Finished The Challenge: Season 7 - And the Winner is...

Status
Not open for further replies.
Hurray, teams! :D The full details of the challenge will be posted later today or tomorrow. Good luck everyone! <3
 
Sorry for the delay, guys. Yesterday was busy and today is a holiday. At this point, it's actually probably better for me to wait until Monday to post up to make sure I can monitor the game as it goes (since I won't be around Friday afternoon and most of the weekend), so stay tight and we'll start up early next week. :)
 
W3LxIHC.png

Cecil and Altaver chose their teams and went back to Athena's throne room, but the Queen looked sad and sighed as they approached.

"Unfortunately, I am being called away on business and I don't believe we'll have time to complete this challenge before I leave. I am putting it on hiatus for now, and I will instead give you guys a long-term project to work on that will last you while I'm gone. It may not be a very interesting one, but I look forward to learning about all of you in greater detail." She smiled wanly. "Thank you all for your understanding."

Host OOC Explanation:

I was really looking forward to running the game, and it's one of the challenges I've had planned for a long time, but unfortunately it fell at a really bad time since I will be MIA from PokéBeach for about a month starting on May 20th for a combination of holiday and my Dutch residency exams. It wasn't until I was halfway through writing the rules that I realized I really wouldn't have enough time to run it before I leave (not without shortening and rushing things, anyway, and even then it would be close).

It was a difficult decision, but I've decided to postpone the game, and possibly cancel it depending on if Vracken will be able to play it when it comes back later. I've PMed him separately to ask for his preference.

Because there's still a chance that I'll be able to run it later in summer, I'm going to stay hush about what it is for now. However, I will say that even if Vracken can't stick around and I don't end up doing that game as a part of The Challenge, I do plan on proposing it to the FG team as a possible game that we can just playh ere separately, so you'll still have a chance to play it later, even if you can't play it now.

Instead, you all get a nice, long creative writing challenge. Enjoy!


Challenge 11 Redux
Character Short Stories​

In this challenge, each member will write a short story about their character in the challenge. I will be giving everyone plenty of time to complete their submission, partially because of my aforementioned vacation, so I expect some very good entries!


Instructions:
  1. Each challenger will write a short story about their Challesian character. Reference your original character sheets and the trivia canon compilation as necessary to make sure your story fits into the world.
  2. Once your story is complete, please PM it to me. You can either include it directly in the body of the PM, or send me a link to a Google Doc. I'd prefer the latter, but the former is also acceptible.
  3. The deadline for Story Submission is Friday, June 17th at 5:30pm Central European Summer Time. That is the same as 4:30pm BST, 11:30am Eastern US time, 8:30am Pacific US time, or approximately the time of this post in your own time zone. This date is actually the date of my exams!
  4. This is a very long and generous submission time, so I expect quality, timely work. If you do not submit by the deadline, you will be automatically eliminated.
  5. I specifically set the due date to be the day of my exams, since I know I won't have the time or ability to judge entries until after that. Hopefully judging results will be ready sometime the following week, though it may take me a little while depending on the length and quality of the entries.
  6. There will be no elimination in this challenge. Instead, the winner will receive a very special prize: an Immunity to be used in a future challenge.

Story Submission & Judging Information:

The rules for story submissions are very simple:
  1. The final submission must be between 3,000 and 10,000 words.
  2. Your Challesian character, the same one you submitted as a character sheet all those long challenges ago, must be the main character of the story.
  3. Your story must adhere to the establish canon of Challesia, including:
    1. Everything that's been written in the flavour sections of challenge updates.
    2. Everything that was written for the Challesia trivia competition.
  4. Everything should be relatively well-written. It should have a beginning, middle, and end. There should be a plot and at least some effort at characterization. Do a spell check. Make sure you're using decent grammar. That sort of crap. Obviously, I'm not expecting all of you to be stellar writers or anything, but that's no excuse for poor spelling/grammar or submitting something that doesn't even count as a story.
  5. You can have someone else edit/proofread your story for you before submission if you want, but they must not actually edit any words themselves. Instead, they should give their comments to you for you to change in your story as you see fit. The commenting feature on Google Docs works really well for this.

Judging Details:

I am the only judge for this challenge. The judging rubrics for this challenge are incredibly specific.

The difficulty comes in the fact that you don't know what they are.

In the event that a tiebreaker is necessary, the story that is my personal favourite out of the tied stories will be crowned the winner.


Scroll of Summon Magical Assistant: Use ??? (I lost track)

(Each of you started with a number of Scrolls of Magical Assistant, a magic item that can be used to give you various advantages throughout the game. Each time a new use of the item is revealed, it will be posted about in the Update (like this section here and now), and also added to the OP for easy reference. Please Note: Each Scroll is single use only! Once you use a Scroll for any purpose it is used up and your total number of scrolls goes down by one. If you ever want to know how many scrolls you currently have available at any given point, feel free to ask.)

SoSMA: Skip to the good parts! (Challenge 11 only): Each challenger may spend 3 SoSMAs to completely skip this challenge, if they so desire. Challengers who skip this challenge will not have to write a story at all, and then can instead treat the remaining length of the challenge like a long break. However, keep in mind that the immunity prize is only valid for those who actually submit a story, so if you skip, you nullify the potential for any prize.

You must have 3 SoSMAs available in order to make use of this; you cannot go into negative amounts of SoSMA. If you are uncertain how many SoSMAs you have available, you are welcome to ask me.

If you have any other questions about this particular use of SoSMA, please ask!

Good luck and have fun! :D
 
Last edited:
I'm not sure what your definition of a short story is, but in Australia, it's 500 - 1000 words. :p Let's hope I find the time. :x
 
bbninjas said:
I'm not sure what your definition of a short story is, but in Australia, it's 500 - 1000 words. :p Let's hope I find the time. :x
Click to expand...

I guess it is a bit steep for some unmotivated people. I've lowered the bottom limit to 3k. :p

But still, 500 words is, like, barely a page typed in MS Word. That's a crazy super short story! Even 3k is pretty short, but I'd allow it. I feel like 5k-20k is probably the range most short stories fit into, but I don't really want to judge something that's towards the long end, since I have my own time constraints to worry about.

There's approximately 39 days to complete the challenge, so even if you're only aiming for the bare minimum of 3k words, that's only 77 words you have to write each day. That's less than this post! I think you'll be just fine.
 
Also, as this was asked over PM but may apply to others:

No, you can't have me as your editor. Between holiday and exams, I'll have a bare minimum of availability for the majority of the duration of the challenge and I simply wouldn't have the time.
 
@Vracken is on board for sticking around for the game still, so it looks like the game challenge has not been cancelled but will simply be postponed. It will instead take place for Challenge 12 and will still feature @Celever and @Brave Vesperia as team leaders with the teams they decided on last week. I hope you all will look forward to it! A relatively low-key game challenge should be nice after all this writing work. :p
 
@bbninjas, @Celever @thegrovylekid, @Luispipe8, @Brave Vesperia, @Jabberwock, @Skyleaf2000, @Vracken

Attention all Challengers! A SoSMA use has been added to Challenge 11!

Scroll of Summon Magical Assistant: Use ??? (I lost track)

(Each of you started with a number of Scrolls of Magical Assistant, a magic item that can be used to give you various advantages throughout the game. Each time a new use of the item is revealed, it will be posted about in the Update (like this section here and now), and also added to the OP for easy reference. Please Note: Each Scroll is single use only! Once you use a Scroll for any purpose it is used up and your total number of scrolls goes down by one. If you ever want to know how many scrolls you currently have available at any given point, feel free to ask.)

SoSMA: Skip to the good parts! (Challenge 11 only): Each challenger may spend 3 SoSMAs to completely skip this challenge, if they so desire. Challengers who skip this challenge will not have to write a story at all, and then can instead treat the remaining length of the challenge like a long break. However, keep in mind that the immunity prize is only valid for those who actually submit a story, so if you skip, you nullify the potential for any prize.

You must have 3 SoSMAs available in order to make use of this; you cannot go into negative amounts of SoSMA. If you are uncertain how many SoSMAs you have available, you are welcome to ask me.

If you have any other questions about this particular use of SoSMA, please ask!
 
I hope you all are making good progress on your stories! You all have a little over 4 weeks until it's due. :)

My holiday starts tomorrow, so I will not be around PokéBeach very much until after the deadline. If you have any questions, or if you would like to use your SoSMAs to skip the challenge, you are welcome to contact me via PM and I will respond when I am able.
 
Vracken, Luis, and BB have all used scrolls to skip this challenge, which means those of you who are actually writing have less competition to worry about to claim the prize! :D You all have several days left, until this Friday, in order to finish and submit. Good luck!
 
Athena said:
Vracken, Luis, and BB have all used scrolls to skip this challenge, which means those of you who are actually writing have less competition to worry about to claim the prize! :D You all have several days left, until this Friday, in order to finish and submit. Good luck!
Click to expand...
How many scrolls do I have left?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top