NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 9185939" data-attributes="member: 5948">[SPOILER="Notes for match 3, spoiler-tagged for judge's benefit"]Writing that loopy a submission was fun, but I veer between being very satisfied and very uncertain about my entry.Divine triceratops was the defining ingredient, of course.  It's just so weird that the adventure is almost inevitably going to orbit around it, and it really stands out like a ... stand-outy-thing ...  in comparison to the other ingredients which trend rather domestic and prosaic.  For me, I connected this herbivorous dinosaur to the Hypocritical Vegetarian ingredient in the same way that [USER=11760]@Whizbang Dustyboots[/USER] did, it did seem obvious.  And then I thought of the vast stack of dinosaur books i had as a kid, where the t-rex was inevitably fighting triceratops in an illustration, and surely if you're fighting a Rex, then by the literal latin translation it's mutiny of some sort?  It kinda came together from there.(Side note 'mutiny' is my absolute favourite use of the Command spell...)My big structural concern is wordcount-driven.  I just didn't have the words to talk about how the gods reacted to the PCs showing up, or talk about how they were reacting to the unprecedented disappearance of the God-T-Rex, or detail what Saturnalia gets up to during the investigation, or explain as fully as i'd have liked about how the game worked - and all those omissions i think inevitably make the adventure read somewhat disjointed and incomplete.  Or to explain why the game existed or why the dinosaur-gods had to play it at all, in fact.  I figure it's all just ineffable divine order and best not questioned...Hypocritical Vegetarian - God-Triceratops, obviously.  I just hope he's hypocritical enough.  Just eating meat doesn't make you hypocritical, but eating meat while preaching vegetarianism does.  I needed to make it clear that God-Triceratops motivations were at least partly principled, based on a dislike of predator rule, and I'm not sure i did that well enoughPermanent Ink - A motivation for the second murder, and a clue that could help identify the killer.  I could be in real trouble here if the judge doesn't make the connection i did between ammonites and squid, and the same assumption that ammonites probably had ink like squid do.Unlikely Mutiny - the herbivore overthrowing and eating the carnivore.  I tried to emphasise the whole inexorability of the 't-rex always wins' cosmic order just to make the mutiny more 'unlikely', because in paleontological reality, I suspect that a simply all-in-brawl between the two dinosaurs would have been a close run thing.Living Chessboard- the Great Game.  Like the other entry, my board itself isn't living but the pieces on it were.  Probably not QUITE the exact ingredient, but the other competitor did it too so fingers crossed I'm safe!  On the other hand, my board isn't specifically a CHESS board.  On the other other hand, gods playing chess with the world is a pretty classic motif, so it fits in well here.Cheerful Melody - the anthem of revolution, the spark which set off the mutiny, and a slightly sinister background tune to add atmosphere.  I love Saturnalia, he's so ridiculous and incongruous here and I wish I'd had the wordcount to do more with him.  Maybe he can show up again in future episodes, like Bat-Mite.  I'm just hoping that the judges think it's cheerful enough.  Les Mis isn't exactly known for its happy upbeat soundtrack...Divine Triceratops - well, yes.  Yep.  Check.  I've got one of those.  I'm hoping I have the edge over [USER=11760]@Whizbang Dustyboots[/USER] 's wonderfully whimsical tea-drinking chess-dinosaur-archfey on this one, because in my entry it matters more that it's a triceratops, rather than say, a cow.  But that's a pretty fine hair to be splitting, so we'll see how we go!Still, whichever way it turns out, I'm pretty confident that this is the best adventure where superheroes need to solve a musical-theatre-inspired murder among the chess-playing dinosaur gods EVER, so I'm going to hang my hat on that.[/SPOILER]</blockquote>

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