Herewith a few of my own:
35 - My Chemical Romance - Whether business partners, next door neighbors, rivals, forced allies or arranged spouses, this couple can’t stand each other. They agree on practically nothing, always trying to score points off of one another, and lose few opportunities to backbite (or even backstab) the other. Periodically the hostility breaks into a vicious fight ... which inevitably ends in screaming, clawing, prolonged sex, until the parties are sore and exhausted. He hotly denies they’re actual lovers, she coolly denies it, and they show no signs of any rapport whatsoever the moment the clothes go back on.
36 - Class Ringwearers - Gosh, they’re so in love! Why they just celebrated their three-month “anniversary” and his class ring hangs around her neck! By the standards of their culture, they’re underage and/or immature. The grownups around them are patronizingly dismissive of their “crushes,” and they’re about ready to scream the next time anyone uses the term “puppy love” around them. Increasingly angry, they’re on the verge of doing something their culture would consider drastic: having sex, getting pregnant, running off to get married, publically disavowing any arranged future marriage ... whatever it takes to get people to take their love seriously and recognize that it’s for real and forever!
37 - Pre-Raphaelites - She’s a celebrated artist. He’s her model. His face and body have been immortalized in a half-dozen well-known compositions, and his own poetry - though somewhat amateurish - shows the illumination of her soul. But to touch one another would mar the artistic purity of their collaboration (and age, class and possibly marital barriers intrude) ... so for years now they’ve suffered in silence, unable to consummate their relationship, unwilling to part and so lose each other’s muse.
38 - Bennifer - They were Yesterday’s Supercouple ... rich, celebrated, the hit of their social circle and so totally wrapped up in one another. But that was then, and events have pulled them apart. Their lives are going in different directions (well, in truth, they always did) and the spark is gone, however much they’re not particularly willing to admit it. ‘Tis a pity that everyone still expects to see them together, harmonious and dazzling as ever, and the act is wearing thin.
39 - Mutt & Jeff - They don’t have a thing in common ... everyone knows it, they freely admit it. He’s neat and she’s sloppy, she’s athletic and he’s intellectual, he’s dynamic and she’s live-and-let-live, she’s a gourmet and he’s steak-and-potatoes. Yet when their orbits intersect, they live and love in tender harmony. No one knows how they do it, and well-meaning people keep trying to pry them apart in favor of “more compatible” partners ... to no avail.
"This is a setting of high adventure ... the protagonists will meet many a challenge."
I believe it would be, and the extensive flavor text and quotes certainly set the table very evocatively, but there's very little food placed on the table, so to speak. The challenges are barely mentioned, let alone specified. Who lives in Sil'Tessa? Are there extant cities/villages/ruins? Nations, however barbaric, or just wandering tribes? Are beings such as the Blizzard Rider and the White Queen still out there, or are subject to recreation by their original fae? (Heck, how BIG is Sil'Tessa?)
I've no objection to mystery in a sub, but it seems that a GM would have to do the work here for almost every detail.
Love this village, BTW ... these kind of comprehensive posts are the sorts of things we need more of here!
Very detailed and complete. A few issues stick out at me:
* The ice storm is presented as a sudden thing. In fact, it takes days worth of storm and spray in subarctic waters (or in winter) to coat masts and rigging, and if the ships are so unseaworthy as to be at serious risk of turtling from the weight, that's a separate issue. Further, while the coating makes working the ships dangerous, any genuine weight requires some serious accretion of rime ice, and we're talking serious and prolonged arctic exposure in winter, a time of year and at latitudes where it'd be considered foolhardy to sail at all.
* While the speed of the Megamoths seem equal to the fastest dogsled drivers - who can manage 120 miles a day, about, with crack teams and frequent tradeouts - traveling at such speeds for novices to ice fields is seven shades of insane. Without experience in arctic travel, the odds that the party will charge their Megamoth at such speeds into a crevasse or through thin ice are excellent. This is, of course, dependent on ...
* What time of year is this? If it's the arctic summer, you won't get the ice storm encounter, it's a lot safer (and sensible) for the sea voyage, and that 100 mile/day travel is stretched out over a time that's not much more than a brisk walking pace. There'd be more ice hazards, but better light and slower speeds by which to see them. If it's the arctic winter, then you have little light by which to travel, and the odds of inexperienced travelers screwing it up are near certain. By way of comparison, sunrise around Iqaluit (the capital of Canada's northern territory of Nunavut) in January is around 9 AM, sunset around 2:30 PM, and the length of visible light a bit over seven hours.
Maybe it's the Dr Who fan in me, but I find the notion of aerial dolphins rather neat.
Eh, I don't much care that groups might not take her seriously ... so what if they don't? It's all RP. I like the sub.
Very extensive, and I wish I could give it a 5, but it's just well short of usable businesses (or even short precis) for a perfect score.
One of the truly amazing subs of this entire site, and that's saying something. Vivid, evocative, creative.
Heh, not bad, and I understand that this is a minor race with a healthy dollop of comic relief. -0.5 for a few too many spelling and grammar errors.
Lifeforms (Intelligent Species) (Any)
Yikes, if this is how overly verbose the sub is AFTER trimming down, I'd hate to see how it was before! It still could use to be smaller by a full third.
Examples? Let's take the first paragraph: "Unleashing a bloodcurdling scream that mingled agony of the most unbearable kind with the muffled moans of sexual gratification, the demon violently thrust its vast array of phallus’s into its gaping and furiously bleeding rectum, his rapidly fading mind fleeing back to the past, even as the talons of the his original home, the netherworld, closed upon him." How about:
"Unleashing a scream mingling agony with moans of lust, the demon violently thrust its vast array of phalluses into its gaping, bleeding rectum, its dying mind fleeing back into the past, even as the final blackness closed upon him." Not every noun and verb need modifiers.
That being said, anyone else staggered at the thought of a monolithic faith, devoted to keeping its people pure and chaste, having as the centerpiece of its daily services a lust demon constantly violating itself, non-stop, for decades yet? That'd be a bit raw for most demonic Chaos cults, let alone a putative white light religion. I'd throw something in about the neighboring nations refusing to help, being sickened by the perversions into which the faith of Wonnoth had sunk in the alleged defense of chastity, and deeming that they could lie in the bed they'd made for themselves.
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