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Fiction Spawning of Bob - Blood Dish (discussion thread open)

Bowser said:
Also congrats to @Oldblood Itzahuan When you get back though we want a chapter for this out of you!
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Thanks @Bowser ! The big day is this Sunday, so once the traditional marraige sacrifice is complete and the ceremonies/ritual hedonistic retreat is done, you can expect me to hit the ground running again! Also, I love what you've done so far @spawning of Bob ! Who says you can't cram techno-jargon with the best of them? (Sotek knows that's all I usually end up doing XP)
 
Thanks, Itchi. I value your affirmation. I wanted to channel a bit of you and a bit of @Iskander with his 40k crossover, but really didn't have story space - hence I have an Old One spinoff short story I want to do.

Does anyone remember who wrote an Old Ones as space-farers / terra formers little texture piece from years back?. I would like to look at it again.

Moving WHFB into the SciFi realm is usually pretty cool. @Xholankha the lost one had an idea he was working on which I hope he is still developing.

Any hoo, this discussion is about ME, not you guys. My other experiment was to NOT reply to comments on the middle of renewing the story. I value all feedback at all times, but I have, at times, expended energy second guessing myself and self justifying to valued critiquers who were not privy to where the story was heading, so of course it didn't make sense to them at the time

The risk of spoilers is high if I try to self justify as I go, so my experiment was to post chapters and otherwise clam up.

I'm sure it cost me 166 likes (damn you, @Crowsfoot !), And it nearly killed me not to respond when @tom ndege mentioned "Hell's Angles".

Question to you, dear critiquers: does less-Bob build anticipation? Do you feel cheated by the lack of randomness in your life?
 
spawning of Bob said:
Thanks, Itchi. I value your affirmation. I wanted to channel a bit of you and a bit of @Iskander with his 40k crossover, but really didn't have story space - hence I have an Old One spinoff short story I want to do.

Does anyone remember who wrote an Old Ones as space-farers / terra formers little texture piece from years back?. I would like to look at it again.

Moving WHFB into the SciFi realm is usually pretty cool. @Xholankha the lost one had an idea he was working on which I hope he is still developing.

Any hoo, this discussion is about ME, not you guys. My other experiment was to NOT reply to comments on the middle of renewing the story. I value all feedback at all times, but I have, at times, expended energy second guessing myself and self justifying to valued critiquers who were not privy to where the story was heading, so of course it didn't make sense to them at the time

The risk of spoilers is high if I try to self justify as I go, so my experiment was to post chapters and otherwise clam up.

I'm sure it cost me 166 likes (damn you, @Crowsfoot !), And it nearly killed me not to respond when @tom ndege mentioned "Hell's Angles".

Question to you, dear critiquers: does less-Bob build anticipation? Do you feel cheated by the lack of randomness in your life?
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Ya the story is still being written an I did say that about the old ones
 
Character Voices - thanks for the heads up, Otzi. If I write some more with these guys I will try to push their personialities a bit further, then go back and alter their lines / give their lines to other characters when I do the "final draft"

I really only had vague personalities / styles locked in by about 1/3 of the way through writing. Here is the list as it stands now:
Kuada-Boc- cynical, sarcastic, fatalistic.
Ta'kul - terse
Brocnos - impulsive, blunt, annoyed by skinks
Resva - impulsive, easily bored, enjoys pulling Brocnos' tail and otherwise playing with fire. Sometimes insightful.
Centra - concrete, unimaginative, follows the rules
Chaffi - averse to pain, always looking for a way out, perceived as cowardly
Priest Tedroit - he sort of just happened. Inspired by @thedarkfourth 's priest trying to sound more mysterious than he really is.
General Fliroda-Gotar - pompous, grand, self obsessed.

Every other lizard - rude, sarcastic, insulting towards other classes. Mixed patrols / work details are the butt of EVERYONE's jokes because of the mix of classes. i.e. Brocnos would have low stock among saurus because he is led by a skink captain.


Since I've got a list of names up here, they are all anagrams / mispronunciations of football positions, football teams or personalities.
Kuada-Boc = Quarter Back
Resva = (wide) Receiver
Rendev and Brocnos = The Denver Broncos
Fahanns = the screaming fans
You work out the rest.

I'm pretty happy with this bunch of names - I don't think they were so obvious that they destroyed the suspension of disbelief too badly.

Did you guys think the names were OK? Was Lord Jeri'Joens going too far?


And BTW, I totally independantly came up with the name of "Orkland Raiders". Then I discovered it is the oldest joke in bloodbowl. I'm going to travel back in time and sue their asses.
 
spawning of Bob said:
I totally independantly came up with the name of "Orkland Raiders".
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Don't you hate when you're the most clever person ever and then a bunch of people preemptively stole your super clever idea in the past? Happens to me all the time.

Also Jeri'Joens was just far enough to be at the line but not over it. He does look like a toad though, so good call there.
 
154796-Jerry-Jones-Looks-Sad.jpg

Put on 180 pounds, Add a bit of bling. Lose the hair. He does look like a slann.
 
More discussion - Lucky finds


The entire plot line – lizards were spawned for bloodbowl – which was itself a method of managing the Greenskin problem. This was cut short by the Great Catastrophe. A patrol find the super bowl and figure it out. The whole inter lizard rivalry was meant to represent that the LM they had collectibvely lost their way. Bloodbowl would restore their teamwork and show that the world could be put to rights. By sport. The original title for the story was “Spawned for This”. The 8th edition map indicated that the only decent city near the Amaxon Basin was Tlanxla. By decent, I mean “not infested by canaonical characters”

I started writing. In the process of filling in the blanks / giving characters motivations, this is the list of “lucky finds” – ideas that came to me as I went along.

  • · Calling someone “bonehead” – which I need to change in the next draft
  • · Evidence that the Old Ones created Bloodbowl.
  • · All of the insulting one-liners.
  • · The ball being mistaken for a quango.
  • · The kroxigor being extra dumb (I usually make them smarter than everyone else. If you guys try being quiet, it might work for you).
  • · All of the names after Brocnos and Kuada-Boc.
  • · Slow time. I did this just as a way of being able to slow the action down to the speed that I could write clearly. At first, this was just an effect of being “in the moment, in the bowl”
  • · Chaffi running away from everything.
  • · Celebratory dances after a point is scored.
  • · Amaxon tribesmen being “Fans” Originally, greenskins were going to appear at the bowl.
  • · Orkland Raiders. The original Greenskin team was to be the “Green Pack Bayas” with some explanation of the word “Bayas” That was going to be the warboss’s name, probably.
  • · The Face-painted witchdoctor.
  • · The Fahanns clearing the jungle of hazards.
  • · Centra’s unimaginative personality.
  • · Setting up Ta’kul to shout “quango”
  • · The concept of volunteering for dangerous patrols, just to avoid being in the city.
  • · Everyone’s overreaction to the threat of a quango egg.
  • · Priest Tedroit’s manner of speech. I literally wrote “You others, go away and do the things you do when you are not… when you are not doing the things you do.” because I had not thought of other duties for them. The rest came from there.
  • · The use of a time warping spell to render the quango safe and therefore the concept that the bowl had a magic field of some sort.
  • · The ceiling of a star chamber revealing the stars. The Slann having black eyes which either reflected the star ceiling or, even spookier, contained the cosmos within them.
  • · The slann “knowing everything” In fact, he only knew things that it was reasonable to know first hand – because he had been around from the beginning, and had seen Bloodbowl as it was meant to be played.
  • · The idea that pyramid temples are receivers, and inverted pyramids are transmitters for magicky stuff. This led to the thought who will they transmit to? And thus the Old Ones in Space subplot.
  • · The use of a pushing gesture to illustrate what a dish does.
  • · The idea that the bowl area is always known to be Orc infested during the full moon – because they migrate to the bowl in the hope of getting a game.
  • · A place for training – the Plaza of Heroes. Which has a Hall of Fame. And later the Pantheon of Lost God’s provided an excuse for using Old One’s names for different plays.
  • · An excuse for giving them bloodbowl protective equipment.
  • · The “4 page AoS rules” gag.
  • · Calling a scored point a “touch dance”
  • · Being able to skip 2 weeks of story time (that’s a long training montage, folks) by linking two sections with the same words. “I wasn’t expecting that”.
  • · The LM bringing their own crowd. The crowds mixing amicably.
  • · Therref. I actually needed a referee. Originally I had though the Biggest Fahann could do it, but that didn’t make sense. Therref having a whistle which caused so much pain that compliance was assured.
  • · The greeskins sneaking weapons onto the pitch.
  • · The coin toss, theft of coin – directly led to the creation of jingle-sacks. All of the effort was worth it.
  • · The Crippled Old One ship subplot. I am trying to write a full short story on this right now, but it is harder than I expected. There are too many big ideas to fit the time frame of the story, and not enough actual “story” to justify extending its length.
  • · The combat with knife wielding Fungus. This meant I could skip a lot of pointless description of the rest of the play, and also indicate that skinks are actually pretty hard core, and LM are well matched against greenskins.

All that added up to an extra 10000 words, and a lot of rewriting to make later developments fit. Lucky finds are an inevitable consequence of my approach to writing - write myself into a corner. Ask myself what would the characters ask / how would they respond / what would they do next? The characters write the story. My job becomes editor - cutting out all of the stuff they do which doesn't propel the story and connecting the ideas so they make sense.

It doesn't sound very efficient, does it?
 
That is all very efficient! I like the part of skipping needless description with a knife fight! I think my ideas for the next short story contest are already brewing. Short sentences with almost no descriptions, just quick stab knife fights. That fits nearly any theme!
 
Hey! At least I find some time to write something here while I'm on the train again...
I know it's been ages ago but here some more words about this nicely done piece of literature! ;)
I really liked it! And I now really understand people watching daily soaps... ;)
The characters where very well described and all seemed to have their own special flavour. And they kept it till the end of the story.
Though I'm not into football (nor soccer) I recognised not every sidekick in that direction when I did it really enjoy! I especially liked the amaxons being the fahans and the big latex claw of the general!
Also the slann was one of my favourite ones! ( I still imagine that he was really sleeping with an open mouth for millennia due to the fact that he was responsible for the blood dish and had nothing to do cause it was lost to the jungle...)
Chapters ending with a climax was also nice, and I feel like you have always started the next chapter in a good way. I like when you start reading and the flow continues...
Also the use of the knife fight or the fahans clearing the way for the patrol on their way back to town were enjoyable ways to get around describing the boring walk home or the not so interesting part of the game... ( who watches football if there's a real fight going on?!)
All in all nice work. And once again sorry for the late reply! Now my thumbs hurt cause of writing this all on my phone... ;)
 
Sorry that took me so long to read

The only blood bowl related feedback i can offer is in relation to the name "Fungus". "Fungus the Loon" is a star player goblin fanatic available for orcs and goblin sides. I think calling your goblin Fungus was a tad confusing at first for that reason.
 
Thanks, Disco. You've prompted me to do a reread and look at my notes again. It's only been this week (a year after you identified the issue that I have found a solution to the "bonehead problem".

I am still fearful of being caught in an overlong, pace killing match report, but I am quite writer's blocked with 3 other projects, so redoing this might be a good place for me get flowing again... After another unsolicited short story that I started yesterday.

@Warden is doing a LM historical timeline which I hope will link canon and fan-fic works, and possibly short "histories". I wonder if he will have space for alternative origin stories such as is alluded to here.
 
spawning of Bob said:
Thanks, Disco. You've prompted me to do a reread and look at my notes again. It's only been this week (a year after you identified the issue that I have found a solution to the "bonehead problem".

I am still fearful of being caught in an overlong, pace killing match report, but I am quite writer's blocked with 3 other projects, so redoing this might be a good place for me get flowing again... After another unsolicited short story that I started yesterday.

@Warden is doing a LM historical timeline which I hope will link canon and fan-fic works, and possibly short "histories". I wonder if he will have space for alternative origin stories such as is alluded to here.
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I am all for adding additional history to the timeline :bookworm:. Right now its concentrated on canon works, with some creative license in placing some earlier events that don't have a specific date attached to them (such as mostly everything that happened before -4000 IC). I am still working through some of the stuff provided by @Qupakoco but need to consult my actual books some more and sort out what else I can possibly find that's cannon.

I would definitely be able to add personal history-events provided by others to the timeline, I can always add a "*" to events to designate them as non-canon, or make them a different color or something. Maybe make two sections, one for official and the other for unofficial historical events, similar to what @Scalenex has done for the fluff index.

That being said, I need to read through this thread and mine it for new information!
 
Warden said:
I would definitely be able to add personal history-events provided by others to the timeline, I can always add a "*" to events to designate them as non-canon, or make them a different color or something. Maybe make two sections, one for official and the other for unofficial historical events, similar to what @Scalenex has done for the fluff index.
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I like the idea. I'm not sure if I'll contribute. I know Orphaned Temple City happened roughly 30 years after Count Renliss' Journey to Lustria which was about 2000 years after "The Fall of Turochlitan" etc etc, but I haven't figured out who was wearing the Phoenix Crown in Ulthuan or which imperial date they correspond to. I'm concerned if I tie down my dates now, I won't be able to write the stories I want later. "You can't have Renliss parley with Konrad Von Carstein, Konrad's was destroyed three hundred years before Renliss sailed to Lustria."
 
I have fixed my main fluff timeline with Canon WRT to The False Moon War (8th Ed ARmy Book Timeline) and then moved the end of the Imperial civil war by a few decades (later I think) to explain the rise of Emperor Magnus as a consequence of the False Moon War. I intend to include the rapprochement of dwarfs and elves (not dated to my knowledge) and later plan to move the rise of Vlad von Carstein and his ultimate fall into the middle of my extended narrative - which will be centuries out.

Imperial Historian Bauchnabel would explain that the records are much more exciting if you mix them up a bit.
 
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