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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 9778066" data-attributes="member: 5948">Congratulations on a well-deserved victory [USER=7054007]@AustinHolm[/USER] !  Real life has meant I haven't exactly been able to put my best foot forward this year, but even if I had, it may not have been enough.  Your entries have been exceptional, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with in the next round.Haha, I’m glad SOMEONE picked it up, but I didn’t make that one very clear, to be fair.That ingredient was symptomatic of my entry, I think.  My original idea was a pulp 30s adventure with an ancient aliens theme - an Indiana-Jones-y party of PCs fighting Nazis and the Gnomes of Zurich for control over an ancient vril-powered safellite and a shoggoth kept confined by Pyramid Energy, with the ghosts of two murdered Berlin cabaret drag queens as their guides.  I liked the girls too much to completely discard them when I decided to go with the Alien adventure, but then I got muddled.  Kylie and Magda didn't become 'spirits' till right at the very end of the adventure when it was too late to really matter, it didn't matter that they were drag queens in the first place, and the thing about the hooch flamethrowers was a bit of a desperate attempt to double up, but kinda just split the ingredient and made it look weak. (Plus despite a whole bunch of googling I wasn't ENTIRELY sure that 'flaming' and 'Gnomes of Zurich' weren't derogatory/homophobic/anti-Semitic in some quarters, and I didn't want to risk being offensive, which was one of the main reasons I eventually shelved that pulp idea).Same with my gnomes.  I figured I could get away with calling a particular variety of Weyland-Yutani synthetics 'gnomes' if I leaned into pre-D&D gnome mythology with the,  Mine spirits etc.  So that's what I did - and then I did nothing with it.  The mining wasn't important to the plot, the mines weren't relevant to the adventure, and the 'gnomes' didn't ACT gnome-y - they were just background workers until they started rampaging.  And the satellite too.  Satellites are defined by orbiting something.  It was originally going to be on a slow decaying orbit to the planet, which would give the workers some time pressure to get off and add to the 'dead end' feeling of the whole business, but that was one countdown too many and it just overcomplicated things.  So my satellite might as well just have been any old space station or asteroid base.  And unfortunately I knew at the time of writing that I was making all these mistakes, but the deadline was too close for me to fix it.  Iron DM is merciless, y'all.The insufficient gelatinousness of the pyramid - yeah, fair cop there.  I could have made it just made of excess tallow and fat from the slaughterhouse, I suppose, rather than a mountain of generic body parts.  Or even better, made it the waste spillover receptacle from where the hooves used to be boiled down for gelatin, cos that's where gelatin comes from.  But I dropped the ball there. Anyway, good luck to the remaining contestants.  I'll wreak my appropriately gelatinous revenge next year...</blockquote>

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