Discussion Make your suggestions to improve the fluff forum here.

[Scalenex]

I haven't got much feedback on the tags in the fluff forum but people are using them and we have a good variety as is.

Contests

@spawning of Bob is free to administer the art contests however he sees fit, but if you have a suggestion I'm sure he'd open to read it.

Unless there are objections to the multiple votes (which increase the odds of ties), we are going to continue the forumula for short story contests and presumably for the art contest that for every three entries rounded down, every forumite gets one vote.

Voting for yourself is generally viewed as not a good thing, but it's not prohibited like with the Golden Serpent. Why isn't it prohibited? Because it's more work for moderators. We have to audit votes. No real point as long as we don't have prizes for the fluff contests.

Do you want prizes? Well we can take donations from forum members who want to offer up prizes. We might be able to able to get business sponsors, but they have requirements. The Red Devil was a tough negotiator and would not change the rules of the Golden Serpent around the sponsors preference but they did require a short advertising blurb, a hyperlink to their website and a counter to measure traffic generator. I doubt we'll get corporate sponsors for our fluff forum. The link between writing or drawing and spending more money on the hobby is pretty weak.

If there is interest, we can add additional contests. Maybe a long story contest (with a correspondingly long entry window). We can also do a best of 2016 at the end of the year and have a winner of winners amongst the contest winners or top contenders in the various seasonal contests.

We can do poety, memes, animation is tempting but I don't see many forumites having the tools for that one.

Minor change Bob and I are going to implement going forward is to post a blank response to the initial voting threads on our contests. That way we can copy and paste in the winner announcement right at the top.

Indexes

If anyone has any thoughts on making the indexes better, let me know.

One thought is to take all the art stuff out of the Lustriapedia and add it to the Temple of Artzifaartzi. Another thought is to move the entire Temple into the Lustriapedia's blank page. Thoughts?

Some of the more prolific writers have been writing personal index pages for their work. This is convenient for me, because I can copy and paste them into the Lustriapedia in one go. This is convenient for writers because they can present everything however they see fit. Bob and I have briefly discussed NOT copying and pasting personal index page and instead offering a hyperlink to the personal index page. I wouldn't do this for everyone, just authors with three or more pieces.

For the Lustriapedia users: Would that make things easier because the author page would be less cluttered? Would that make things harder because that's one more link to navigate through to find the story?

 

[SlanntaClause]

I think prizes are a good incentive for competitions but look at the entries you get without prizes its inspiring how many enter for the reward of having their story read by others - having said that you could offer up prizes that relate more to fluff maybe some of the existing lore books or audio CDs that GW sell? Or if it were for myself writing a story for the content and being bad grammatically and spelling wise a prize could be some editorial sessions on some works to refine a body of work to its fullest potential but someone would have to offer up their time to do this.

Additional contests sounds good because some people have lots of ideas flying around in their head and if they don't get them down on paper they can be lost forever also I know from experience that from a single theme title it can inspire an entire entry that the author may not have ever conceived without the prompt. Personally I like poetry I'm not the best at it but so I'd like to see one. Longer stories I'd support but the time to read all the entries would dramatically increase so as suggested it'd need longer time windows.

I don't know how plausible it is but if there was a prefix of "compendium" or something where authors could post a collection of their works with comments disable except for the author then it would provide a very compact and easily accessible view of all their stories without the clutter of off topic natterings. Just a suggestion

 

[Crowsfoot]

I think the forum could benefit from an Authors tab which is locked so you just see the author click the hyper link to another sub page with there work, where they take comments and discuss.

I wouldn't launch any more contests as I feel we have plenty of options as is.

 

[Killer Angel]

I'm with @Crowsfoot , the current contests work pretty well, I don't think we need something else.
That said, I'm against prizes: competitions with tangible rewards may lose some of that lightheartedness that I like.

 

[thedarkfourth]

I'm against prizes - I don't think I'd actually want to make the comp, well, competitive. The friendliness of it is one of the biggest appeals for me. On the other hand if entry numbers start to seriously dwindle it wouldn't be the worst idea to start incetivising more. (that's a big if)

My one suggestion is that going forward the story comps should be capped at 2,000 words instead of 2,500. Just because it is starting to take a ridiculously long time to read all of them, and people need to learn to write concisely! (I'm as guilty as anyone in this respect, of course)

I would say there's little point in having a vote for best story from 2016 - but what we could do instead is ask all of the comp winners to write a new piece and publish it with original artwork from the art comp winners in a small pdf "anthology". The L-O 2016 Anthology. Or Lustrology. Then we have one of these per year as a record. Mainly I'm suggesting this as a way of forcing Slanputin to write more.

 

[Y'ttar Scaletail]

Chaos Dwarfs Online's Story Competitions do prizes, though the (at least thus far run) UE story comps have never done that (perhaps partly because of how low-key it often has been and how it'd take an age to get anything like that sorted.) However, the Golden Rat competition offered a forum medal and a few of the famous UE dice. There was discussion a long while back between the UE Mods about if the Story Comps should have an awarded banner system for participation and perhaps some form of medals, but this was never worked out.

One idea that had some success on the UE was world building writing challenges. The fluff Mod would put up a "what if" theme like "What if Skavenkind actually won? What would this future be like?", or a "historical event" theme like "The First Skaven Civil War", or a co-op event where the writers build up an existing or new location/Clan (for you Lizzies it could be a co-op history and layout of a Temple City.)

 

[SlanntaClause]

what if

I seriously love this suggestion It adds a lead to a theme suggestion that makes it more of a direct challenge to create different scenarios from each author. Does leave room for the possibility of identical stories though - however mathematically unlikely

Edit: Oops my weblink embedded the song xd

 

[Y'ttar Scaletail]

In regards to What If kinda challenges, here's the UE's two examples. They were really fun to do:

After the Ascension
The First Civil War

I'm not sure how many themes you lizzies can do, though. Historical war against Pestilens? What if one of the First Gen Slann survived? What if several Lustrian Temple Cities became corrupted by some evil item/relic of the Old Ones gone wrong?

 

[SlanntaClause]

What if there is no great plan? :O

 

[Scalenex]

If I'm reading the consensus right, I'm hearing "stay the course". We do not need more or fewer contests then we have. Prizes are not worth the trouble.

My one suggestion is that going forward the story comps should be capped at 2,000 words instead of 2,500. Just because it is starting to take a ridiculously long time to read all of them, and people need to learn to write concisely! (I'm as guilty as anyone in this respect, of course)

There used to be a 2000 word limit, but the very first contest the winning piece and the runner up both exceeded this. I thought, if this is what people want, I'm not going to make a stink about word count. I don't know about making the word count 2000. That seems to be a tall order for some, myself included, but I do believe that lots of people, myself included, need to work on being concise. I'm sorely tempted to issue a hard 2400 word limit, as in 2401, disqualified.

I'm open to what-ifs but we can/should probably keep it informal and open-ended.

I think the forum could benefit from an Authors tab which is locked so you just see the author click the hyper link to another sub page with there work, where they take comments and discuss.

Is this a contest or Lustriapedia suggestion. Not sure what you mean by "authors tab which is locked"


Anyway keep the feedback coming ladies and gentlemen.

 

[thedarkfourth]

There used to be a 2000 word limit, but the very first contest the winning piece and the runner up both exceeded this. I thought, if this is what people want, I'm not going to make a stink about word count. I don't know about making the word count 2000. That seems to be a tall order for some, myself included, but I do believe that lots of people, myself included, need to work on being concise. I'm sorely tempted to issue a hard 2400 word limit, as in 2401, disqualified.

Yes I think a hard limit would be good. Then you could also say "2,000 or under is encouraged, to ease the load for readers".

 

[Killer Angel]

What if there is no great plan? :O

'til Zlaaq lives, there will always be a Great Plan!

 

[Rednax]

ALL HAIL ZLAAQ! ALL HAIL ZLAAQ!

 

[Scalenex]

Okay, unless a bunch of people revolt at this. I'm going to politely encourage people to try to keep things around 2000. I won't post anything with more than 2400. time permitting, I will word trim early submissions. If a submission comes in towards the end of the submission deadline, I'll chop off the end till the piece is 2400.

 

[Bowser]

@Essmir did it before it was cool. I think that's pretty fair though.

 

[spawning of Bob]

I'm right behind you, Great Caesar, and I know several of the senators are as well.

Yours truly,
Brutus.

 

[Killer Angel]

Okay, unless a bunch of people revolt at this. I'm going to politely encourage people to try to keep things around 2000.

works for me!

 

[Essmir]

Well finaly people are follwing my lead!
And to the ones draging out long .Do you need every sentence? Does it evolve the plot or the caracters? No? Then skipp it, I usualy do it before I have even vrithen it saves time that way.

 

[Warden]

In regards to What If kinda challenges, here's the UE's two examples. They were really fun to do:

After the Ascension
The First Civil War

I'm not sure how many themes you lizzies can do, though. Historical war against Pestilens? What if one of the First Gen Slann survived? What if several Lustrian Temple Cities became corrupted by some evil item/relic of the Old Ones gone wrong?

I like this idea. Using specific themes taken from fluff history to inspire new writing competitions. This would help fluff out the lore on areas of Lizardmen history that are currently untouched, or shed new light/view well-known periods in Lizardmen history from different angles. The War of the Rat (pestilens invasion to Lustria) would be a great setting (alternate titles being the Rise of Sotek). Maybe a competition concerning Mazdamundi's war on Cadavo or even the campaign to conquer Albion and the founding of the new city Konquata by Kroq-gar! A Southlands competition might be interesting too.

The only issue I see going the Lizardmen history route is that it leaves the AOS portion of the fluff out...

I'm right behind you, Great Caesar, and I know several of the senators are as well.

Yours truly,
Brutus.

said every skaven ever.

 

[Y'ttar Scaletail]

I like this idea. Using specific themes taken from fluff history to inspire new writing competitions. This would help fluff out the lore on areas of Lizardmen history that are currently untouched, or shed new light/view well-known periods in Lizardmen history from different angles. The War of the Rat (pestilens invasion to Lustria) would be a great setting (alternate titles being the Rise of Sotek). Maybe a competition concerning Mazdamundi's war on Cadavo or even the campaign to conquer Albion and the founding of the new city Konquata by Kroq-gar! A Southlands competition might be interesting too.

The only issue I see going the Lizardmen history route is that it leaves the AOS portion of the fluff out...

Aye, it's a problem that AoS doesn't really seem to have as much of a legacy of lore to expand or play around with in comparison to the Old World.

However, i'd say it is possible to transcend both of these by having a somewhat broader theme that can fit for both. For example, the current UE challenge is called To the Stars and does not have to necessarily be Old World or AoS (heh if anything, Skaven in Spaaaaaaaaaaaace could be done as 40k fluff, especially if we're talking about pre-retcon Hrud.)