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Showed his submission
Gray,
I don't do extensive critique's but this is my take on your submission:
Is it Ganix or Ganex? The name changes mid submission.
I think you've got some pretty good ideas as to what kind of rats we're dealing with, don't be afraid to mention templates and stats, now the rats can be any kind of rat, even the boring kind.
Robbing PCs of equipment if frowned upon!
Rival party, why doesn't this occur at the end?
spreading the adventure over 2 (in-game) days may be bad, given that the scenario may only take 4 hours.
The assassin vine is not very special, the outline requested a special vine.
Faction missions are not terribly exciting.
I got the feeling that your submission might have held some passive voice, I didn't check for it with MS Word, but maybe you can check for yourself?
Light Dragon, I've had a chance to read your submission.
Overall I liked the encounters but the Intro and Summary didn't seem to explain the plot in enough detail - enough to get me excited to play.
Also sometimes I found you used words like concurrently and they
stood out rather than made me want to read more. However the phrase "pickled mephits" was a cracker, made me smile. Keep that up.
Cheers
Submission
Light Dragon
Here is my feedback for what it is worth. I tried to avoid reading the other critiques of your work. So, this may be repetitive, but if you hear the same responses from others, it may be worth consideration.
• I also had to re-read the 2nd paragraph a few times to get an idea of what was going on. Consider that the order of events in the paragraph is a bit confusing. First a mages tower is ruined and covered in water. Then looters picked over the ruins (that are under water?). Then cataclysmic magic sent half of the castle into the earth (wasn’t it already under water). Sorry, but at this point I’m lost.
• “The PFS needs you to investigate” Why? The PFS is not a police force. I don’t see why they would send anyone to investigate. They might alert the local militia, but this doesn’t seem like a PFS type mission.
• The Summary: I may be wrong, but the siege castles are right outside of Absalom. Are you certain there are geysers there? At the end of this paragraph, I still do not have a clear idea of what this dungeon is about. Part of me is still wondering about the skeleton/tendril think in the ocean and how this ties together. Also the sentence “hang suspended in plants doing battle with vermin”. I believe you mean to say the PCs “hang suspended in plants while doing battle with vermin”. You original suggests that the plants are fighting vermin while the PCs hang around.
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submission
Darkjoy
OK, I cheated on yours a bit as I read NSpicer’s review. He was very thorough, and I agree with many of his observations. My first impression was that your entry was something I could see playing. Your writing is good, but you may need to think more about the logistics behind your scenario.
• In addition, I really liked the idea behind the demi-plane and the tower lying down. However, the story on why the tower had not been discovered did not seem plausible, and the demi-plane seemed a bit powerful for the situation.
• Your ecosystem threw me a bit. I can see why a thoqqua would be there as a burrowing creature. However you have such a nice theme with the pale blood-drinking plants. You’re entry made me more interested in seeing what these strange plants could do. A thoqqua seems boring in comparison. But an environment where ghostly white blood-sucking plants are living off of a local tribe of grimlocks, well now I’m interested. With that said, I’d ditch the stirges too, and add another plant encounter. (Granted, I see similarities between your entry and mine that I like, so I may be biased. In fact, if I were to change my entry, it would be to add elements of yours.)
• It seems that future submissions will not require Faction Missions. However, you may want to consider how the factions could assign missions that they have no knowledge about. For example, no one could possibly know that there is a demi-plane under the tower, but the Osirion mission is to retrieve soil from the demi-plane.
• One more plot point that bothered me involves the death of Varn. If the assassin vine was freed from it’s confinement after killing Varn, then why did it not leave the area and relocate to the surface. Considering that it is very mobile, and there are much more opportunities to find prey on the surface . . . I can guess that it longs to be near the demi-plane, but I’m not certain.
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SubmissionI believe you mean to say the PCs “hang suspended in plants while doing battle with vermin”. You original suggests that the plants are fighting vermin while the PCs hang around.
ah shoot, the while was misplaced.
thank you :)
>>It almost reads that the gray tendril was trolling with the skeleton as bait to catch children, or whatever may be attracted to a skeleton rising from the ocean.
Actually that is what it was doing.
>>Instead, I was wondering why a child would be grabbing a skeleton that just came out of the sea, and why some creature was using a skeleton as bait.
Hm. That made sense to me, knowing children grab at everything, but other people said the same thing so I admit it was perhaps not as likely a conceit as I assumed.
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okay, and also thank you French Wolf!
-LD.
Hi... Just for fun to look at Gray's piece:
>>Ganix the necromancer accomplished little to make himself a noteworthy figure in history
I know someone else mentioned this before... but that is a major turnoff for reading further. Why do I care about this person (in the first sentence)?
>>Legends suggest the crystal orb glowed with eerie necromantic light, and observers could see the swirling images of bones in the globe’s smoky depths.
nice depiction.
>>The Pathfinder Society discovered a soldiers’ journal detailing the first siege and mentioning a necromancer named Ganex.
"and mentioning" ... ... Verb/noun agreement?
>>The journal provides a map depicting the fortress’s floor plan before it was destroyed.
Implies that the floor plan was destroyed.
>>The Venture Captain hires the PCs to excavate the site, find the stairway, and perhaps recover the Skeleton Moon.
either cut perhaps or change to hopefully. Perhaps makes it seem like the "Moon" isn't important at all, sort of a throwaway term and item.
I really like the Artifact.
>>pay day
one word?
The rat encounter I seemed fine... why not combine it with Rats II and have it (like II) happen at night. 2 rat encounters seem boring.
>>The hungry plant recently discovered a bountiful feeding ground here, and it grew abnormally large in the necromantic light.
Is it eating rats?
Good Luck.
~LD.
submissionDarkjoy
OK, I cheated on yours a bit as I read NSpicer’s review. He was very thorough, and I agree with many of his observations. My first impression was that your entry was something I could see playing. Your writing is good, but you may need to think more about the logistics behind your scenario.
Gray,
Thank you for the input, hopefully I'll get to use it when the next open call is announced.