Iron dm summer champion announced!
- Thread starter Rune
- Start date
cool hand luke
First Post
Thanks for the comments Rune, I really appreciate the feedback.
I knew I was going to be in trouble when i went up against seasong.
This has been a great experience. I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into when I signed up for this.
I was also pleased with the improvements I was able to make in between rounds, I think this little exercise has improved my story telling, that's for sure!
unfortunately, in the end, I was unable to capture what was really in my head in a concise enough manner to submit it as a adventure. I was also unable to put in words what I had envisioned for several elements, most especially the mansion, and the femme fatale notion of shanzli/jezzell. I knew those were glaring weaknesses.
congrats seasong, your story was awesome.
I knew I was going to be in trouble when i went up against seasong.
This has been a great experience. I had absolutely no idea what I was getting into when I signed up for this.
I was also pleased with the improvements I was able to make in between rounds, I think this little exercise has improved my story telling, that's for sure!
unfortunately, in the end, I was unable to capture what was really in my head in a concise enough manner to submit it as a adventure. I was also unable to put in words what I had envisioned for several elements, most especially the mansion, and the femme fatale notion of shanzli/jezzell. I knew those were glaring weaknesses.
congrats seasong, your story was awesome.
cool hand luke
First Post
my biggest dissappointment in this round was my inability to exploit the very first idea that came to my head. as soon as I saw the list, I thought
femme fatale = ex monk
I mean, what better combination? she appears, soft, alluring, seductive, not at all dangerous, and then proceeds to pound you into pastrami with her bare hands.
femme fatale = ex monk
I mean, what better combination? she appears, soft, alluring, seductive, not at all dangerous, and then proceeds to pound you into pastrami with her bare hands.
cool hand luke
First Post
yeah, I just didn't know that that was the intergral part of being a femme fatale. In fact, I had to look femme fatale up in the dictionary, just to make sure I knew what it was.
Rune
Once A Fool
Perhaps I should clarify. I don't think I have ever read or heard any definition of the term, femme fatale, that specifically said that a corrupting influence was inherent in the concept. However, my own observations of various femmes fatale throughout noir cinema and fiction lead me to that conclusion.
At heart, it seems to me to be the most important characteristic of the femme fatale--not just that they corrupt, but that they destroy by corrupting.
At heart, it seems to me to be the most important characteristic of the femme fatale--not just that they corrupt, but that they destroy by corrupting.
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cool hand luke
First Post
when is the other semi-final happening?
seasong
First Post
Exposition!
The first thing I noticed with this list of ingredients was the traps laced throughout. Rune doesn't like predictable scenarios (given the ingredients), so Asian flavor was right out. I mean, monks, origami, temples and a pearl? Yup, no Asian for me today.
He also included a very difficult ingredient, the femme fatale. It doesn't seem hard, but that's because most people think of a femme badasse instead when they see the word. Since he included it, I had to assume he knew what it meant (if he didn't, I would have gotten docked, since I abandoned the usual perception of the word entirely).
He also took the reasonably common phrase, "a forbidding mansion" and tricked it up. Forboding means something rather different. Bastard.
Finally, he included TWO locales. It's pretty tough just to work elements into one locale within the time frame of IronDM. Having two requires not only twice the work of designing one locale, but it also requires that you spend time on connecting the dots and making sure it's "one, whole scenario". Bastard.
The pearl is also a bit difficult: it is a passive object, and it is hard to work a passive object into a scenario and not feel tacked on. The question tends to come up, "well, what if it was a ruby?" or some such similarly irritating thing.
But then, everything was made okay. He'd included a pearl. I'm about to geek out for a moment, so please forgive me...
Pearls are the earliest gemstone we have records of, the first beautiful stone adored by humanity. They've been called the Queen of Gemstones, and have appeared in literature dating back to ancient Egypt and the dawn of writing. And, tying in with the femme fatale, pearls have always been considered a femminine jewel. The Egyptians associated it with Isis the healer; the Greeks with Aphrodite; many cultures have associated them with the moon and femminine cycles; and many also believed that they were formed from tears of joy. Cleopatra dissolved them and drank them, and she was a quintessential femme fatale.
Oddly enough, pearls are also the gemstone for June.
Despite these positive aspects, however, pearls have another layer of meaning: greed and suffering. In Roman times, the penchant for pearls became so gross that women were wearing dresses that could literally stand on their own, they were so stuffed with the precious oyster spit. Europe very nearly depleted the entire oyster population looking for the bits of shiny, and laws were enacted in many cultures to curb ostentatious displays of the stuff.
The associations with self-destructive greed, and the power of the pearl to destroy a man's wealth and happiness, has been a common theme to the pearl for almost as long as the pearl has been worshipped as the goddess of healing and happiness.
Can you see why I got a funny feeling?
As these thoughts danced through me like tiny pearl-bedecked cherubs of joy, I decided to go with a Modern Earth setting. Partly in tribute to anonystu, but also because if I didn't, I would have had to include some fantasy background on the pearl, and it just didn't have the same oomph (for ME) as the rich history of our own world. Of course, I might have maybe included the above 250 words, but I decided it was too geeky to live, and let the scenario stand on its own.
Tumbling after that thought came two more: for a modern setting, I would use Church monks instead of D&D monks; and the temple would be their monastery, where the pearl was kept.
I already had some inklings for the pearl. I knew I wanted it to be ancient, older than humanity (as Isis would have wanted). I knew I wanted it to have corruptive power... and that I wanted it to be an active object. And I knew I wanted it to have something to do with the femme fatale, possibly in creating her.
Isis, incidentally, is called the healer because she sewed her husband (Osiris) back together after his dark brother Seth cut him into several pieces and tried to feed him to the crocodile Sekhmet. She is all good things to the Egyptians. So my first thought was that she was a powerful woman who had possessed this particular pearl and that it gave power over life and death. Isis would have been one of the few who used it for good, rather than ill.
Secure in that thought, I then went on to write up the Dragon Cult, and how they thought the pearl was a dragon egg. I had a lot of fun with it, and since a Church order of monks is all-male, none of them would be able to use the pearl, causing it to languish indefinitely. Boy, I kill me.
Melpomine's Keeper isn't original, by the way - I borrowed him, or rather synthesized him, from a campaign I ran a while back. The PCs came across a room full of Muses, chained to pillars for the pleasures of their owner. And I stole even that idea from an obscure little story by Neil Gaiman, where a writer kidnaps and keeps a Muse to provide himself with stories (he gets it in the end). The paintings were my way of tying the Muse's artistic association with the forboding aspect, and I rather liked the result.
I tied the mansion in the only way I could think to: I like giving PCs a base of operations, so I was either going to put the pearl in the temple or the mansion, and make the other one the base of operations. That neatly tied it all into one scenario.
Pitr Vascova kind of came all at once. I'm not proud of him, but I do like him - the idea of a very sensitive artist with just enough of a femminine side for the pearl to affect... only he goes mad and runs away
.
The origami golem was a nod to the literature I was abundantly stealing from. A paper tiger is a false fear - something that seems terribly frightening, but is mostly bluff. Melpomine's Keeper was one big bluff to keep the PCs from noticing the real danger, so I decided that protecting the red herring with a paper tiger to make it credible was a pun I couldn't pass up. I deeply, sincerely apologize.
I was thinking I was done, and only needed to write in the details of the setting, when the illithid came to me. And the egg idea. It so neatly explained everything else, including why the pearl was what it was throughout history, that I couldn't let it go.
Especially since female illithid are so rarely discussed. My egg from the stars was born, and I began tying stuff together.
Since the pearl was a MacGuffin (except that it WASN'T a MacGuffin, it only looked like one), it made hooks and factions easy. Perhaps too easy - I didn't spend much time on them, and cool hand luke did a much better one.
Saint Margaret was an instant choice for the Dragon Cult, and neatly tied in the pearl aspects of the "tears of joy" thing along with the "stomach lining" thing.
The Silver Chain was wholly there to help explain Melpomine's Keeper without it looking like I was writing rules just to get HIM in - the rules were for the Silver Chain, you see, he was just an "afterthought"
.
Then I wrote guidelines for taking all of these things and running the PCs through pearl-tinted hell.
Oh yeah, the femme fatale came with the illithid - and as soon as I started thinking about a woman being co-opted by the illithid to lay eggs for their species, I immediately thought this would be great for one of my players. And so I wrote it that way.
A few specific comments on the judgement:
I'm very glad you liked it, and that I managed to make it reasonably complete in less than a billion words (I tried to follow the example of the "nutshell settings" in Pyramid Magazine, which fit an idea for a setting into a single article).
Seriously, it doesn't bother me in a setting with polymorph or enlarge. I could have just said they were 10 lbs, period, but I wanted some magic in it
.
.
The first thing I noticed with this list of ingredients was the traps laced throughout. Rune doesn't like predictable scenarios (given the ingredients), so Asian flavor was right out. I mean, monks, origami, temples and a pearl? Yup, no Asian for me today.
He also included a very difficult ingredient, the femme fatale. It doesn't seem hard, but that's because most people think of a femme badasse instead when they see the word. Since he included it, I had to assume he knew what it meant (if he didn't, I would have gotten docked, since I abandoned the usual perception of the word entirely).
He also took the reasonably common phrase, "a forbidding mansion" and tricked it up. Forboding means something rather different. Bastard.
Finally, he included TWO locales. It's pretty tough just to work elements into one locale within the time frame of IronDM. Having two requires not only twice the work of designing one locale, but it also requires that you spend time on connecting the dots and making sure it's "one, whole scenario". Bastard.
The pearl is also a bit difficult: it is a passive object, and it is hard to work a passive object into a scenario and not feel tacked on. The question tends to come up, "well, what if it was a ruby?" or some such similarly irritating thing.
But then, everything was made okay. He'd included a pearl. I'm about to geek out for a moment, so please forgive me...
Pearls are the earliest gemstone we have records of, the first beautiful stone adored by humanity. They've been called the Queen of Gemstones, and have appeared in literature dating back to ancient Egypt and the dawn of writing. And, tying in with the femme fatale, pearls have always been considered a femminine jewel. The Egyptians associated it with Isis the healer; the Greeks with Aphrodite; many cultures have associated them with the moon and femminine cycles; and many also believed that they were formed from tears of joy. Cleopatra dissolved them and drank them, and she was a quintessential femme fatale.
Oddly enough, pearls are also the gemstone for June.
Despite these positive aspects, however, pearls have another layer of meaning: greed and suffering. In Roman times, the penchant for pearls became so gross that women were wearing dresses that could literally stand on their own, they were so stuffed with the precious oyster spit. Europe very nearly depleted the entire oyster population looking for the bits of shiny, and laws were enacted in many cultures to curb ostentatious displays of the stuff.
The associations with self-destructive greed, and the power of the pearl to destroy a man's wealth and happiness, has been a common theme to the pearl for almost as long as the pearl has been worshipped as the goddess of healing and happiness.
Can you see why I got a funny feeling?
As these thoughts danced through me like tiny pearl-bedecked cherubs of joy, I decided to go with a Modern Earth setting. Partly in tribute to anonystu, but also because if I didn't, I would have had to include some fantasy background on the pearl, and it just didn't have the same oomph (for ME) as the rich history of our own world. Of course, I might have maybe included the above 250 words, but I decided it was too geeky to live, and let the scenario stand on its own.
Tumbling after that thought came two more: for a modern setting, I would use Church monks instead of D&D monks; and the temple would be their monastery, where the pearl was kept.
I already had some inklings for the pearl. I knew I wanted it to be ancient, older than humanity (as Isis would have wanted). I knew I wanted it to have corruptive power... and that I wanted it to be an active object. And I knew I wanted it to have something to do with the femme fatale, possibly in creating her.
Isis, incidentally, is called the healer because she sewed her husband (Osiris) back together after his dark brother Seth cut him into several pieces and tried to feed him to the crocodile Sekhmet. She is all good things to the Egyptians. So my first thought was that she was a powerful woman who had possessed this particular pearl and that it gave power over life and death. Isis would have been one of the few who used it for good, rather than ill.
Secure in that thought, I then went on to write up the Dragon Cult, and how they thought the pearl was a dragon egg. I had a lot of fun with it, and since a Church order of monks is all-male, none of them would be able to use the pearl, causing it to languish indefinitely. Boy, I kill me.
Melpomine's Keeper isn't original, by the way - I borrowed him, or rather synthesized him, from a campaign I ran a while back. The PCs came across a room full of Muses, chained to pillars for the pleasures of their owner. And I stole even that idea from an obscure little story by Neil Gaiman, where a writer kidnaps and keeps a Muse to provide himself with stories (he gets it in the end). The paintings were my way of tying the Muse's artistic association with the forboding aspect, and I rather liked the result.
I tied the mansion in the only way I could think to: I like giving PCs a base of operations, so I was either going to put the pearl in the temple or the mansion, and make the other one the base of operations. That neatly tied it all into one scenario.
Pitr Vascova kind of came all at once. I'm not proud of him, but I do like him - the idea of a very sensitive artist with just enough of a femminine side for the pearl to affect... only he goes mad and runs away
.The origami golem was a nod to the literature I was abundantly stealing from. A paper tiger is a false fear - something that seems terribly frightening, but is mostly bluff. Melpomine's Keeper was one big bluff to keep the PCs from noticing the real danger, so I decided that protecting the red herring with a paper tiger to make it credible was a pun I couldn't pass up. I deeply, sincerely apologize.
I was thinking I was done, and only needed to write in the details of the setting, when the illithid came to me. And the egg idea. It so neatly explained everything else, including why the pearl was what it was throughout history, that I couldn't let it go.
Especially since female illithid are so rarely discussed. My egg from the stars was born, and I began tying stuff together.
Since the pearl was a MacGuffin (except that it WASN'T a MacGuffin, it only looked like one), it made hooks and factions easy. Perhaps too easy - I didn't spend much time on them, and cool hand luke did a much better one.
Saint Margaret was an instant choice for the Dragon Cult, and neatly tied in the pearl aspects of the "tears of joy" thing along with the "stomach lining" thing.
The Silver Chain was wholly there to help explain Melpomine's Keeper without it looking like I was writing rules just to get HIM in - the rules were for the Silver Chain, you see, he was just an "afterthought"
.Then I wrote guidelines for taking all of these things and running the PCs through pearl-tinted hell.
Oh yeah, the femme fatale came with the illithid - and as soon as I started thinking about a woman being co-opted by the illithid to lay eggs for their species, I immediately thought this would be great for one of my players. And so I wrote it that way.
A few specific comments on the judgement:
There was simply no other way to follow my "funny feeling". And I wanted to make sure anonystu's sacrifice was not in vain. Well, that, and when I shake my head too hard, new settings fall out.
I'm very glad you liked it, and that I managed to make it reasonably complete in less than a billion words (I tried to follow the example of the "nutshell settings" in Pyramid Magazine, which fit an idea for a setting into a single article).
Bah! Such simple-minded adherence to physics can not affect Megatron! He is a villain! He breaks laws!
Seriously, it doesn't bother me in a setting with polymorph or enlarge. I could have just said they were 10 lbs, period, but I wanted some magic in it
.Actually, I meant to mention something about how killing Melpomine's Keeper in his realm wouldn't have legal repurcussions, but I must've forgotten. It's one more reason for the PCs to want to keep the place - a way to make enemies disappear
.
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