WotC Setting Search News

[Jürgen Hubert]

Re: golden age...hmmm

Regarding the search. A one-pager was definently not enough to really set the proper tone of an entire world. I think there are many submissions that would blow us all away that just didn't initially attract the reviewer's eye.

Maybe WotC should have increased the number of participants in the second round to one hundred or so. Oh, well... I guess their reviewing resources were stretched thin enough already.

 

[seasong]

So, I'm sitting here, reading these submissions, and I notice a few things.

1. You could turn those paragraphs into a list of bullets, and it would read about the same. Which likely means I wasted a lot of time worrying about "flow" and "paragraph cohesion" when I could have been packing in more details with short, hard sentences. My bad, worrying about prose when I should have been worrying about idea density .

2. Show, Don't Tell. Instead of saying, "there are lots of mage types", listed out a bunch of mage types. Pretty obvious, when it's looking out at me from the text.

3. Golden Age. Yeah, yeah, this isn't the only criteria, but it does point out that my setting (while optimistic about what the heroes will do in the future) was perhaps a shade too dark for WotC. Especially when I could have set things a century previous (my setting was post-apocalyptic) and offered WotC thriving political centers, a sea-floating city, airships, powerful magics, etc.

So, all in all, I don't feel too bad. There's some good reasons these settings were chosen over mine, and I can see how to improve any other submissions I make in the future. I may do a rewrite of my submission, just to see how it turns out .

 

[Fast Learner]

That's not what he said. He said that he didn't "mention the words 'Golden Age'." That does not exclude it from having a golden age type theme.

Good point.

 

[Abulia]

Congrats...but?

Now playing the part of devil's advocate is…well, me.

First, a hearty congratulations to those that made the cut to the second stages and beyond. Actually, I should expand that to everyone that entered--doing so certainly took guts.

Now I wonder, what is the current fascination with those that didn't make the cut? Suddenly they're a hot commodity for getting rejected? Out of 10,000 (or so) entries, these lucky few made it to the next round but, sadly, their 10 page treatment wasn't good enough. Yet, somehow, these treatments are suddenly good enough for second-tier publishers?

It seems a little like fighting over the scraps that Wizard's has thrown from the table. FFG got together and made an entry, but apparently didn't think "Dawnforge" was worth pursuing in house. Now it's been rejected by Wizards. Now it's suddenly cool! They're "relieved" it was rejected. Why do I imagine the cover of "Dawnforge" will read: "DAWNFORGE: A primeval world where the great empires have not yet fallen and magic still courses through the earth like a raging river. Rejected by Wizards in the second round!"

RSKennan made good inroads and is a self-admitted amateur hoping to get published. (I presume with no published credits currently to his name.) By virtue of the fact that a panel of Wizard judges, using a selection process that none of us know the criteria was, accepted him for the second round the presumption is that, perhaps, his setting is somehow superior to the 9,999 others?

The appearance seems to be that being rejected by Wizards affords some instant name-recognition and some clever individuals and companies are hoping to feed off of this. Kudos to them, I suppose.

In closing: "I was rejected by Madonna--come date me!"

(Again, a sincere congratulations to those that participated, moved on, or fell short.)

Regards,
Don Mappin

 

[ColonelHardisson]

Maybe WotC had in mind certain elements they would like to have seen in the winning setting, but I think it would have been better not to have mentioned them. That's so that they would have the chance of receiving entries that didn't have the hoped-for criteria, but which dazzled on completely unique properties. There is always the chance that at least one of the top three is unique in this regard, and doesn't contain the criteria WotC might have been looking for.

 

[Greg at FFG]

Re: Congrats...but?

It seems a little like fighting over the scraps that Wizard's has thrown from the table. FFG got together and made an entry, but apparently didn't think "Dawnforge" was worth pursuing in house. Now it's been rejected by Wizards. Now it's suddenly cool!

It's probably a matter of perspective. As the author of the proposal, I don't think of Dawnforge as a "scrap" or a "reject," though I knew it was inevitable that some folks would characterize it that way. I look at it as the germ of a setting that some smart folks at the leading publisher in our industry chose as the 0.1% that they wanted to hear more about.

And FFG, the company, didn't submit the proposal to WotC. Several of us at the company got together and submitted it as a team. We'd still like to see it published and our relationship with FFG makes that a no-brainer. As individuals, we will not, sadly, be making a hundred grand off it this way, but it's still exciting.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Re: Congrats...but?

RSKennan made good inroads and is a self-admitted amateur hoping to get published. (I presume with no published credits currently to his name.) By virtue of the fact that a panel of Wizard judges, using a selection process that none of us know the criteria was, accepted him for the second round the presumption is that, perhaps, his setting is somehow superior to the 9,999 others?

Hey, if you want to get your setting some name recognition, you gotta advertise in any way you can.

I mean, I didn't get to the second round, and I still plug my setting in my .sig file...

 

[Abulia]

Greg & Jürgen:
No problems. Like I said, simply playing devil's advocate.

Best of luck to both of you!

Regards,
Don Mappin