Contest October-November Short Story Contest: and the winner is...

For me, one story stood clear, and that was "fear". It captured you to begin with, and stayed with me afterwards.

Narrowing down to a top 4 is something I will need time to do, as plenty were brilliant, and all were great. 'The Ghosts' will be there too. Eh, so hard to narrow down.

I will put some more thought into it and post again... Great job everyone

 

Ps. What's a serephon?

 

You have been away for a long time, haven't you, @discomute .

Age of Sigmar (AoS) came and hasn't went. The overall net effect, after subtracting disgruntled old-timers dumping the hobby and adding starry eyed little nooblings, is that GW has given all of its models copyrightable names.

Gone are lizardmen, elves and dwarfs.

Now we have Seraphon (technically daemons of light), Aelfs, and Duardin - which are identical to the old armies except the prices are higher.

Oh, and the Aelfs are even more overpowered.

The only things linking the AoS universe to "the World that Was Nerfed" are those who attained godhood before the the nerf-curtain dropped.

Therefore we are stuck with Sigmar (yawn), Nagash (again) and probably some grumpy dwarf deity. Sotek seems to be around, but the Old Ones are still in the realm of buggered-off-somewhere.

Interestingly, the Great Horned Rat seems to have shown his colours as being a minor Chaos God, and Slaanesh has gone "missing." Theories about that on this forum include, "because you can't sell models with genitals for heads to starry eyed little nooblings" (from @Phatmotha-phucka)

The factions are now (please correct me, because I don't care) Order, Death, Chaos, and Destruction (the last of which rolls Grots, Ogors, Orruks and Troggoths together. Roughly translates to goblins, ogres, orc, trolls and STOP MESSING WITH THE FANTASY LEXICON together).

The new game system is easy to pick up, fun, full of holes and useless to grouchy old tactical wargamers.

The net effect of GW trying to hold onto it's own shrinking turf by making it impossibe for any other companies to use their IP is that several new game systems are storming into popularity, and any fool (and Phatmofo) with a 3d printer and a penchant for writing rules is no longer writing rules, but is putting his keyboard to use for writing a business case for becoming an online miniatures merchant.

I am partway through putting up a review of the Seraphon fluff, which should be up tonight or tomorrow. Save your votes on the seraphon stories until then, BUT you need to realise that all of our stories were written before the "official" Seraphon fluff dropped last weekend. Prior to that, we all had about 3 paragraphs to go on.

And don't buy GW shares.

 

haha yeah I knew most of that - it was the phrase "Seraphon" that I didn't really understand.

I hope that this is okay but I have decided that I will vote for Fear alone.

I did this because I thought it was clearly the best story. Firstly it captured the theme of horror very well, in both from our perspective (the great description of the leg wound) and from the protagonist (the dark). Secondly I have a great amount of respect for stories that are done from a lizardman's perspective, as it is something that I struggle with. Thirdly it drew me with in instantly, and has a good ending, I still remember it. Fourthly, and just a personal preference of mine, I love it when stories take a small insignificant character and illuminate a greater conflict. (e.g. fav tv show of all time is firefly)

 

The last time a guy didn't use his full vote allocation, he got pestered by people trying to bribe him into voting for theirs too.

Do you take cash or cheque?

 

If I knew there were bribes up for grabs I wouldn't have voted so early! Haha!

 

I accept bamboo and cash...cash to buy bamboo with.

 

The only reason I would have any issue with voting for one thing is that, frankly, there are a crapton of good submissions in this contest, and it seems cheap to only recognize one of them with a vote when I had trouble deciding who to give my plentiful 4 votes because of how stiff the competition is.

It's a free internet, of course, so do what you will. But honestly, I don't see much reason in rationing votes when we only have 4 to start with. I figure if there's any issues with ties then they can just hold a tiebreaker.

But that's just me.

 

Also, is there a limit to what species of bamboo you will accept, or do you turn democratic tricks for any variation of the species?...

- u -

 

Yeah but that was my problem, I couldn't narrow it down to 4!

I thought that Fear was the best. Yes I would have liked to voted for all of them, but when it came down to narrowing it down for 4, I would think "hang on, how can I vote and leave XXX out of it?". So I just couldn't vote.

 

the problem i had with deciding which stories were the good the bad and the ugly is that they all deserved to win in different ways so i shall not cast a vote, with my entry '????' i struggled to put all of what i wanted to convey into it and i also want to add more detail but the last slann was very interesting . Anyway im doing a LM and 40k crossover so if you want check it out and post your ideas or thoughts

 

Agreed

 

1 more week for votes (and bribes)!

 

@Scolenex Where should I send bamboo?

EDIT: Oh no it suposed to be a PM!

 

If I can find time to read and vote... ...so maybe?

At the moment I am sitting in a herd listening to a computer generated voice say stuff like, "now serving R325 at window 12".