bravesirrobin88's page

my vote went to Sean for "Grasping At Shadows".

Sam Zeitlin wrote "Grasping At Shadows," not Sean. Sean wrote "Among the Gears of Madness." If you wanted the Plane of Shadows, make sure you voted for the right author!

You may have noticed this already, but because it looks like the contest is going to come down to the wire I thought it worthwhile to point out.

First of all, I agree wholeheartedly with Ernest Mueller and gbonehead: the adventure happening here is really cool, and though its playing on a storytelling convention (the faustian bargain), its doing so in a really interesting way with very compelling characters. It reminds me a bit of what Sam did with The Gentleman Knave and the Robin Hood trope.

...the idea of there being enough fetchlings in this valley town to fill a ghetto is jarring.

I think it would be stronger if whoever was conspiring with him wasn't actually fetchlings...

I did just want to touch on one aspect of the fetchling thing. Thinking about the scenario presented, Sam mentions that the baron rules for almost 10 years with the support, aid and protection of Nicasor. It doesn't seem all that strange to me that fetchlings would be attracted to a smaller town with a strong connection to the Shadow Plane, even if that town was out of the way or too small to normally support a minority ghetto. In fact, I think it's quite likely that Nicasor would have some direct connections to a few of the fetchlings, as he probably recruited a few of the planetouched to help keep up his end of the bargain. Naturally, when he turned on Stepan, he would use those connections as a part of his plans.

Don't know if that changes anyone's opinion, or is particularly useful, that's just how I interpreted the presence of the fetchlings in this proposal.

I voted for Sam Zeitlin (Arlington, VA) - Grasping at Shadows.

Based both on the strength of his submission and his body of work in the competition, he is the person I most want to see writing a Pathfinder module.

Based on comments so far, I wrote up a short tie-together for everything that I feel the adventure is missing...

While you're right, Ronars, that the adventure you've proposed would address the disjointedness of the elements in this proposal, it's also fundamentally different from adventure proposal we've been asked to consider.

I liked Neil's breakdown because he evaluated the "oomph" of the proposals: the meaty, fun, memorable adventure that is there to be had. Basically, I'm more interested in the amount of that oomph in each of these proposals than I am in the needling details of the presentation, if only because I think that in working with the developers, the winner will really learn the polish of the presentation. It's the capacity to deliver on the oomph that, in my opinion, makes the writer a Superstar.

The problems that you've "fixed" are exactly where I see the oomph lacking, you know what I mean?

So, use passive when you either can't or shouldn't (or don't want to) specify an agent.

I think we should take care to point out what kind of writing the judges are critiquing here. (I could have said "care should be taken," but someone might call me out on passive construction....) Seabryn makes an excellent point: the passive does an excellent job of obscuring the actor in a sentence. That is why the classic examples of the passive voice are apologies by politicians and press secretaries (My favorite is always, "mistakes were made.").

However, when writing an adventure proposal, or for an RPG in general, I think the author really wants to avoid obscuring things. The point is to communicate as much information to the publisher, development team, and eventually customer as quickly and clearly as humanly possible. Particularly for complicated plots, the writer and the developers want the eventual GM to be crystal clear on who is doing what to whom. The GM, on the other hand, might make excellent use of the passive voice while running the game in order to create suspense and sense of discovery for the players.

I guess what I am trying to say is that we should be careful not to paint with too broad a brush by suggesting that there is categorically good or bad writing; there are important guidelines and conventions in every writing discipline, and I think that context is important.

All that said, I think Seabryn's post is one of the most clearly articulated descriptions of the passive/active voice distinction I have ever read, and ANY kind of writer in ANY kind of discipline is going to benefit from having a stronger command of that breakdown.

That's enough mindless drivel from me. I now return you to your regularly scheduled RPG Superstar conversation.