Shackled City Epic: "Vengeance" (story concluded)

[ajanders]

Heh, I'm afraid to ask.

Thanks for the kind words!

The basic ingredient for writing success. Apply butt to chair. Do not leave chair until 500 words come out.
Repeat.
When distractions arise, remind yourself that your butt is made of lead, and you must write 500 words before moving.

From Richard Nixon: sadly, that's one of his better moments.

 

[Lazybones]

The basic ingredient for writing success. Apply butt to chair. Do not leave chair until 500 words come out.
Repeat.
When distractions arise, remind yourself that your butt is made of lead, and you must write 500 words before moving.

From Richard Nixon: sadly, that's one of his better moments.

Ah. I've seen similar advice from Stephen King and Anne Lamont, who both wrote good books on the craft.

I think this is what I need to do with my next story idea. I already have an outline, but the power of the blank page and a general hesitation (this will be my next few months of free time, after all; I put hundreds and hundreds of hours into Travels and Shackled City), have thus far kept me finding excuses to do something else.

In fact, tomorrow I have some down time, as my current project at work just finished, so maybe I will apply the lead butt principle. It's not like I can get up and leave anyway.

 

[Lazybones]

The Shackled City PDF is up at http://lazybones18.tripod.com/shackledcity.pdf. It contains all 12 books of the complete story as posted in this thread, without comments. It's about 6 megs and comes in at just under 1500 pages. I made it bare-bones to save on file space. My provider is a free one, so I don't have a ton of bandwidth, but it should be able to handle a modest number of downloads. For that reason I ask that you save it to desktop rather than download it each time you want to read.

Let me know if any of you want it but are having trouble getting ahold of the file.

 

[Neverwinter Knight]

Ha, just grabbed it!

Congratulations on finishing the campaign - quite a big project. It was a lot of fun seeing things and characters develop and being able to talk about it with you every step of the way. Few characters have had to take so much of a beating as did Arun & co. and the Travellers, but it was an amazing ride that - amazingly - had a happy ending.

I would especially like to give you kudos on the last part of the story, which was your own. In any campaign he appears in, Graz'zt is an overpowering enemy that is virtually beyond all party's ability to defeat. I felt that the difficulty you set for the PCs was adequat for their enormous task! I especially liked the discovery of Graz'zt true nature (in your campaign).

So, thanks again! I will keep your story around and know I will be rereading it again and again!

 

[Elemental]

Hard to believe it's finally over. Harder to believe it's been four years since it all started.

I liked the ending. An apocalyptic showdown, and then a short, quick ending that shows evil is never quite as big and scary as it seems. And I'm glad that the last chapter was Mole's--she's always been my favourite character. It's a nice mirror of the very start of this story, with she and Zenna heading down the path into Cauldron.

Thank you for this story. I hope one day I'm able to write one this impressive.

 

[Lazybones]

I'm glad you liked the ending. I thought about ending it on a less optimistic note, perhaps with a small scene in the Abyss, but ultimately I preferred this one. I'm not a big fan of epic play, and doubt I'll ever get back to these characters, so I think they have earned some peace and happiness after all I've put them through these last few years.

Thanks again to all readers who took the time to post feedback in this story thread.

 

[Nyayesh]

Thank you

Thank you.

I - and I'm sure many others - have been lurking around since the beginning of this SH without writing a single line of praise.

I registered an account about halfway through the tale, and this is the first out of a rare few posts that I will be seen making (until about three-four other story hours see their end), dedicated to the author of what began as an enjoyable read.

So here's to you.

 

[Rabelais]

Wow. It looks like I chose well for my first Story Hour. This was pretty great.

 

[Neverwinter Knight]

I thought about ending it on a less optimistic note, perhaps with a small scene in the Abyss, but ultimately I preferred this one. I'm not a big fan of epic play, and doubt I'll ever get back to these characters, so I think they have earned some peace and happiness after all I've put them through these last few years.

Thank you for that !!!


And a kudos *bump* where it is due!

 

[CrusadeDave]

I'm not a big fan of epic play, and doubt I'll ever get back to these characters, so I think they have earned some peace and happiness after all I've put them through these last few years.

I'm starting to lose my fondmess of it as well. Last month my players decided that they were too scared to continue in the plot in the direction they were indicating, so I had to set aside my prep, while they decided to clear up all the loose ends in the campaign they let dangle for the past 4 years.

So I get to try to upconvert random encoutners from a CR 16 in 3.0 to a CR 21 in 3.5.With no warning from session to session about what they're going to clear up next.

"Hey, we never hunted down Imix and all the cult members who fled behind that Portal we sealed. Let's get 'em!"

"Hey, that scary looking undead castle in the ruined Drow city that we weren't interested at all. I bet it has some loot. We should look into that before we go kill Cthulu."

There are SOOOO many options for players.

Thanks again to all readers who took the time to post feedback in this story thread.

And this is the real reason for the post.

What an amazing story. Right up there with my favorite story hours. This is a colossal achievement, congratulations.

I'd love to see what you'd come up with if YOU wrote an adventure path module to get players from 1-22. You have an excellent gage of challenge, and I think you dragged every bit of adventure that could be had out of this module. I'd love to see what tools you could build with your sense of timing with the cliffhanger.

Great job!