I did not, but I noticed the mistake and looked it up and decided it was actually perfect, thanks lol
Gunnrat
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The theme tie in could have been executed a little more crisper but... this! This is the kind of fundamental fleshing out of lore that OPR needs to thrive! And I'll accept nothing less than this quality, either. It was dramatic, so grim, hopeless, so dark and stuffed with that "I have to know what happened" energy that lore overviews will never reproduce.
Freaking 5-A. I'm a total sap for Fear and Loathing quantities of metaphors and junk stuffed into stories (especially short ones) and your ability to hand wave really complex ideas with a couple short sentences is very commendable. Mixing and matching races isn't very popular in the Grimdark genre for good reason but I think you really put together an interesting set of characters here!
I think you have a future in Hollywood screen writing.
I'm not anything that resembles someone who knows what they're talking about with writing but if I had to try to come up with some kind of feedback for this I would start with this: When you're looking over your own words for hours, sometimes the grammer makes more sense to you than it does for a first-reader- especially if you're not writing in your native language. Try to take a step back when you're trying to form a complex idea and describe in the simplest possible terms. Also, I can tell you had a message you wanted to make and had a Point A (planet name) and a Point B (enemy is defeat) but you should try to flesh those "everything at the wall" thoughts out according to the "themes" and main ideas you want to showcase.
If you want non-babbling advice from actual writers on how to avoid "and then, and then" syndrome, check some video essays on different story structures. This is very imaginative and I'm sure with some studies on story telling you could come up with something truly great
When I read the title, I rolled my eyes. I figured there would be tens of cheap stories making use of "weapon range" as an excuse to write action-scene dribble for this jam. Maybe so but there's just so much personality oozing out of this grunt sandwich that it can't help but bullseye the target audience. Good effect.
This was a fun waylay but your opening scene is actually a good teaching moment to showcase how redundancy can happen in writing: "sands of the ground beneath him" and "high walls surrounding him" and "aliens cheering/in a language he couldn't understand" and "inside the cage, slamming against the cage walls" and "tall, lean muscular, towering, 7 foot tall" - There's tons of these lines everywhere. Don't be afraid to use the short or incomplete descriptions of things and let the reader finish painting the picture with the rest of the text.
I really like the idea of a monster of a man calling an enemy a monster, that sentence alone makes sure that I know whatever it is, its big.
The language addresses terrain placement, not unit capture rules. "Accessible" meaning that since players may be able to place terrain or objectives competitively, and that objectives may be placed in a way that prevents vehicles/monsters from reaching them, they absolutely cannot be placed in any way that any infantry type unit would not be able to reach the objective. Thanks for the clarification.
I could nitpick on the handling of ranks and format of some of the dialog but my main feedback would be that the start and middle was way too detailed for the amount that was actually happening to forward the story. Personally I was into it, because I'm a sucker for tactical jargon and realistic military settings in scifi, but from a story perspective, the limited word count could hav ebeen used more efficiently. On the whole, it was fun to read =)
First of all, thank you for not uploading the mood board haha. This was a great little tale, well done, I don't really have many actual criticisms apart from a few lines where maybe you repeat what the reader just put together. Personally, I didn't like the ending, I would have liked to see the gunner be just as caught of guard by something as the pilot was by the competence of the gunner- so she doesn't start AND end the story bored. (Maybe the pilot's experience that intel is always wrong inspired him to keep one more trick up his sleeve? Again, personal taste) Well done, regardless. Fun, if short, encounter! Edit: I especially liked the line ~the crew was as ramshackle as the ship~ That was strong enough in and of itself that you could have cut alot of other lines!
I'll be honest, this feels like a first draft stream of consciousness piece. Sure, some of my favorite grimdark fictions are based on the casual moments in a wild setting, but feels like a single (drawn out) scene in a scooby doo play. The character's races are very artificial and have no bearing on who they are/what they want. The most climactic moment is a character using a piece of tuba to physically hit a ghost in the shin- which only creates more questions. My main advice though is to make sure your characters have motivation- our heroes have "nothing better to do" than to wander around the bandhall and we have no idea what the Elf Spirit was after except maybe it was a little frisky for some reason (The roles are reversed haha). With that in mind, you clearly have the capacity to be a great writer, and I'm eager to see what you bring to the next jam!
Really great myth story, this is the stuff that campfire tales are made of! As far the writing, I would always suggest that if you're going to use physical descriptions of a character (especially as the first paragraph) then you need to bring that back around by the end. Without a word limit, or with some editing, theres a great place in this story for that... I don't like the way the ending is written at all, it feels really rushed and just flat out tells the reader how it ends. I think if you could have described him like you did at first, but show how his appearance changes to the undead thing he becomes that would have been MUCH stronger. Other than that, I would nitpick on stuff like telling us that he "sort of" believes in the supernatural, or how the demon's appearance shifts the pace. Still one of the more engaging stories in my que so far! I'll probably be plagiarizing this tale next time I go camping =)
I do enjoy the "zoomed out" telling of this story- its much easier to fit more "happenings" in a story like this than one that tries to break into back and forth dialog. That being said, it still suffers a little bit (although less than I would have expected) from telling not showing- especially at the end. Maybe you could have woven in more threads of 'unspoken drama?' Still, as short as it was, it was a VERY easy read and that goes a long way. I advise not using paragraph indents in this format but well done =)
I enjoyed it! My main criticism was going to be that you sort of repeated information between dialog and character thoughts but the main example I went to use was Charlette's considering killing the necromancer- but that turned out differently than I expected haha, well done. other than that, I would have suggested spending more time building up/waking up the necromancer by starting the characters out in the second village to begin with- only because of the page limit
I'll be honest, this story reads more like someone giving the synopsis of a story than telling the story. I think its too bogged down with details that don't hold any significance to the point and don't really get the reader invested in what their goal is. I think the story would have benefited from trimming alot of the "traveling" from place A to B to C with at most a paragraph and instead focused on alluding to the character's worries. You could build up the dread and lore with some subtly before the last paragraph, then the readers would really feel the weight of the revelation. (I don't know what Bloodhounds are in OPR and I know very little about the Starhosts. Having the character ponder what those factions mean to him would have helped a clueless reader learn more) Looking forward to seeing you in the next jam!













