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Thank you! I was getting caught up on OPR lore before the jam, and the new-ish stuff around the Goblin Reclaimers really piqued my interest.

The clarity of this piece is very impressive to me. You take a fundamentally disorienting premise - a battle, but during the battle things are being snatched out of time and devoured, and you've also got the Tt'arck hivemind you're playing with in the background - and you manage to display it to the reader in a clear, organized way.

This is one of the highlights of the jam for me. Great flow, well-paced, and well-organized: in a lesser story, the multiple scene breaks and the bold/colored text might have been distracting or messy, but here they work effectively and provide clarity. If I have any criticism for this story, it's extremely minor: I would have liked to see a little less exposition in the first column, to give you more space for detail as Graum sees all the past authors' mistakes.

I enjoyed this one a lot; the squabbling between Grekkag and Malach feels believable and the setup with the ritual is clever. The bits right after "How didn't we notice this sooner, Malach?" were real highlights to me. I can't help but feel let down by the ending, however. I understand what you were going for, with the surprise to both the character and the reader, and the subversion of your setup, but there was no foreshadowing - no slight movement of the vampire beneath the rubble, no previous mention of its one free hand, no slowly and ominously stepping closer, etc. - and the end result is an ending that doesn't quite feel earned.

Big fan of the tone here: it's somber, it's visceral, it does a lot to flesh out the Havoc Warriors and, in doing so, makes them surprisingly sympathetic. I am very interested in where you'll take the story from here - it feels like we got hints of a fun character dynamic between Bargotha and Druuk that one page is too short to explore.

Thanks! I try not to do too much fighting in my jam entries: partly to flesh out the universe a little more, partly because writing good action is hard and it scares me, and partly because battles have a nasty habit of taking up valuable words.

Between goblins and ratmen, this has been a great jam for fans of Weird Little Guys. I was a big fan of the way you played Ratchet and Gribble off each other.

Trying to do a humorous story is a bit unusual for me, as I'm never quite sure if it'll land. Thanks for your feedback!

That's exactly the sort of self-containedness I was going for - in past jams, I've really struggled with picking a story that can be done in one page without feeling incomplete. Good luck to you too!

Thank you! I think developing characters is the biggest challenge in a story of this length, so I'm glad you think I made it work.

Something something orbital mechanics waves hands vaguely. L1 is far enough away that it would be easier to just dump the Object into the star instead of doing a rendezvous with the planet, and it would have made more sense to just have the station be in orbit, but it's my right as a space fantasy science fiction writer to follow in the "parsec" tradition and misuse impressive-sounding terminology.

(The main reason I didn’t want to put the station in orbit is because then it'd be easy enough that I'd lose my justification for the Eternal Dynasty hiring a contractor instead of just dealing with it themselves.)

There are a few places where your wording stumbles, but it hardly detracts from the heavy and consistent emotion of the piece. It's a wonderful character study. Nice job!

This blows "Pals" out of the water. It's clear you've become a much better writer since the last time you touched Ratchet and Gribble; their relationship feels more real and the structure of the story is comfortable and familiar without being boring. Well done!

Anyways. 

Big fan of this story. I like the character focus, and I think you do a good job navigating the frame story and the inner story in a way that makes the divisions between them clear on the page, yet gives them both the space they need. I do think that changing the way you tell the inner story (maybe by structuring it as a story being told, or in a voice that doesn't match the frame story as closely) would strengthen the piece as a whole; the space between them is clear on the page, but the tone and content is so similar that they begin to blur together in the reading.

Your narrative style gives your work an authentic voice. Nice work!!

I enjoyed this story a lot - your premise is clever and well-researched - but I can't help but feel like the actual story is slightly out of focus. The pivotal moment of this story to me, and the part that really piqued my interest, came in the final two paragraphs: the Vrix are human, almost. The Vrix are human, but not quite. Reading the story leaves me thinking intensely about the moment of first contact in your literal Uncanny Valley; I wish you'd given that moment more space.

I'm glad you liked it! "The problem said" was one of the few pieces of my first draft to survive to the final, so it's good to know it lands tonally.

I could see that in your jam entry too! I think the setting is much more interesting when there's reasons for fighting within factions and cooperating outside them

Thank you! Good flow is high praise coming from the author of "The Dog Star Blues".

Thank you! Strong characterization is always something I aim for in my jam entries, but it's difficult to pull off in a thousand words.

Thanks for the kind words! For this jam, I was specifically focusing on pacing - in a lot of jam entries, including my past work, you can see where the story should have been longer but was cut down to fit, and I didn't want to make that mistake again.

Thank you! I know it's a wargame, but surely not everyone is fighting all the time, right?

I'm a big fan of this story. Your prose is polished, and it's really a feat to cram this much story into the word count while keeping it so well-organized.

This might be the strongest entry I've read yet. Your prose really is a breath of fresh air, and you perfectly capture the sense of quiet desperation.

This story packed a lot into the one-page limit, and you managed to do it without feeling cramped or rushed. The description of Oscar getting infected, and how it feels from his already not-quite-human perspective, was a real highlight for me.

I really wanted to like this piece, but it didn't quite land for me. I love the concept that you chose, and I like the structure of "increasingly desperate assassination attempts culminating in doing it yourself".  But there was a vagueness here that stopped me from really getting invested in the story, and I think part of it is that your chosen concept/structure is simply too much for the one-page limit.

Might be my favorite take yet on the "Ratman stowaway" concept! You do a great job selling Squick's attachment to Bean and creating genuine emotional moments, which is always a tricky thing to manage in a piece of this length.

You did a good job with the pacing of this story - it's a chase scene, and it feels appropriately frantic. The ending was well-done, too: in a different story, it might have felt like it didn't belong, but you managed to make it both unexpected and natural.

This one was an enjoyable read - the beginning of the story is very deliberately paced and very characterful. I was enjoying it so much, in fact, that Lucena's appearance felt very jarring and shook me out of the story. Just a little foreshadowing sprinkled through the first 2/3 of the piece would go a long way towards making the ending feel more "earned".

Big fan of this one. An Infected Colonies story is rare, and you do an excellent job of making Vera and the rest of the Infected sympathetic while still making sure they still come across as inhuman. The severed hand, especially, was an inspired touch.

I liked this one a lot - the theme is a very natural part of the story, and the ending payoff/reveal feels both earned and very clever. Well done!

This is a very well-paced story - it feels like it fits the word limit well without being too stretched or too cramped. I'm struggling to see the theme, though: is it meant to be Jack's detachment assignment that's "close enough", or is there something else I'm missing?

Thank you for your feedback! I would have preferred to take a lighter touch RE: Orsinia's interactions with her advisor, but I feel that in a story of this length it's hard to find a subtlety that works with the pacing and is still picked up on by most readers. I was waffling on the time skip myself; do you think it would have been better to leave it out completely? Would that have tightened up the story while still making the conclusion, well, conclusive?

Thank you for your kind words and feedback! Can you point out some places where you thought the flow stumbled? I'm not that pleased to include asterisk-breaks and time skips in a story of this length (I mentioned that in another comment, I think) and I'd like to know if those are what negatively impacted the flow to you, or if the problem lies elsewhere.

Thank you for the feedback! I was aiming for "quietly-simmering resentment and rage" more than "grin and bear it"; what sorts of fleshing-out were you looking for?

Thank you! I was worried about the section breaks (to me, that usually denotes a story that's just too long for the word limit) so it's nice to know it worked out.

I'm glad you enjoyed it! I wouldn't mind writing more Orsinia in the future, but it probably won't be for a jam: I like self-contained jam entries and I worry a serialized story might stray from that.

I really enjoyed the premise of this story; it feels like something straight out of The Expanse.  I can't help feeling, though, that the technical details you include (normally something I enjoy very much, and in your story they do work to establish the credibility of both the author and the characters) took up space that you didn't really have to spare. The climax of the story, the destruction of the "ramshackle rocket" itself, didn't carry a lot of emotional weight; in this case, I think more personal information about Jar and his crew would have served the story better than more technical information.

This one was a delight to read, and a real highlight of the jam! I loved the retired orc warboss (a strong way of differentiating the setting from its inspiration), I loved the ultimately-hopeful ending (such a rarity in these jams), I loved the phrase "you cleaved the skulls you were given".

It was spooky, it was ominous, you did a really good job of setting up for the punchline without giving it away. A real highlight of the jam for me. Maybe my only real dissatisfaction was that it was hard for me to see what made this a Grimdark Future story versus a Warhammer 40K story.