives Prophet the better interpretation of this ingredient. Hurricane Recovery.  This ingredient is another one that is easy to include, but the distinctions are in how well it's integrated into the story of the adventure.  In Prophet, the recovery from the hurricane is tied directly to the funeral rites, to the through-line of the adventure. In Sacrifice, the hurricane recovery is a significant part of the early activity in the story -- the players are asked to take on a lot of skill challenges and other activities which gradually reveal some of the trickster/fey magic that is involved. Both use it pretty well. But I think in the end the use in Prophet is stronger -- Sacrifice's recovery feels like a lot of busy work, while Prophet's is a bit more intrinsic to the story. Funeral Rites. This one is probably the most straightforward and direct ingredient in the list.  In Sacrifice, the usage feels tacked on -- the ritual that the party must complete a "funeral right binding" the big bad's evil energy back on itself after killing it.  While I really dig the way that feeds the ouroboros theme of the adventure, the ritual isn't quite a funeral rite (in that it's not honoring or protecting the subject of the rite). In Prophet, the funeral rite is a clue (because of the way the funeral rites change after the Prophet is being influenced) and it is part of the coven's plan to make the villages feed them unknowingly.  Prophet's use is stronger.  Shadow Couatl. In an adventure in which we have two creatures whose alignments are apparently flipped (the Coven and the Couatl) this one I expected to be the big bad as things played out.  In Prophet, the couatl is the town's missing guardian. There are pieces of the Nahutai thread that I find confusing.  Nahutai is the guardian of a secret shadow rift near the town, but the rift doesn't appear to be an important part of the story. The proximity of the rift makes Nahutai also a protector of the town, and she even tried to finish the funeral rites herself, but was consumed by shadow in the process.  There's a piece of this I find a bit confusing -- if the funeral rites were for people who had been killed by the storm (and part of the hurricane recovery) then the rite must have been taking place after the storm had passed, when I would have expected the storm surge to be receding, not rising.  But, even with that weakness, this couatl is shadowy and dark and an importantly bad influence on the story.  In Sacrifice, the couatl Noxical is the big bad behind the coven and the thing that needs to be contained after the coven is defeated.  The usage doesn't confuse me the way it does in Prophet, but it's also a detail that could be anything. In both entries, frankly, the couatl-ness of Noxical/Nahutai isn't a significant part of the story, although in Sacrifice the ouroboros theme does connect nicely to the imagery of the couatl. I have gone back and forth on this one, and I find both uses of the shadow couatl interesting but problematic, and I can't find that I prefer one over the other, so we'll call this ingredient a wash as well.  So that means that Sacrifice has stronger use of Secret Admirer and Serene Coven, while Prophet is stronger on Funeral Rites and Hurricane Recovery. So, again, a very tight competition. Creativity and PlayabilityThey're both strong entries, I think. I think the hooks are reasonable, but not great. The use of ingredients wasn't exactly what I was expecting, but were satisfying. The overall story of a former-coven-member mayor and tavern-keeper is good, and while the skill challenge activities seem a bit like busy work, there are clues there about the nature of things to come that the players can interact with. And the story of the barber/prophet/betrayer is a mix of cliche and unusual, I find that I'm intrigued by this interpretation of the belt of the copper dragon more -- and the belt that allows the wearer to become a copper dragon seems like an awesome item to put in the hands of players at the end of the adventure.  At the same time, the idea of the players having to pick their way through a recently defunct copper dragon's trap-filled lair sounds like some good fun, too.  [SPOILER="Final Judgement"]In the end, given how close the two entries are in many ways, I find that the ideas and interpretations in Prophet are slightly more interesting and memorable than the ones in Sacrifice. In Sacrifice, the skill challenges and traps are very much business as usual, while the final battle in Prophet seems more epic, and the rewards are more unique and interesting.  So, Prophet wins, and Iron Sky advances.  [/SPOILER]Thanks, and congrats to both of you for such strong entries.  -rg</blockquote>

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