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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sagiro" data-source="post: 463298" data-attributes="member: 726">1. How many sessions deep are you into your story? (meaning- how many single game sessions have you written up for your SH so far?)I have run 138 game sessions over almost exactly seven years.  (The 7th anniversary of our first game is Tuesday, November 12th)  This Story Hour chronicles the whole darned thing.2. Everyone seems to agree that a successful story hour can only come about as a result of passion on the writer's part for the story, not the glory. Still, how much do you value reader feedback?Reader feedback is great!  I hope it means lots of people are stealing ideas liberally, just as I steal from every source I can find.  Plus it fills me with warm fuzzies to know that I’m entertaining folks.  Oh, and it swells my ego to a nearly unmanageable size!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />3. What percentage of your own players read the story, would you say?I think they all do.  Some of them probably go to my campaign web-site instead, where (except for the most recent runs) all of my Story Hour posts can be found.  Morningstar’s player recently printed out the entire thing, for times when they wanted to trace some obscure plot hook back to its source.4. Do you value the page views column on the main page? If so, do you feel like jumping from a bridge when you see Piratecat's views? I think “value” might be too strong a word, but I think they’re cool, and I enjoy knowing that readers are deriving happiness from something I love to do anyway.  This question did make me take note of the interesting “stat” of views-to-posts ratio, which generally runs in the 15-1 to 20-1 range.  As Views increase, Posts tend not to keep up, even in relative terms.  For instance, among threads updated in the past five days, the top 7 Views-To-Posts ratios are:Piratecat’s Updated Story Hour: 279-1Sagiro’s Story Hour Returns: 99-1Wulf’s Collected Story Hour: 89-1Defenders of Daybreak: The Early Years: 75-1The Rape of Morne: 54-1Darkmatter D20…:  42-1…Knights of Spellforge Keep: 25-1…and these are exactly all of the threads with more than 10,000 views.  What does it mean?  Beats me!  It only confirms that a) the Story Hours with lots of views are more significantly perused by “lurkers” (as a percentage of total viewers) than those with fewer views, and that b) I’m a stat-head weenie with too much time.As for Piratecat’s obscene Views count: doesn’t bother me at all, since I’m one of the Lucky Few™ that gets to play!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />5. What's the worst in-game moment you've had to write up? Examples could include a total party kill or heavily hyped bad guy going down in the first round, etc... Things that just don't really happen in epic fantasy fiction. I can’t think of anything like this, off the top of my head.But to answer a different, related question:  the thing I most regret about my Story Hour is that I’m so lousy at recalling dialogue.  My players are endless reeling off wonderful, dramatic and/or humorous dialogue during the game, but I never have the time to write it down while I’m playing, and then I forget it afterward.   One of these days I’ll sneak a tape recorder under the gaming table… 6. What three things (single sentences each) would you say are most important in a good SH?- a compelling plot- good pacing - humor- grammatical competence(Oh, you said three things?  My bad.)7. What three things (single sentences each) would you say are most important in a good SH writing style?- reasonable enough spelling that it doesn’t become a distraction- use of paragraphs- avoiding run-on sentences8. How many sessions behind are you in your writing, compared to where the campaign actually is, in-game?Right now I’m about four extremely action-heavy runs behind “real life.”9. Have you ever tried to turn events (discouraging a certain course of action, cheesing a rule, etc.) in-game for the benefit of the story hour? If so, have your players called you on it?Nope.  10. If your story hour were published in novel form, paste here what you would want as the first-page teaser: several paragraphs from the story to hook the attention of a browsing bookstore patron. EDIT: quick note- people seem to think I mean the same old "give us a few paragraphs about your SH". I mean "Give us a few paragraphs FROM your SH". ***A few minutes after the sending there is a knock on Grey Wolf’s door. Skorg is there with a big grin on his face. "Lunchtime!" he says brightly. Grey Wolf can detect an unpleasant odor coming from the kitchen. Skorg rouses Kibi as well. "Come on! You wizardy types need to eat sometime, to keep up your strength."In the dining room the table is set with plates containing some sort of black oozy substance. A questionable smell wafts from the plates. Eddings is already seated, trying not to look disgusted. "Black lizard pie!" announces Skorg proudly.  “I made it from scratch myself. I had the Icebox deliver a brace of fresh black lizards, and used some of Ernie’s spices to give the pie extra flavor.”“I suggest the spices," Eddings offers helpfully. "Lots of spices."Kibi and Grey Wolf sit, their noses wrinkling uncontrollably. Skorg starts wolfing down forkfuls of pie. Eddings pushes his food around with his fork without enthusiasm. And then the Greenhouse vanishes. Grey Wolf feels a lurching in his stomach, and the constant feeling of churning semi-nausea is replaced by a different sort of discomfort. Now it feels like a deep vibration, like a buzzer is going off in his innards. After a second of disorientation, the four of them look around and see that they are in deep, deep trouble.It is night. They are outdoors, on a vast plain, in the midst of an army. All around them are tents, campfires, and the sounds of an army camp at night. They can hear grunts, clanks, voices, horses, the crackling of torches. The air is filled with the aromas of sweat, urine and gruel that follow large armies wherever they go. They are all still in their chairs, forks in hand. Eddings looks around slowly. "I, uh, don’t suppose this is something you have done on purpose?" he whispers.***Nearly 150' down, the vertical shaft opens onto a wide stone corridor with a black glass floor. The party surmises that they have reached the bottom of the bottle that contains the city of Zhamir. Screams, loud sobbing, and maniacal laughter all echo throughout the City Below, which seems to be a latticework of straight stone corridors and mostly empty rooms. A small child huddles near one wall of a corridor, begging for water. Pog warns the party to ignore him, but Kay and Ernie cannot abide the child's pathetic pleas, and give him water to drink. He takes a sip, begins screaming that he's been poisoned, and launches himself at Kay, scratching and kicking. He does not relent until Ernie knocks him out. Shaken, the party continues on while screams and babble resound all around them.  At one point an old man pokes his head out of a dark room, and the party recognizes him from a portrait in Repose; it is Kinnvhad, but he is mad beyond help, and goes into fits when the party asks him of details of his former life. At last the party is brought into a small room with wooden benches, and one simple door at the far end. "Solomea is through there," Pog tells them. "Don't speak too loudly to him, and understand that he is quite eccentric. I won't be going with you; he is quite particular about that when he talks to strangers. There will be a short length of hallway, which opens into Solomea's room. Good luck!" The Company heads through the doorway, and the hallway stretches into the darkness before them.  As they pass the threshold each feels a slight shiver, and a feeling of unease creeps over them.  Morningstar casts thought capture – and immediately goes unconscious.  She comes to after a few seconds with a splitting headache.They continue on.After twenty more seconds of walking it is clear that this is no "short length of hallway." They turn to look back toward the door -- and see that there is no more door.  Rather, the hallway ends at a vast star-filled space, like a stone catwalk hanging out over an abyss. In fact, the space is slowly advancing toward them, and the hallway itself is being "eaten away" by it.  Dranko walks to the edge, taking constant steps back to stay on solid ground.  He can see that the space extends in all directions; the hallway empties out into an endless starry void. The party is essentially chased along the hallway by the encroaching void, but after half a minute they can see the same void ahead of them as well.  With nothing else for it they continue ahead until they find themselves standing on a wide iron disc, floating all alone in space. All around them, above and below, stars twinkle in the night. Then the face appears. It is unimaginably huge, taking up a full quarter of the horizon, its distance impossible to gauge. It is an old man's face, with stringy gray hair and a mostly-salt salt-and-pepper beard and mustache. And it begins to laugh, a slow, resonant chuckle that booms through the void.  It speaks in a voice that echoes from everywhere. "Welcome to the Maze. Welcome, to my mind. See what the Maze has done to me, and… what it will… do to you. It is… but a reflection of your minds, which are now in my mind.  Ah, yes, I'm afraid you won't be leaving. Yes, I'm very afraid." Then, in a softer voice, with a clear note of panic in its pitch: "Very afraid." And finally, in a soft voice filled with unmistakable terror: "Help me…" The face fades away, leaving them alone on an iron disk floating in the void.  Then, high above them, something fills the sky. It is a vast iron labyrinth, terrifying in scope, stretching through the blackness as far as the party can see. It is upside down from their point of view, as if the Gods themselves are holding it inverted high above their heads. And it is descending. Closer and closer it comes, filling all space and thought; the sky is a huge iron maze, and it is falling. Then they notice that another equally large maze is rising up from the depths below their floating disc. For a few brief seconds, they can see that both mazes are irregular, mostly filled with even iron-walled passages, but with various strange features dotting the expanses – rooms, walls of other materials, blotches of color. But the two labyrinths, falling from above and rising up from below, seem as though they are going to crush the Company like a pair of monstrous jaws. They brace for the collision… 11. Give us a link, pookie.Here’s <a href="http://enworld.cyberstreet.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=598&perpage=40&pagenumber=1" target="_blank">my Story Hour</a>, and here’s <a href="http://home.attbi.com/~dorian/charagan.html" target="_blank">my campaign web-site</a>.  (Due to attbi.com flakeyness, you may need to hit "refresh" a couple of times.  Don't believe it when it tells you it can't find the url...)-Sagiro</blockquote>

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