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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Radiating Gnome" data-source="post: 5201503" data-attributes="member: 150">Round 1 JudgementIt is always a mixed blessing to have two entries that are credible responses to a set of ingredients. On the one hand, it means we have a lot of good stuff to read, but it also means judgement is going to be challenging.Thanks for making my job hard. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />As a sort of best practice, I try to refer to the names of your entries rather than you directly -- an old habit from my writing workshop days.  I'm not evaluating you, just this product of your fevered brains.  I'll abbreviate to make my life easier, too.  So, we start with the review of the ingredients:Weretiger - the weretiger, in both cases, plays an important role in the story of the adventure. In "where cloud giants go to die" (WCG), the dual nature if the lycanthrope is used pretty well, but it did bother me a little that the players, as they work their way through the adventure, don't really get to have much of a relationship with both personalities before they find out that he has two identities. I felt like a scene where they meet swiftclaw early in the adventure would deliver that discovery.In "Greed in Greencloud" (GG), the dual nature of the lycanthrope is also used to have an NPC with a dual identity, but while there is a bit of investigation to reveal the weretiger, it feels like the lycanthrope is just a means of disguise, and almost any sort of disguise, illusion, or shapeshifting would have served jus as well. Also, I'm scanning over the entry again, double checking, but did he get a name at any point? He ought to have a name.  It was pretty good, but in comparison I find I like WCG's weretiger better.Aerial Swamp - GG's floating gas swamp is just a damn cool setting, and it is the sort of place I would love to send players. Bizarre, dangerous, and redolent with fart noises. It feels like a well imagined, very alien setting, something pretty remarkable.The "swamp" in WCG is a stretch, and while I think the potential for some entertaining encounters exist in the raft of giant bodies, this aerial swamp pales in comparison to GG's.Human Slaver - WCG has Storm Giant Slavers who only dabble in trafficking humans. So, they are only barely human slavers if "human" indicates the slaves they traffic in, and not the slavers themselves - and that feels strained, too.GG has a patron/villain who is a human slave master. I actually had to look up slaver to make sure it could also mean someone who owns slaves, not just someone who sells them. It also occurs to me that it was possible to run with the other word spelled "slaver" - the saliva/drooling one. That would have been a fun way to turn the intended ingredient on it's head.Anal retentiveness about definitions aside, the slaver in GG is a more integrated part of the story. In WCG, the storm giants need not have been slavers at all -- removing that detail doesn't hurt the story at all. So, another point to GG.Universal Suffrage - This one was not nice. Democracy doesn't really fit naturally into the sort of feudal fantasy we are used to. And the historical examples of democracy that pre-date feudalism don't really approach one-person-one-vote.  That's a very modern idea.  So, this was a real curveball.  In WCG, the lycanthropes in the small community have no representation in the local lord's council, and they're lobbying to win that concession.  In GG, however, the idea of suffrage has morphed in to emancipation, rather than suffrage.  WCG is stronger here, although I felt like the idea could be smoothed into the adventure a bit better than it is in the current presentation.  I think, to really make the suffrage an important part of the adventure, some sort of voting or election must be an important part of the action -- otherwise it's just background material that the players need never truly interact with.  WCG gets closer, so the point goes there. Broken Chronometer - In WCG, the broken chronometer belongs to an important NPC, the halfling Provalor.  He loses the trinket when he is helping the storm giants break into the keep and kidnap swiftclaw.  Swiftclaw ends up with it, and hands it to the players at the end of the adventure.  I'm not particularly happy with the use of this ingredient. For one thing, it could have been any trinket -- there's no reason why it had to be a chronometer, it could have been a riding crop, a beenie baby, or a shrunken head.  Also, the players don't get to make the discovery themselves -- Swiftclaw just hands it to them at the end.  The players should be the active parties in the adventure . . . they should be the ones picking up this item and making inferences from it's discovery. In GG, the chronometer is a much more important part of the story.  The chronometers are necessary because of the tidal flux of the swamp (I think that's pretty damn cool, by the way), and the slave masters need them to know their position within the swamp. The Weretiger's is broken, and that means he doesn't know where he's supposed to be -- an important clue in trying to figure out which of the slave drivers is the shapeshifter.  It couldn't be something else, like a beenie baby -- in this case the item has to be a chronometer, or at least it's woven into the fabric of the story in that way.  Point for GG. And lastly there's the Songbow.  In WCG, it's the adventure hook and also the bribe used to hire the storm giant slaver's compliance with Provalor's plan.  In GG, the songbow is the enchantment used to enslave the swamp gas mine workers.  Neither use was great, IMO.  In WCG, it's part of the regalia of a dead giant hero, but it could have been any item, again -- a big sword or the giants favorite bag of rocks.  The same story could be told with a different item in it's place.  But in GG, it's barely a songbow -- it's a layered enchantment that is pretty much just called a songbow, and if the players reveal it's true nature in the end they find out that it isn't a songbow at all, but a complicated bit of machinery.  It feels like a near thing to me -- like I said, I'm not pleased with either use, so no points on this ingredient. So, the score for ingredients is: WCG - 2 (Weretiger, Universal Suffrage) GG -3 (Aerial Swamp, Human Slaver, Broken Chronometer) PlayabilityIn this area, we examine the playability of the adventure, and this gives me an opportunity to get onto one of my high horses about traps we can fall into as we develop these adventures.  We all do it -- I've done it in my own entries over the years, but we risk some critical weaknesses in our entries when we write long backgrounds for adventures, and the players don't get to interact with the majority of the story that is included.  Writing those backgrounds and setups for adventures are easy -- we don't have to worry about the choices players might make, and we can shoehorn a lot of stuff into the adventure there that's hard to place anywhere else.  To evaluate that in each adventure, I like to take a quick look at what the players will actually get to do and interact with over the course of their adventure. In WCG, the players have the songbow and deliver it to their buyer.  That night, the keep is attacked, and they get to fight some storm giants. Then they get asked to climb the mountain and fight their way into the slaver camp on the cloud giant corpse raft to free Swiftclaw.  At that point, Swiftclaw hands them the final clue that lets them know that the halfling Provalor was responsible.  In GG, the characters are sent to investigate the problems in the swamp gas mines.  They meet Vivian, get his version of the scoop, investigate and find the nameless weretiger, and either fight him or join him and emancipate the slaves.  Neither is too bad about the background thing, actually. Both adventures look like they've got some good playability, and have some interesting settings to run around and smack things in.  I do think that GG has a slight advantage here because the players have a fairly ambiguous choice to make in the adventure, and their choice will have a dramatic effect on the future of the swamp, the people, the area, and the company that hired the PCs. And either choice is playable.  Especially clever PCs might even try to find a way to help the Weretiger without completely sacrificing their relationship with the company -- a very interesting problem to put in front of the players.  The final act of WCG, on the other hand, involves the players being handed the one clue the need to reveal Provalor's treachery, and Provalor apparently doesn't have the wherewithal to insist that the chronometer proves nothing, that it was stolen from him during the commotion of the Storm Giant attack -- probably to frame him, but he's sure no one will fall for that, blah blah blah.  Anyway, the players are just along for the ride, they don't get to make important choices that shape the story, which is a weakness when compared to GG. So, playability goes to GG.Creativity:Judging Iron DM is all subjective, but I think judging the creativity of an entry is the MOST subjective part of the whole process.  WCG gave us a sky filled with cloud giant corpses lashed together into rafts.  That's pretty good.  GG gave us the floating gas trees in the tidal aerial swamp, complete with rain-catching hammocks and floating transport cars . . . in the end, an incredibly vivid environment I'm dying to see and run players around in.  This setting captures my imagination and sends my head spinning off in all kinds of different directions.  Which is not to say that WCG didn't have it's strong point, or that there are not weaknesses in GG (I'm still looking for the Weretiger's name). But I think GG edges out WCG for creativity, too.  Final Judgement. Writing these responses is always an act of discovery.  I think these are both good entries, and both have their strong points, but in the end I find that I prefer Greed in Greencloud, which has edged out Where Cloud Giants go to Die in enough of the key evaluation areas to make it my choice in this match. So, ender_wiggin advances.  Mortal Plague, your entry was strong, but you drew a tough opponent.-rg</blockquote>

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