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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 9764749" data-attributes="member: 5948">Thanks [USER=6789971]@bedir than[/USER] - it was a very close-run thing in the end, a lot of the ingredient decisions were by very small margins and it could have gone either way.  And I really liked your choice of a post-apocalyptic setting to reconcile the time period discrepancies in the ingredients between open heart surgery, dukes, snipers, and wagons.  The first Iron DM round is by far the hardest, I've always thought, just because of the word count.  Later rounds have more ingredients, sure, but also a much more forgiving word limit to ingredient ratio.Re the judgement and my ingredient use:Iron Diem was the really hard one, because even translating 'Diem' as Latin for 'day' it ... kinda meant nothing.  For a while I leveraged off the fact that 'Diem' is a common Vietnamese name and 'Iron Diem' became a steampunk cyborg vigilante protecting Asian railway workers from robber baron rail magnates, but the setup just got too complicated to fit in the wordcount.  After most of a day spent cursing a meaningless impossible bad-Latin ingredient, I eventually realised that I should simply use a setting where bad Latin is a long-established trope.  Hi there, Warhammer.  I tried to riff off my own confusion with the bad-Latinness in the adventure, with the confusion in translation.Ugly Duke-ling - I have to admit I just used 'duke' as a placeholder for 'nobility' here.  I'm vaguely aware that sometimes the more distant heirs to thrones carry the title, but I don't know the specifics.  What I was more focused on here was mirroring the 'ugly duckling' story that obviously inspired the ingredient.  Melos starts off despised and awkward, but blossoms into a swan as the adventure progresses (but this being Warhammer, such things are not always good news - by the time the PCs fight him at the end he quite probably IS weirdly elongated and covered in feathers!)Sniper Blind - I tried to double down on this with the blind sniper in the sniper blind because just having a sniper shooting at PCs from a blind seemed to miss the point a little.   It made the sniper the important element, while the ingredient was the blind.Open heart surgery - the criticism re confusion between heart and lung is legit.  My intention was for this to be a clue that All Was Not As It Seemed with Melos's utopian workforce.  If the attacker performs heart surgery, but somehow the lung implant is gone afterwards - how does that makes sense?  Answer: it doesn't, which means the supposed lung implant wasn't in the lung at all, and Melos was lying.  But I just didn't make that clear in the entry.  I could blame limited wordcount, but given my late submission, the limited wordcount was all self-inflicted too...True identity - i thought I used this one ok, but I would have preferred to establish the false identity first to contrast the true one.  But that just wasn't going to happen given wordcount restrictions.Broken Wagon Wheel - [USER=59816]@FitzTheRuke[/USER] was more generous to me on this than I would have been!  While my initial intentions were good, in the end I really just used 'broken wheel' and used 'wagon' as a synonym for 'basically any vehicle at all' where it probably more accurately refers to a cargo-carrying vehicle that might rely on a towing vehicle for propulsion.  So I might have gotten away with one there...Yeah, a lot of the time the ingredients seem to just rule out D&D off the bat, which is perhaps a shame.  Lots of modern ideas and concepts.  I could have managed to fit a sniper in a D&D adventure (with a crossbow perhaps), but open heart surgery was a step too far so I never really considered it for this ingredient set.  You can stretch the definition of words and try to creatively interpret, but that tends to be expensive on wordcount, and if you go too far you risk the judge just dumpstering the whole thing.</blockquote>

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