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

Which story or stories did you like best? You may vote for up to FOUR entries

  • Story 1: Fear

    Votes: 13 59.1%

  • Story 2: Tunnels

    Votes: 3 13.6%

  • Story 3: Trial of Cuezaltzin

    Votes: 3 13.6%

  • Story 4: The Ghosts We Have

    Votes: 12 54.5%

  • Story 5: The Days of Terror

    Votes: 3 13.6%

  • Story 6: Rat Poison

    Votes: 8 36.4%

  • Story 7: In the Serpent's Eye

    Votes: 9 40.9%

  • Story 8: Fool's Gold

    Votes: 3 13.6%

  • Story 9: Midnight Chase

    Votes: 7 31.8%

  • Story 10: Whispers in the Wind

    Votes: 3 13.6%

  • Story 11: The Last Slann

    Votes: 7 31.8%

  • Story 12: Secrets of the Southlands

    Votes: 13 59.1%
  • Total voters
    22
  • Poll closed .
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
 
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.
 
I was supposed to work...
Oh, well, it was worth it, the stories are really good (and four of them more than the other ones ;))
 
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 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.
 
People are free to use their vote allotment however they see fit. What shouldn't be allowed is not reading these pieces and not voting at all...

I was a little iffy on doing four votes when my previously set guidelines said "use three" but this was an exceptionally strong crop of entries.
 
Oldblood Itzahuan said:
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.
Click to expand...

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
 
For all those who are stuck deciding how to vote.

I took out my own entry, I never vote for myself (though that's not a rule, if you think yours is truly the best, vote for it). Though this time I don't think mine is in the top 50% (though I am still proud of it). Admittedly my piece in the first contest was just aimed @spawning of Bob and not expecting to win. Contest two, I really thought I was worried we'd have a small crop of entries and started working on something and POOF four or five people give me entries, so I guess I didn't really need to enter.

Any event, all the pieces struck me as good. Six of the pieces struck me as really good. I couldn't figure out which one I liked best but I knew my top two. Once that was settled, I had to cut the other four in half. Basically I paired them off with each other. I like A more than B, A more than C, and D more A. and mixed it up to make sure the transitive property applied. Contest two, I went in thinking I had a good shot (and I still wished I got more votes) but I believe the first and second place winners were objectively better than my piece. Contest three I didn't write. For starters I had planned the contest theme WAY in advance and already had a story idea so it would have been cheating in letter and spirit, instead of cheating just in letter like I did on this one.

I tried to not be biased, given that I knew all the author names, but I find myself rooting for the newish writers.
 
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".
 
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