Contest October-November 2025 Short Story Contest, voting and reading thread

Except, key difference here: quadruple jumps are hard. Just throwing Chaos Dwarfs into any old story is easy as a jumping jack. Thus, to use myself as an example, I will only use Chaos Dwarfs if the routine would actually benefit from their inclusion organically, rather than defining my entire routine around a bunch of jumping jacks.

 

That only has an effect if the judge wishes to maintain an air of credibility. Such motivations are beneath me. I am Chaos.

In the early days you would have been fully correct, but now it is a bit more nuanced. Recently we've had several instances where multiple stories in a single competition featured Chaos Dwarfs. In that case, how they are used to craft the story does actually come into play. It ceases to become a purely simple and straightforward inclusion.

 

Aren't you guys happy that @Lizards of Renown inadvertently started this Chaos Dwarf fiasco with his story in this contest ? That was the point of origin. For the record, he also won that contest (via tie breaker) to start the trend of Chaos Dwarf story domination.

As a side note, look at how many entrants there were in that contest!

 

When you're that good you can play outside of what is typically considered "best practices". That said, even he typically relied on his most dominant hand.

 

Which is why I implore people to harness the Chaos Dwarf advantage. Otherwise the writer has to simply hope that none of his competitors leverage that power.