My thoughts on two of the ingredients:
My favorite ingredient in this round is the Aerial Swamp. And in my humble (and insignificant) opinion, it is the ingredient that was used the best, in both of the entries.
MortalPlague uses a creative interpretation for this ingredient. It is almost like he asked himself, "what would a swamp in the sky be made of?" and the answer he came up with is "a pool of clouds, full of decaying cloud-stuff. Like cloud giants." Ender_wiggin uses a more literal interpretation. He put an actual swamp--water, plants, noxious gasses and all--right up in the air.
The aerial swamp is the setting of both adventures. In "Where Clouds Go To Die," the party must trudge through a stagnant swamp made of clouds, to get to their destination (which is brilliant, but expected.) But in "Greed In Greencloud," the aerial swamp is not just
where the action takes place, but also
why: the swamp produces a valuable gas, which is the reason people are being enslaved. I think that will give Ender_wiggin a bit of an edge.
A chronometer is a device that measures time...it could be a sundial, an hourglass, a grandfather clock, a waterclock, whatever. It had such potential...but both contestants dropped it. Radiating Gnome ain't gonna like this...he hates McGuffins.
In "WCGtD," the broken chronometer could have been replaced with nearly any broken object...two pieces of a broken sword, two halves of a friendship bracelet, etc., and the story wouldn't notice. And in "GiG," the chronometer isn't a chronometer at all, but a sextant or compass or something more suited to measuring distance or location, not time. And even so, it could have been replaced quite easily with a map. Time, or the need to measure it, isn't a significant part of either story.
Anyway. It will be interesting to see if RG agrees with me on these points. I'm not going to venture a prediction here, though...the contest will likely come down to how the other four ingredients get used. Good luck, contestants!
