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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pielorinho" data-source="post: 1194218" data-attributes="member: 259">Nemmerle vs. WulfFor the championship!  This is, appropriately, the hardest of all the matches for me to judge.  Even as I’m posting this, I still don’t have a gut favorite between the two adventures.Nemmerle’s adventure, true to form, clocks in at eight pages of text.  I stopped reading it several times, getting distracted and bored.  Bad sign!  That said, there were some great scenes in it, some fantastic politics.  All the ingredients were used fairly well, except for the queen bee – I never did get a good sense of danger from the bee-men.  Perhaps it is my fault for picturing them like the only bee-man I know of, the guy from the Simpsons, but they just didn’t scare me.  Regular bees would have been more effective, IMO, or else some other creature entirely.The contagious madness is very cool, but I’m not sure I buy the whole “redemption” explanation – you stretched that word just past the point of no return, according to my dictionary.  Even if you could twist such that you were technically correct on the redemption, the ghost talks about “not seeking redemption for my sake.”  Nobody would ever use the work like that, and the PCs know it as well as the players, as well as the DM.Mammoth harp?  Good stuff.  Magical sand?  Works very well.  Paragon of perfumed foppery?  A fantastic character, one I’ll yoink for a game of my own some day. Wulf’s adventure was a lot shorter, a lot more engaging to read.  Again, the bees didn’t have a strong reason to be bees – but the scene with them did hold to a fae feel, and I love the trick of getting the PCs to play music accompanying the faerie dance.  When the faeries sing their curse, the Excellent DM will take a big hit from a helium balloon and then sing the song.Magical sand wasn’t nearly as well developed in this adventure as in Nem’s, but it was thematically appropriate.  Silent killer was, of course, woven throughout the adventure, in a very cool way – while some of those killers were goofy (mime of death?  I giggled, sure, but c’mon), others were pretty cool, especially the wight musician. Overall, we see the strength of each of the semifinalists in these two entries:  Nem develops a complicated political and historical setup filled with magic and a couple great characters, while Wulf gives a set of quick, evocative scenes oozing with mood.  Even as I write this, it’s hard for me to choose between them. Ultimately, it comes down to two related facets:  Wulf’s entry was pithy, and almost all its major aspects were derived from the ingredients.  Nem’s entry was long and dragging in places, and contained many more aspects unrelated to the ingredients (giants, for example).  By a single hair, Wulf’s elegance and simplicity of design wins him this tournamentCongratulations, Wulf, the new Iron DM!</blockquote>

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