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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 8164572" data-attributes="member: 5948">Thanks and commiserations to [USER=11]@el-remmen[/USER] - that one was very very close and could have really gone either way, unanimous verdict or not.  After reading your entry i thought using Spelljammer to square the fantasy/sci-fi circle of the ingredients was a stroke of genius and that your Binary Suns and Cursed Sword would be really hard to get past.I can't argue with any of the critiques of my entry.  My ogre wasn't precisely and literally ogre-y, so that was always a bit tenuous and i knew the hook was weak.  The adventure was originally a Delta Green story, but I dumped that because I didn't want to deal with all Delta Green's setting-specific tropes, but one thing Delta Green DID have was a bunch of somewhat crazed superiors who sent you on weird missions with no or insufficient explanation, and my hook was a holdover from that.  Having said that, what I should have done is relegated the last paragraph about Shakespeare's grave (which adds cool factor to the whole thing, but isn't structurally necessary) to a separate codicil post outside the judgeable portion of the adventure to reclaim wordcount and improved the hook a bit.  [USER=67]@Rune[/USER] seem to have been absolutely reading my mind on this adventure when it came to translating what I actually wrote into the vision I had in my head, and their mention of what happens when the sword is stored in a sealed container is exactly how i envisioned it, and what i should have used for the hook.  The pawnbroker keeps the sword in a locked safe or the sealed boot of a car or something and Eldritch Hilarity Ensues.I did want to address a couple of questions that [USER=67]@Rune[/USER] made though, because i thought of them at the time and while i couldn't explicitly talk about them in the adventure due to word count, knowing about it does add to the thing as a whole.I deliberately chose Shakespeare partly because Shakespeare is The Bard with a capital 'B', and so was a better fit for the 'Bardic College' ingredient.  But it did reach a bit beyond that.  Lovecraft and his work of course have a well-founded reputation of racism, and i wanted to flip that about in this adventure a little.  So rather than the standard Lovecraftian story construct where some funny-looking foreigner secretly practises unspeakable rites that horrify good honest white anglo-saxons (and heaven help us if a white man breeds with one of these awful creatures!), I tried to make it the other way around.  Poor Pakistani immigrant Pamir is a victim twice over, exploited and stolen from by shonky white managerial type Coulthard, and used and discarded to madness and death by Ffoulkes.  And the sane, sensible presence is Ronica (who is in my head of Afro-Caribbean descent - Ronica is a common Jamaican girl's name according to Google, and her surname Marshall came from the legendary Barbadian cricket player Malcolm Marshall, and she studies colonialism into the bargain).  And of course, what's more emblematic of high Anglo-Saxon culture than Shakespeare?  It amused me to make him a twisted warlock writing unspeakable tomes, and spreading his taint to new worlds, rather than the taint coming to Good Old Wholesome England from without....  Besides, if you're running a CoC game and you can't do anything with Shakespeare's tomb, then you're not trying.  And the circumstances of his death remain unknown (mutated into a Ffoulkes-like ogre and taken down by agents in Walshingham's employ, probably, who then went back and purged the unholy bits out of his plays, which is why the chant of the three witches in Macbeth, for instance, is clearly stylistically different to everything else in Shakespeare ) The inscription on his grave: ''Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare, To digg the dust encloased heare, Blest by the man that spares these stones, And curst be he that moves my bones.'</blockquote>

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