Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="phoamslinger" data-source="post: 4990580" data-attributes="member: 2342">this one's going to take some work.  edit: and so it did:[sblock]Wik’s Gone Fishing vs Iron Sky’s Operation: Lightning StormIngredients:Underdark JungleLightning FortEvil HealerMilitary DraftPurple WightTrident of Fish CommandI was curious how you were going to slap these together.  on too many contests, I’ve seen a solid adventure but the ingredients are just tossed in as window dressing.  or used as a mcguffin, or in some other way that some other ingredient could have been inserted and the players would have been none the wiser.  finally this is not the case (at least at first glance) and I actually have to make a judgment against two entries that have learned the rules of the game.  apparently this is more work for me now.  maybe I shouldn’t have told you what I was looking for, so as to keep the judge stuff easier.  if I am going to judge this one, I decided I needed to come down a bit harder on each ingredient to determine a “he’s doing better” at the end.  so,The Ingredients Evil Healer:Wik gives us Ebon Grai, a medic who is masterminding the plot to give him an unbeatable army not to conquer with but to become wealthy with.  I like the non-cliché there.  Iron Sky gives us a background mission to Heal Evil.  in his item summary he mentions “Royal” Bolt as an evil healer, but I went back and double checked and didn’t really see anything to substantiate this one.  IS, did you intend to make Bolt into a cleric?   because his clerical abilities should have drawn some mention elsewhere if that were the case.  I didn’t see this, so point to Wik.Lightning Fort:Wik gave us a dwarven fortress which has become electrified because of the Kua Toa.  Iron Sky gave us a fortress that was built intentionally to discharge lightning throughout the area and has changed it’s environments on both planes because of it.  point to Iron Sky  Military Draft:Iron Sky gave us two pompous generals who draft the party into their military organization.  IS have you ever played or run Paranoia?  your mission briefing I’m planning on stealing and reading verbatim the next time I run Paranoia because I can just see the players scrambling to decipher stuff and getting everything totally confused.  Wik, your military draft reverses this and puts the party as doing the drafting and having to deal with all of the consequences that came out of it.  Wik’s Draft is perhaps a bit stronger, but the comedy implied in Iron Sky’s military clichés compensates enough that I’ll call this one tied. Underdark Jungle:here we start to get into the ugly ingredients.  I realize that the Underdark implied Mushrooms when I put the ingredient in there.  that is something that has been done over and over in so many games I’ve seen, I was wondering what would be the result.  Wik gave us a mushroom jungle, yet still referred to it in places as a mushroom forest, including the fungal forest.  Iron Sky also gave us a fungus jungle, but the additional descriptions of the life forms that have moved in really made his jungle come alive more in the story and it became a more integral part of his adventure.  point to Iron SkyPurple Wight:when I was putting this one in, I was thinking back to that David Eddings novel where the king gets drowned in a barrel of wine and when they bury him, his corpse is purple from the pickling.  so I knew of at least one way to make a wight purple; I was wondering what you would come up with.  Wik’s idea that the blood congealing in a newly made corpse made a lot of sense.  Iron Sky’s wights that spread purple paste on them to resist the lightning also worked, but wasn’t as strong.  but Iron Sky also pulled Purple White out of a hat and incorporated it as well.  I’ll give Wik a slight edge for this one.Trident of Fish Command:this one I expected to see just tossed in somewhere.  Iron Sky made it the only means of easily gaining access to the Lightning Fort.  Wik pulled Underdark Jungle and the Trident together and got Kuo Toa! as an opponent.  Iron Sky gets an edge because I was impressed with Wik’s intuitive leap there that quite caught me by surprise.  like he mentions elsewhere, once he made that connection, everything else just fell into place.  so we have Wik with one and an edge, Iron Sky with two and an edge.  I really like both entries, so let’s keep looking.both are quite useable, have adequate formatting and development, hooks make sense, etc, so I’m going to call all that a wash.  and you both have cross connections all over.  Iron Sky has a few word plays going and incorporates them as well into his entry.  slight edge to him.Wik has an Evil Healer who’s using the people of the Draft to make his Wights to seize the Trident from the Fort through the Jungle.Iron Sky Drafts the party to use the Trident to get through the Jungle to fight the Wights in the Fort.  and possibly Heal the Evil tooWik’s sentence is just a tad bit stronger than Iron Sky’s.  point to him.which leaves us with a relative two plus two for Wik, two plus one for Iron Sky. Essentials (namely how critical to the adventure is it that this item be used and not some other one):  the Trident: yes on boththe purple wights: neither of you went into why it had to be wights instead of zombies or some other undead. no points. Wik's blood clotting was stronger on why they were purple than just a bit of body paint.  nod to Wik.the Draft: both equally strong parts of the overall.  nod to both.the Jungle: Iron Sky's Jungle was full of life (which jungles are very much so).  he made it come alive with his fish.  nod to Iron Skythe Lightning Fort: another nod to Iron Sky.  it HAD to be Lightning.  Wik's could have just been a dwarven fort on the hill.Evil Healer: Wik gets the nod for this one, Evil mastermind who can raise dead while posing as the group medic.  Iron's was ok, just nowhere near as strong. judging is really all very subjective when you come down to it.  when I read your entry Wik and especially when Iron Sky was saying it was like slamming his head into the wall to make things work, I knew your opponent was going to have to really come up with some cool mental pictures to overcome your entry.  but his Military briefing, his Lightning Fort, and his Jungle did just that.  you’ve written a solid adventure Wik, and I am strongly tempted to give it to you as a technical win.  but Iron’s very weak Evil Healer was offset by what I saw as a weak Jungle and Fort on your entry.  so I could easily go either way choosing one or the other.  my decision:while I think Wik's Gone Fishing would involve the party more, I think Iron Sky’s adventure would be just a little bit more fun to play or to run.  so Iron Sky’s Operation: Lightning Storm gets my vote for this round.[/sblock]</blockquote>

Verification