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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Iron Sky" data-source="post: 8394034" data-attributes="member: 60965">Judgment for Round 3, 3rd-Place Match: el-remmen vs NeuroticCrazy busy week (brother's house burned down) so am setting a judging challenge: one hour to write? One hour to judge! Edit: Posting this exactly 1 hour later. Go me!Going to play this faster and looser than ever. Also going to be playtesting "Mean Judge" for this judgment; nothing against you, for entertainment purposes only.Read-only first pass. Write after.Go.[spoiler=Fools Rush In]This sucked less than I expected.Most of the worst grammar offenses seemed to be piled in early, an outer wall of anti-capitalization with spikes of extra commas and the longest sentence ever complete with a hyphen.I expected to be disappointed by an adventure about bards and I was disappointed. Mostly because it's about killing bards which in most games I've played is the optimal use for them so you can re-roll something useful.Let's sum up the adventure: "A group of PCs bards (or worse, bard-wanabees) enter a contest they think is about music but is really about feeding the magic blood box that powers the mecha that lets the king feed more blood to the blood box that will let him conquer his neighbors." And you thought the box caused confusion.PCs consume poison, may be beaten to death if they aren't funny, and have to pretend like they know cool stuff or die. Like being an Iron DM judge. They also start practically naked and can't leave until the contest is over; more similarities to judging. <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=";)" />Aside from someone having to play a bard, I don't hate this adventure so let's go to ingredients and see if that can be fixed.Let's make it into an entirely straightforward and non-un-anticonvoluted sentence:"Fools Rush In to the Feast of Fools, including the PCs and other rando bards engaged in a contest that's really about feeding a Weapon in Waiting Mecha sitting in a Magical Workshop holding the anti-music music box that creates a Fading Dreamscape." Got it? Good.So the focus is on the contest and the box which none of the ingredients quite center on. Mecha in Waiting in the Magical Workshop that creates a Dreamscape... okay, why does it have to be any of those things? Unicorn to Be Summoned from the Enchanted Grove that creates a Drug Stupor could be swapped in without too much bending.If the PCs figure out the Feast is poisoned, would see them doing whatever they can to skip it as would anyone else who's not an idiot. Oh wait, these people apparently chose to make bards...Fools Rush In then wobbles like a drunk at a party full of narcoleptics as the sole "strong" ingredient.[/spoiler]With that butchered judgment, let's move on to[spoiler=The Great Dream]Goody. "The Adventure" starts 60% of the way through the entry after the mini-novel about dream Queen gem Awoken King Mist urines. Just after the section where PCs find out they're imprisoned sucide-soldiers. Hey, at least they get to pick why they're prisoners! Hooray, player choice.Wait, so they get to make up why they are evil, then they're promised freedom if they do good, then are set free? Why should these evil players help if they're already free? Why not use the nuclear laser robots to conquer Dreamplace? They can't talk about their mission but why not just march their Mist Mecha the direction the Formains came from and leave them to it?Let's assume that the unlikely-to-be-heroic heroes go along with it. What do they do? Get mission, get geased (always a great way to ensure player compliance), then travel for 10 days through... why 10 days? Does anything happen? Anyway, they get power suits which don't matter because it's the gems needed to beat the  ̶T̶r̶a̶d̶e̶ ̶F̶e̶d̶e̶r̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶'s Formian's drone army. Is... is that it?Maybe I'll be vaguely impressed by the ingredients:Like the adventure, it looks like these ingredients were pretty much tacked on to the end of the story. We have Mecha as Weapons in Waiting to protect the Fading Dreamscape from Formain Fools that Rush In to become a Feast of Fools for each other while the PCs kill them on their way to bringing a crate full of McGuffins to the Magical Workshop to save the Snorefields.Feast of Fools Rush in dangles by floss and duct tape. Weapons in Waiting/Mecha are probably made in a workshop, but these are called out as being technological with laser nukes not magical. Focus is also on them being hidden, not waiting (even called out as Hidden Weapons). Why do they have to be Mecha again? How does that tie to dreams?Fading Dreamscape is the King of this nebulous realm of ingredients, central to and place of action for everything like a dance hall heavy on the dry ice with only a couple nerdy kids at the edge playing with their Transformers.[/spoiler][spoiler=Judgment]Drunk guy vs empty dance hall. Fight!To be fair to both these adventures, I didn't fall asleep and I'm really, really tired right now. Desires to gouge my eyes out never quite manifested into maiming myself into monocular vision either. Two points for both already!So who wins? I could belabor the point and stretch it out here to build suspense, weighing strengths of this vs high points of that, but these adventures didn't burden me with any of those so it'll go faster.Fools Rush In reduces the bardic population so it and [USER=11]@el-remmen[/USER] win.[/spoiler][spoiler=End Note]Dropping Evil Judge persona, some cool stuff in these adventures.Fools Rush In's mayhem, murder, and backstabbing would make for a great low-level "funnel" style adventure with PCs dying in horrible, funny ways left-and-right then jumping in with one of the background NPCs. The subversion of the premise, the various challenges, suggestions for alliance/deal making, and twist that it's all about feeding the Karne Box is awesome.Ingredients were a bit weak, but can't expect much more than the first coat on a quick idea for these 1-hour challenges. That you came up with an actual funny, multi-layered, playable adventure in that time is impressive.The Great Dream suffered from backstoriosis. With the meat of the "adventure" tucked behind the PCs, there's not really that much left for them to do: get mechs, get gems, go home, maybe fight?That said, I loved the setting with the Mists and guardians. I was hoping they'd be on the border fighting bizarre, horrible incursions from nightmare realms bordering the Kingdom or launching rescue missions to save people from dream invasions by sleep haunts or something. Could be a pretty cool game right there. Unfortunately, it didn't quite make it into the entry in time as cool as the concept is.Judgment remains the same as above if for different reasons.I've even played a bard once... because his stats were too godawful to play anything else, sure, but I've done it! Was hoping he'd catch a stray arrow and die, but somehow survived the whole campaign only to have his head cut off and kicked down a mile-deep hole in the final session. C'est la vie.[/spoiler]</blockquote>

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