Judgment for Round 1b, Match 8 - Rpjunkie vs GuardianLurker
maxfieldjadenfox
Guardian Lurker Vs RPJunkie
Mission Improbable
RPJunkie
First I think your description of the griffin-man was very well done. I like the idea of multiple hearts, and the beginnings of the world are pretty cool as well.
Picture use:
Griffin pic is well used. It sets us in an alien landscape immediately. The bubble as shield is a good idea, but I would have liked the execution better if it had somehow tied to the method of transport since you already set it up. The lighthouse is kind of a toss off. It doesn't need to be in the story.
A huge pet peeve of mine is changing tenses. We all do it accidentally, but I try to be diligent about picking one and making sure it matches throughout the story when I edit. It's one of the most disconcerting grammar errors and it pulls me right out of the story when it happens, and it happened a lot in this story. The story started off strong but grew jumbled once the players were on earth. The "it was just a dream" ending always feels like a cop out to me.
The Case of the Missing Beacon
Guardian Lurker
A story from the Celestial Plane. With a detective. Intriguing.
Picture use:
The lighthouse was central to the story and was well used. I also liked the use of the griffin as hawk-woman. That being said, I would have liked it if you did more with her. She was young and inept. It could have been more fun if she had been shirking her duties in some way, or in on the heist... The Sphere of Celestial Invulnerability would appeal to us gamers, and was an original usage of the bubble picture.
The ritual the dragon man was doing was also appealing to the gamer in me. I liked the main character, you don't often find a hard bitten, gumshoe angel. I am totally "gumophobic", so the bubblegum incident cracked me up.
Both stories presented neat worlds and I enjoyed reading them. Decision to Guardian Lurker.
Rodrigo Istalindir
Rpjunkie vs GuardianLurker
Rpjunkie – Here we have a quick little action story with a non-human protagonist. The idea of a plane-shifting strike team is intriguing, more so when our world is on the receiving end. There are some tantalizing hints of visits past, but unfortunately this never progress beyond a sketch. Obviously these beings served as the source of terrestrial legends, but maybe a brief flashback to the origin of one of the legends would have fleshed that out some.
The pacing of the story is swift, and conveys the sense of urgency that a commando raid would have. Maybe a little too swift, though, as aside from the introduction, we don’t get a sense of the players in the story – not even names for most. A little detail to gild the story is always welcome. Names of people and places, brief backstories for characters, these go a long way to giving the story some heft. The hard thing about short stories is that they aren’t long enough to immerse the reader the way a novel does; this is especially true of stories set outside the real world. The more three-dimensional you can make things (within the time and length constraints), the better off you are.
The prose is workman-like and efficient, but lacking in polish. There are some awkward shifts in tense, and some of the paragraph breaks aren’t as clean as they should be, which throws off the pacing a little. Care should be taken to separate the thoughts of the actor from the narrative. For example:
As he saw me standing there he screamed! It startled me and I screamed too! This of course does not make friends very easily. The human ran to the desk inside and grabbed something that made a tinkling sound and ran from the room. My men were alerted and had weapons drawn as the human burst out of the side door running for the barn.
It shifts from action ( “he screamed” ) to the thoughts of the character ( “This of course” ) and back to action. Nothing unforgiveably wrong, from a technical perspective (aside from the ‘!’s), but maybe better like this:
He saw me standing there and screamed. Startled, I screamed too.
“This isn’t a good way to make friends,” I thought to myself.
The human ran to the desk, grabbed something that tinkled like wind-chimes, and ran from the room.
By breaking things up, and putting the reader into the head of the protagonist, you can improve the flow of the story and help the reader identify with the characters.
Picture use is ok. Using the gryphon as the hero was a nice touch, but it might have been better used a bit later in the story ( “I unfurled my wings and leapt into the air.” ) rather than right off. Let the reader start off thinking he’s dealing with normal humans and then hit him with the surprise.
I hope you don’t think I’m beating up on you
This is a good first entry for someone new to Ceramic DM, more so if it’s your first story ever. Take some time to read the other stories, and especially to read the judgments, to see what sets one story apart from another. Take more time next time, too – I tend to write my stories in a single sitting also, and I *always* benefit from a second read-through when the dust has settled. It’s easy to get into the groove of putting words on paper and not notice that what sounds good while you are writing it doesn’t flow as well when you read it. Reading it out loud to yourself works well for me – it helps me identify pacing problems and awkward phrasings, and also to see if I’m overusing certain phrasings or sentence structures. Thanks for competing, and I hope to see you in the next competition.
GuardianLurker – This story is an interesting blend, a planar romp with Chandleresque overtones. The second paragraph has some nice teasers that hint at a larger world outside the scope of the story. The investigation is intriguing, but a little dry. More dialogue with Willa would have been welcome, and interspersed with the various discoveries would have made each seem more important.
While things got off to a good start, the second half seemed rushed, in particular the protagonist’s deductions. The bing-bang-boom planehopping doesn’t help, not so much because of the change of scenery, but in how its written. While it does a nice job of establishing Shammer’s abilities and reinforces the ‘seen it all’ hard-boiled detective bit, as written it came across as perfunctory rather than casual. The resolution is a little unclear – the confrontation with the half-dragon (what is it with half-dragons this go-around?) could have used some of the exposition common to the detective genre to wrap things up.
Picture use is pretty good. The lighthouses as astral beacons is good, and results in some nice mental pictures of the surrounding area. The ‘hawkwoman’ guardian fits in seamlessly. Using the ‘bubbleman’ as part of an integral action sequence was a good choice.
Rpjunkie made an admirable effort, but lacked the polish and intangibles that will come with practice and experience. Guardianlurker’s story starts off strong, but can’t sustain itself. Still, with better technique and stronger picture use, this judgment goes to GuardianLurker.
GuardianLurker advances, 2-0.
