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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 8169700" data-attributes="member: 5948">[SPOILER="final round stuff, spoiler tagged for judges"]Psychic Scream - emitted by Walidah as she undergoes the torments of continually blocked childbirth, and a clue she might not be human.  I needed to do more with this one.  What if no PC can hear it?  Former Parrot - Nua'ir, the polymorphed hag servitor and scapegoat who may become a PC ally.  Poor Nua'ir, he's had a rough humanity.Pink Unicorn - the 'child's soft toy', supposedly a gift for Walidah's child from Uzmah, in reality an enslaved polymorphed unicorn  Uzmah's using to keep Walidah aliveAwakened Witch - Walidah on recovering after childbirth and realising the truth, also Uzmah awakening in her new bodiesTime Stop - the intention of Uzmah to defy the passing of time and stay alive, and the enchantment she lays on Walidah to ensure this happens.  Not a strong ingredient for me, especially since my usage of it doesn't really jibe with how the spell of that name works.Pregnant Moment - the agonising final moments before childbirth, where Walidah is trapped.  I hope the creative use of the ingredient wording is enough here.Swoop - the swooping hang-gliding sport of the inhabitants of Qalat, used to befriend Nua'ir and to access the head of the zaratanTurtles All the Way Down - in Ghommolod's bargain, the intent of the phrase (indefinite repetition/recursion without end) subverted by its literal reading (you'll be a turtle again and again all the way down to the Abyss).  I hope my association of wrinkly, cranky, long-lived turtles with a demon of old age is as plausible/intuitive for the judges as it was for me, otherwise this usage might strike them as arbitrary or artificial.Well, to be honest I'm not entirely happy with that.  I think it'd be a fun adventure, but while I haven't read Fitz's entry, if it focused tightly and relentlessly on the ingredients I reckon I may be in trouble.  Just a few too many of my ingredients are all aspects of the same situation around Walidah's childbed (time stop, pregnant moment, psychic scream, awakened witch, and even the unicorn) while perhaps not standing out by themselves very prominently.  One thing I've noticed in this competition is that it's very hard to do complicated many-variable sandbox-type situations justice within the word count.  I mired myself in that trap in the second round, and only escaped by binning my entry and starting again very late.  But a bit of the same happened here.  The childbed scene just has so many moving parts that you can't discuss all the permutations within the wordcount, but ignoring some of them leaves you open to (accurate) accusations of plot holes.  What happens if the PCs succeed in helping Walidah give birth safely but in the process discover she's a hag but have killed Nua'ir in the meantime?  Just.  So.  Many.  Possibilities.  In then end I tried to just cover the most likely ones and leave the rest to DMs initiative/improvisation, I hope it was enough.Did this really need to be an Al-Qadim adventure?  Well, probably not, strictly speaking, much as i love the setting - it could have fitted somewhere more generic, and to be really Al-Qadimy I should have put a genie in there somewhere.  But the zaratan is originally an Al-Qadim monster, and parrots fit well in a corsair island story, and the whole theme of the evils of defying Fate and the demon being tricksy with words is all very Al-Qadimy so i decided to go with it.  There was originally another wrinkle in there, where the PCs were offered accomodation at Ruqayah's house (in her missing daughters' bedrooms) while they were in Qalat, which meant that later on when they discovered her true identity they'd be stuck in a dilemma given that killing their host is a flagrant violation of the Al-Qadim principle of hospitality.  But that didn't survive the wordcount cull.But at least, in the final round of the competition on a 99% D&D board, i finally actually wrote a D&D adventure, so that counts for something right?[/SPOILER]</blockquote>

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