Feedback for White Haven

[LadyTevar]

Thats' an interesting start... although I think your 'man in grey' is a little too wordy for the bar setting.

[frigidmagi]

I liked it. Fair warning though man your Hatred and Cunning boys sound alot like reavers.

[frigidmagi]

That's a good beginning. So 4th edition Thay is a Necro-state?

[White Haven]

Yeah. Szass Tam's a full-blown lich who apparently tried to pull some sort of mega-ritual to remake the world in his own image, and the whole place's ruled by the undead. If you're alive in Thay in 4th, you're a slave to the undead.

4e has finally produced a society that I would choose after the Underdark.

[frigidmagi]

A good story, well done and manages to be interesting. I hope to hear more about this character someday, especially since at the moment we don't know that much besides he has a strong desire to live.

Which isn't a bad place to start.

[White Haven]

Yeah, I didn't have a whole lot of time to work with before the campaign started, but I'm certainly planning to continue with him later on. He's fun to write in conversation, albeit something of a challenge. It's hard to write characters smarter than you are, but a wizard with a sky-high starting int really deserved to make the kind of logical leaps and inferences that he manages during his conversation with the cleric, I felt.

[frigidmagi]

His Int may be high but that doesn't mean anything if he doesn't have any knowledge to use it on. If he doesn't know anything of the outside world, he can't make leaps. Still he knows what a cleric is and what they look like so it's a good place to start.

[LadyTevar]

So.. Mage and Priest too?

[frigidmagi]

Huh... No. He read their library. That doesn't make him a priest. Any worshipper can wear a holy symbol Tev. It's how like we wear crosses and Star of Davids and the like. It doesn't automatically make you a cleric. He would need religious training to do that, not simply a library crawl.

[White Haven]

Frigid's got it right, he's just a bit voracious where raw knowledge is concerned. He was well educated by Thay in some areas, and in others he's utterly ignorant. Some of those holes are targeted excisions, like Kelemvor's existence. Others are subjects that simply weren't covered at all. Now that he's becoming aware of those deficiencies, he's beyond eager to fill them in.

As pertains to Kelemvor, not only was his life and afterlife just saved by His servants, but he's also studied their order and learned of their utter hatred for the undead. Given his experiences, there's definitely an element of 'enemy of my enemy' going on.

[Norseman]

I thought I'd make a few quick comments about Living (D&D)

1. Is the dormitory building primarily made from wood, or a wood and stone mixture? I mention it because it's important for picturing his escape, so it's a detail you should be clear about.

2. The hidden compartment. Where did it come from? Did he make it? Or was there a niche in the wall that he covered over with wood?

3. In Chapter 5, why did the lich freeze the door and shatter it instead of simply opening it? It feels a little too "exciting action scene"-ish.

4. Why would he need several weeks to heal? Presumably a cleric could use magical healing powers?

5. Your writing is generally good, but sometimes, such as in this sentence "Fire blossomed atop the piled drifts of snow, rapidly concealed behind a billowing cloud of steam as the ice directly beneath the sorcerous flames flashed directly into vapor." It gets a little purple.

6. Some of the lines are a little clumsy like this one, "A way out was finally in place, albeit to somewhere else doubtless under Thay's influence." Perhaps something like "There was finally a way out, even if it was bound to lead to another place under Thay's influence." Just as an example mind.

Another example is this: "No sooner had he begun to form a brief impression of the luxurious mansion-styled construction of the unknown building than the door to the basement iced over and shattered with a convulsive cracking sound." Perhaps it would be better rendered as, "There was barely time to get an impression of being in a luxuriously furnished building, like a mansion, before the basement door iced over and then shattered with a loud crack." Commas are good.

7. Occasionally the tenses shift suddenly "As he passed through an open doorway to a larger hall, he turns sharply and risks a glance backwards before he charged out of sight of the basement door." It should be "turned" and "risked" respectively.

In conclusion I think it needs some editing and to fill in some details here and there. Try re-reading it in a couple of weeks, you need some time to spot what you wrote as opposed to remembering what you meant to write.

Overall it's nice, I hope I don't sound too critical.

[frigidmagi]

4. Why would he need several weeks to heal? Presumably a cleric could use magical healing powers?

My own thoughts here. Sure the cleric could, but why should he? The character is in no danger of dying from his injuries and the extra weeks do him good in study and understanding. Futhermore, clerics are not just walking healing batteries for everyone else, they have their own goals and responsiblities. It could be they felt there was a more immediate and worthwhile need of their abilities or that such an expenditure of power was simply unnecessary.

[Norseman]

That is of course a valid answer, all I'm saying is that it would be a fairly common question so it should be answered in the text itself. One should never omit necessary details.

[White Haven]

Just woke up, so I'll save a detailed reply for sometime when I'm more coherent. First-off, thanks for the feedback, this is the first piece of my own work I've taken past a page or so in a significant non-zero number of years. I'm a touch rusty. I'll have to see about finding some way to work the clerical-healing bit in. From a character perspective, Darren has no expectation of healing magic's use. He's familiar with the idea of its existence, but canonically the only clerics allowed in Thay are those of Bane, who isn't so much the healing type Even if they were, the only people who could benefit from healing magic are slaves just waiting to die and be raised as undead in any case. I just need to find a way to make that clear without an infodump to reinforce the point, as the prologue is a long time ago by then.

Regarding tenses, OH yeah, you have no idea. I've kept my hand in, so to speak, with text-based roleplay, where just about everything is occurring as actions in the present. You'd be appalled to know how many present-past edits I had to make on the way; this whole thing's been one long excercise in retraining myself to write in the past tense.

Again, thanks for reading and even more for some constructive feedback. Once I'm more awake, I'll run back over it and cogitate.

[frigidmagi]

Let me get this straight, a squadron is under attack and their own formation is next on the chopping block and the ship's captain feels that it's more important to use a trumped up pretense to bust his XO?

In a combat ready navy this wouldn't stand. I have to assume this isn't an effective combat ready navy.

[White Haven]

No, it's not, and that'll be more clear as I write more. This is a navy that hasn't had a shooting war in quite a long time. It's ended up as more of a civilian government employee atmosphere, with all the petty empire-building and posturing that entails, only with the added 'fun' of established military dynasties throwing their weight around. Whoever jumped the other squadron has hellaciously good ewar, so the captain doesn't really know how bad it is. Couple that with tremendous institutional arrogance and, frankly, someone who shouldn't have command rank in a truly professional military, and you have him delaying reaction to a 'minor threat' to maneuver a troublesome subordinate into overreaching so he can cut him off at the knees. That's not all going to be clear from what I've done so far, of course, I've got more work to do. :)

[LadyTevar]

I love the way you've started this out :) Even without a Bolo in sight, you've drawn me in and have me as curious as the cadets about who the instructor is.

[Hawkwings]

Almost the same here, though I really don't care that much who the unnamed man is. Hope you write more soon!

[frigidmagi]

Forgive me White Haven, but well... I hated it.

1: You're sending cadets off to the infantry over one wrong answer? Especially given a question like that which is insanely subjective? Bullshit. Any instructor who wasted potentional officers like that because he didn't like an answer he gave before starting their damn education shouldn't be allowed within a 100 meters of a school. I found this wasteful and frankly silly.

2: Mystery Instructor? Really? Seriously? Oh Spend time figuring out who I am instead of learning how to lead men and machines through combat! Waste of students time and kinda gimmicky. I mean it could work if this was their last year or something but if it's their last year it makes the above complaints even worse

3: Infantry is a bunch of wash outs huh? How fucking fighter jock. Look let's say these cadets are wastes of space, putting them in infantry just gives them the chance to kill more people before they die. Say it with me, DESK JOB. DESK JOB! Make them count infinite repeaters for a living or something. You need motivated, determined, manics for your infantry in a Cthulu-Boloverse. Because anyone else will just fucking mutiny and be done with it.



That said I like the concept, but I think you've let in to much Hollywood and need treatment. Read some military novels written by real military folks.

[White Haven]

Fair points, and I hope you'll reconsider down the road once I have the time to show why commander training is so ridiculously stringent right now. Just for your own information until I get that chance, in the early days, the Concordiat lost a lot of commanders to madness. As a result, the training programs went wild, higher-ups and civilian leadership both panicked at the thought of Bolo commanders being turned and perhaps managing to influence their Bolos, given time. Commanders were pulled entirely, leaving their units to operate autonomously, and effectiveness dropped far more than was expected based on historical records of Commanderless Bolo deployments.

In essence, mutable laws of physics and the difficulty of predicting Lovecraftian horrors via logical extrapolation and military historical examples makes an unsupervised Bolo less effective than you might expect. Anyway, this represents panic from both high command and civilian leadership, leading to a 'try something, anything, just give me Bolo commanders who can stand up to thiswar' attitude. Oh, and as for the infantry...you'll see. While it's entirely possible that a few will end up there, it's more of an intense motivational tactic than anything else. It wouldn't work in the long term, because warning would eventually trickle down to new classes of cadets, but this isn't at all a normal training regime. Good criticism though, I appreciate it, and it's helped me refine some of this background writing this out.

As for writing more, I certainly do intend to. Expect alternating chapters between the present-day, Bolo Command school, and the opening days of the war where everyone's going 'Fuuuuuuck!' and scrambling for their brown pants.

[Dark Silver]

I liked it, aside from the bits and pieces Frigid picked out.

Always wondered what it'd be like in the Dinochrome Brigade's Training Academy, and this is a interesting concept.

I look forward to seeing it fleshed out White Haven. Also: What Mark of Bolo are we dealing with? if I'm not mistaken, with this time frame, we should be in the early Mark XX's, maybe even the Mark XXIII or XXIV Bolos...

[White Haven]

You're way off on the timeframe I'm afraid. This is set right at the beginning of what, in canon timeline, would have been the Final War between the Concordiat and the Melconian Empire. As a result Mk XXVIIs through Mk XXXs are the soup of the day. Of course there's always the possibility of throwing older marks at the problem under the 'Some Bolo Is Better Than No Bolo' logistics doctrine.

[Dark Silver]

ahh, your right. I was WAY off on my estimations there.

Still, I would have loved to see what something like NIKE (Mark XXIII-B-Experimental) would have done seeing one of the Elder Gods for herself....

sorry, Unit NKE has a special place in my heart.

[White Haven]

Just to clarify from my own notes, the Melconians are more or less self-destructing from the arrival of the Unpleasant Gribblies at this point. In-universe, it's because they were always fairly religious, so terrible gods from the beyond are going to strike them quite differently than the largely-agnostic Concordiat. Out-universe, I'm not quite masochistic enough to want to turn this into a three-way war and there's a lot less information available on the Empire to use as research material. I won't rule out having them play a role later on, but for now I'll just be satisfied with them being shattered between sectarian violence and nameless horrors from beyond space-time. Name of the Nameless Ones indeed. ;)

[LadyTevar]

I had to ask Nit why this would be a bad thing, having 360.4 degrees. He had to point out to me that this meant a complete circle is no longer divisible by <i>pi</i>.

Yeah... incoming Elder Things!!!!