Workshop: Ancient History

[Philomel]

Name of Completed Thread: Ancient History (http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?25073-Ancient-History-Beginnings)
Name of Authors: Herald of the Storm
Type of Thread: Quest
Thread Length: 16
Feedback Rewards: (Post Length of Thread/10) * ((EXP Needed to Level)*0.05) EXP
Date Closed: 24th July 2016

Critique Guidelines:

1.) Standard rules for etiquette apply. No spamming or off-topic posts, no personal attacks or trolling. Focus on critiquing the thread, not the writer. Use constructive criticism and try to speak in terms of "strengths" and "weaknesses". For example: "Your story was strong, but the action seemed a little weak. Try using more adverbs to describe actions or use a thesaurus to spice up your word choice."

2.) Likewise, those who have asked for a workshop should take criticism gracefully. Use it to better yourself. These are not intended to offend or belittle, only show you opportunities to grow.

3.) If at any point you notice improper conduct, contact an administrator immediately. Bullying of any kind will not be tolerated. Arguing will also be regulated heavily. Polite, constructive debate is permitted within reason.

4.) In order to receive EXP & GP for your feedback(see Workshop Guide), a critique must be helpful, elaborate, and considerate. It is suggested that the review be at least 3 paragraphs and focus on strengths, weaknesses, and overall content. You may use the Althanas Rubric as a guide.

5.)Those that leave an exceptionally detailed review with plenty of constructive advice may be eligible for double rewards. This will be up to the posting judge's discretion. The authors of the thread may request the additional reward be given if they found a review to be particularly helpful. The request must still be approved.

[jdd2035]

Storytelling:Dude I love your back and forth from the past to the present. The way you wrote it out and made sure to keep a time stamp to make things clear where and when things were happening. With out that things could have gotten really confusing really fast trying to figure out how things were in the caravan and the school at the same time.

Setting: I am a big fan of deserts especially in a fantasy setting. I've played desert elves in D&D, always mentioned deserts in custom systems and so on. And to contrast that with your school another setting that I highly enjoy made the read quite enjoyable. The contrast of civilization VS wilderness while at the same time both settings have the same potential of having very ancient lore/knowledge/information etc. You used the settings well and when you described each I got the sense of where I was at in my reading good job.

Pacing: The pacing was enjoyable, slow in some points but not overly slow. Here's the thing with pacing if the story is constantly fast pace from beginning to end things get jumbled, people are trying to remember specific events and straining to keep up, or at least I do. At the same time if things drone on and on and one peoples eyes gloss over and brains start oozing out of their ears, or at least mine do. Your thread is a little of both so I can read the faster bits then get a reprieve to think about what just happened.

Communication: Your communication was well founded. I got the gist of what was going out with out much struggle. On this note you have several characters your working with in this story. This again can make things really confusing you your self have to keep track of their names and their personalities while at the same time telling a story around your main character. I have ran into this problem several times too and you manage to navigate it well. I was never wondering who was talking to whom.

Action: Cross fire trail was a fantastic movie, and in that movie there was a phrase "Take it easy and you will get a more harmonious outcome" This thread manifests that statement quite well. You took your time with the action and it made for a better out come at the end. I figure I can combine action and pacing as they are so intertwined. But I will say that this thread was not a meat grinder which as you know can get boring really quickly and oh yeah deus ex machina too this thread doesn't do that.

Persona: You character and his motivations were pretty clear from a few posts in and comparing your character sheet to your story they jived well.

Mechanics: I am not one to judge this I passed high-school english with a C-. Though I think some of your posts were to pad the bill as it were. The post and I'll quote the entirety of the post here.
The celebrations lasted for weeks. could have been written as a postscript to the previous post rather than taking up a post slot in it self. The same could be said for the single paragraph posts, they could have been made as a prescript or a postscript the posts coming before or after those ones.

Clarity: As I said in your action and communication I didn't have a problem figuring out what was going on, who was talking or where I was.

Technique: The third person perspective is a fantastic writing style for this kind of RP. But that being said I got a C- in high school english and didn't do much better in college. So I give it a thumbs up?

Wildcard: Hmm just for future reference a leader of a caravan is called a Hansgraf. Comparing it to other medieval/renaissance/Victorian titles it would be equivalent to a baron. Either than that it was an enjoyable story to read.

[SirArtemis]

Storytelling:

I really loved the story and you executed the parallel quite well. There was a tremendous amount of creativity in the culture and names of the herald's world, and it drew a great contrast with the "known" world of Fallien. However, it feels like the herald's story was not following the same duration of time as the caravan, which left me a bit put off. In particular the mention that Vyrabron and Vaahnzerekh had grown close in the two years they'd spent together implies that at least two years had passed since the first post of the herald and that post, while the caravan still is happening across maybe a week. Maybe a clearer way of depicting this would have helped me understand flashbacks that are coming together to overlap with the present. You know, something like ... how many days prior?


Setting:

In retrospect, I don't remember much setting at all. I guess I just filled in the blanks but they were pretty empty. I remember a lecture hall. A crowded street/hall where Vaahnzerekh tried to ignore his annoying friend. A big portal with crystals around it.


Pacing:

Aside from my earlier gripe regarding the timelines being confusing, the pacing felt great. However, though the collision of stories was great at the end, the final post felt incredibly trite and rushed, as though all the buildup left me with nothing but a summary of what you would have written in posts if you felt like you wanted to keep writing. It's like you gave up.


Communication:

I felt like each character was unique and had a voice of their own. At points when reading about Madi vs Sheillal I got confused on which he was who. And even harder to think of Madi as a man given Maddy (Andy's character).


Action:

The actual actions of the thread seemed almost... non existant to be honest. There was no grand gesture. No behavioral ticks. Just walking around, setting up a tent, and that's all I really saw. The rest it was just heads talking in my imagination. Though truth be told, I have no idea how to even picture the characters in my head. They're very bland and empty templates.


Persona:

As I mentioned in communication the characters felt unique and each had their own voice and personality, but you left me wanting when it came to having any sort of way to imagine them or the world they were in. All the actions of the thread seemed very thought-centric and dialogue based. I had a story, but no people or world to pin them to as a sort of foundation.


Mechanics:

It seemed like post 5 had the most errors in it mechanically. For the most part this was clean and smooth with no hiccups. I can't speak to particlar sentence fragments but spelling and homonyms seemed fine. There were some elsewhere. Like reading the wagon rather than readying it. Followed by caravan mater rather than master.


Clarity:

One point where I found myself losing some clarity was early on in the thread where you had dialogue between Vaahnzerekh and Khotemi. You'd start a new paragraph but continue speaking as the same person. Given the brevity of the paragraphs it seemed needless and just made it harder to track who was speaking momentarily, which tripped me up needlessly. The last post in particular left me completely lost. I had no idea what all these terms/phrases meant, and so I had no clue what the closing of this story was.


Technique:

I think the largest attempt you made here was the attempt at the two parallel stories colliding and it would have been better if I'd had a notion of different timelines colliding. As I read it, I had no reason to think these weren't happening simultaneously time wise in different locations.


Wildcard:

Honestly I felt like this was going to be great. It started so fun and interesting. But as things went on it felt more and more confusing. The three posts that have almost nothing in them felt as though they were notes for yourself in the timeline that you didn't feel like filling in or writing. The final post felt rushed and left me feeling confused and unsatisfied. All the preparation and buildup of the parallel stories and climax fell flat in the end because I am left not knowing how any of this tied together.

[Ebivoulya]

This was interesting enough that I finished reading it, so I may as well give you my thoughts.

Storytelling: Well, the two-stories thing managed to keep my interest, and using new posts to denote a time-line change was a good idea; one you might have over-used, though. I was more interested in the story of the Eye, of course, but the characters portrayed in the caravan were interesting enough. I gotta admit, though, I glossed over some of those long names; there's a point where trying to figure out how to pronounce it is harder than making up a replacement name. On the plus side, I got to imagine Vince Vaughn helping to open the Eye of Koalas. I enjoyed the scene of opening the Eye, but wasn't entirely fond of the time jump after that. The post order implied the stories were happening simultaneously, so it was strange to see one jump ahead two years while the other did not. I think I might've preferred to see the Eye opening as a flashback, or summed up in the first post, and more time spent just before the attack. I didn't really get why the lesser races were attacking the portal.

There were a lot of things you could've explained a bit better, really. Subtlety can be fun, but too much of it makes parts of the story incomprehensible to people who don't get it. I did enjoy the subtlety of Sheillal, though; that reveal was pretty well done. The main problem I have with this thread is the ending, because exactly how the vessels carrying their souls end up on Althanas is not clear. It seems like the portal they open leads to Althanas, but then it's destroyed some uncertain amount of time after Vince Vaughn takes the other magic dudes to go transfer themselves into what I like to think of as brainjars. So, either the brainjars were somehow sent through the portal before it exploded and onto Althanas thousands of years ago, or the Krom empire existed on Althanas thousands of years ago. The first one makes more sense, but I don't actually know because it's never explained.


Setting: I enjoyed the use of Mitra to refer to the sun, and you managed to remind the reader of the desert heat well enough, but other than that there was very little description of the setting in this thread. Things were named, like tents and doors and buildings, but I think I saw like a dozen adjectives this whole thread; little to no setting metaphors either. I would've liked to see more of the Empire, both in terms of its politics, and how it actually looks. Letting the reader imagine the setting is good, but you need at least a few distinct quirks of the area for them to build on. Most of your setting was described visually, as well; not much of what things sound, smell, or taste like.


Pacing: You do well keeping the pacing pretty even throughout the thread, mixing longer sentences in with shorter, keeping paragraph size down, and adding some prose during dialogue scenes to keep them slower. I have few complaints in this category, other than the fact that the short posts just after the Eye explodes are a bit jarring. All of that could really have just been worked into the previous post, and the last post could've been a bit longer. That put the climax a bit too close to the end of the thread, and didn't give the reader much time to digest all the implications before the thing was over.




Communication: All in all, the dialogue was pretty well done in this thread. Most of the exchanges made sense, and you included body language from time to time as well to good effect. There were a couple points where things seemed a little off, but for the amount of dialogue in the thread, it's a low percentage. The elbowing between friends was a bit cheesy, for instance. This may be re-visited under clarity, but I didn't quite get the evil-ness of Sheillal. Vince Vaughn didn't really seem like that much of an ass, so while I liked the reveal, I think it only worked so well because Vaahn was so different from how you played him 'possessing' Sheillal.


Action: There was very little actual action in this thread; most of the exciting things happen 'off-camera,' so to speak. The urgency during the attack was done pretty well, but considering how deadly you made the Praetors sound, you kinda glossed over the people they killed. There doesn't have to be fighting for it to be a good thread, but the fighting that was there was kinda bland. The scene of Sheillal getting stabbed wasn't bad, see clarity for other thoughts on it. Other than that, this thread is all walking and talking. As far as 'stuff happening' goes, the scene about opening the Eye was probably the best described.


Persona: Aside from Sheillal, which I'll cover in clarity, most of the characters in this thread were pretty good. You developed Khemal's character decently in the time he had, but it seemed weird that Madi chose the 'kindness' of killing Sheillal, but Khemal was willing to just leave him, with a shrug; the 'man who had given him purpose in life.' Also, Khemal's death wasn't really that impactful. Looking back, you did describe him pretty well, but the fact that he died 'off-camera' made him almost immediately forgettable. Vaahn's character was also kind of forgettable; he basically just became the perspective of the reader. Khaaltek was a pretty likable character, though; he did the sidekick role well. Khotemi was basically flat, as well as the Praetor assigned to Vaahn. I think you might've spent more effort developing Khemal before he died than you did anyone else in this thread, except maybe Khaaltek.




Mechanics: I don't have a lot to say on this category. You were more or less flawless. There were a few sentences that started with 'But,' and 'adimixture' came up a couple times, but there were very few typos other than that; probably around a half-dozen for the whole thread.


Clarity: Other than the few things I'm about to go over, this category was more or less flawless as well, maybe too flawless. As I'll soon mention in technique, a bit of abstraction through metaphors and whatnot would be nice; you have the clarity to spare for it. To the main issues, though. The fact that Sheillal and his Praetor are made of that living rock Khaaltek's colleagues discover is, perhaps, a bit too subtle, with only a single line of description to make the connection.

Sheillal as well was an issue for me, rather finding out it was actually Vaahn. I know he does what he does for the Empire, and wants to take over Althanas in its name, but there was too little of that shown previously for it to feel like it fits. All I saw was an absentminded scholar who just wanted to learn, and serve his country well; he exploded the Eye, but that was a situation of desperation. So, it seems really weird then to associate that character with the evil alien possessing Sheillal, even if it fits logically. The tone of the characters is so different it's jarring to connect them.


Technique: Well, as far as technique goes you've got the basics down quite well. You know your way around the structure of a sentence, and can grammar with the best of them. You don't use many of the descriptive techniques, though, like similes and metaphors, nor do you use many of the prose techniques like alliteration. You can construct a tale, and tell it well enough, but there's not a lot of style. You're kind of relying on the situation to bring the imagery, but even the dullest of scenes can become vivid and rich with the right blend of literary techniques. Perhaps consider expanding your repertoire and throwing in some of these techniques from time to time, I think they would add well to the strong core you have developed.


Wildcard: Herein shall I judge the ideas of this thread. The Eye of Koalas was pretty cool, and the fact that it used some kind of mixture of material 'sciences' and magic was a nice detail. Again, would've liked more information on the political situation with the Empire, but what was there was pretty interesting. The idea of the liquid stone bodies is also a really cool one, and it was nice to get a glimpse into what the other fields of research were learning from the portal. I only had one real qualm as far ideas go, and it was the whole 'cracking of the tectonic plate' when the Eye exploded. It just makes no sense, an explosion would blow off the atmosphere before it sent enough energy through miles and miles of rock to crack an entire tectonic plate. Other than that, though, this thread had some pretty cool ideas, and I enjoyed reading it.

[Rayleigh]

This thread is now closed! Thank you to all who contributed. Rewards will be calculated soon.

[Philomel]

Rewards:

Rewards are as follows!

jdd2035 (http://www.althanas.com/world/member.php?18477-jdd2035) receives: 440 EXP and 32 GP

Sir Artemis (http://www.althanas.com/world/member.php?14322-SirArtemis) receives: 960 EXP and 32 GP

Ebivoulya (http://www.althanas.com/world/member.php?64-Ebivoulya) receives: 480 EXP and 32 GP

[Shinsou Vaan Osiris]

All rewards include 4 AP for high quality feedback.

[Shinsou Vaan Osiris]

All rewards added!