Ambrosia Software Web Board: May Chron Challenge - Ambrosia Software Web Board

Joy. I am mentioned in a topic on the B&B. They even stayed on topic for a second post.

Also, with the epilogue I'm now finished. I'm not going to post a full list again, since anyone that's been following this topic has likely been following along. However, if you're thinking of reading through again from the beginning, I'll note that all of the chapters are now linked together. The only two links you'll need to get started are:

(Introduction)Grapper's Return:
(PART DEUX)Grapper's Return:

Avatara, on 15 March 2014 - 07:13 PM, said:

I'd say that is singularly unlikely .


Also, very impressive work, Pallas. Written in true Grapper-style.

While it's true that no one could hope to compete with Grapper's Return, we'd still like to read the rest of Downfall ^_^

I might get around to writing the next chapter of The Powerful Demon before May's over, but we'll see.

BreadWorldMercy453, on 02 February 2014 - 08:50 PM, said:

Oh oh, that's too good a challenge to resist. I think I owe it to this board to bring at least one of my stories to a satisfying conclusion, so the next part of The Shadow Warriors is up!

This was a fun exercise, taking stuff I wrote over ten years ago and working with it, laughing/blushing at my mistakes, reacquainting myself with some dudes I created as a teenager (or kidnapped from the tavern, hah) and thinking of a way to continue a story that's actually been with me for a long time.

This post has been edited by Rogan: 13 May 2014 - 04:23 PM

That is so awesome, Rogan! I can't tell you how happy this makes me :D When I read this, I couldn't stop grinning & "squee"ing. I daydreamed that one of the great old writers would return to continue an abandoned chronicle, but I never thought it would happen! That brings this challenge to a whole new degree of success ^_^

BreadWorldMercy453, on 15 May 2014 - 06:17 PM, said:

High praise — thanks so much! I'm glad you enjoyed it. I reckon it's two or three chapters from a conclusion, and I should be able to get another part out soon™.

Oh, and I'm loving the other chronicles. Both Grappers Return and The Powerful Demon are very much in the spirit of their respective original authors

Yay, I'm glad you're working on more Shadow Warriors ^_^

I'm intending to write two more chapters of The Powerful Demon to bring that story to conclusion also.

Congratulations on graduating college, Sely! Now you'll have plenty of time to dedicate the next two weeks to Downfall, right? :D

Downfall is far too ambitious an endeavor for me to get that interested in at the moment .

I will, however, attempt to write up a summary. Maybe somebody else could finish it...preferably without mangling Selax's character too badly.

Sorry, mangling Selax's character is pretty-much a sure thing if one of us takes over the story :P Are you certain you won't just write it yourself?

This...was a lot harder than it felt like it should be.

This was a lot more ridiculous than it should be.

BreadWorldMercy453, on 25 May 2014 - 04:00 PM, said:

Pretty certain. It's likely to be a longer endeavor than I feel up to attempting.


Anyway, a brief summary (as best as I recall):
After Alaric's death, Cythera fractures politically along all levels. Divisions exist among cities, families, neighborhoods, etc. I think that the elementals emerge openly into the world and join in the ensuing wars (fracturing among different sides as well), but that might be DM. At the time of the story, Malthas's boss--whom I never bothered naming, so I'll call him Warlord--was in the process of forcibly reunifying northern Cythera. The only unifying force is Cythera's navy under the control of Admiral (unnamed), considered the most honorable man in Cythera. He has stayed neutral in the story. As Downfall begins, he is investigating a rise in mysterious deaths along Cythera's coasts.

There is a also a mage (called simply Mage), but I'm not certain how he is introduced into the story. I can't recall what happened to Pnyx, but the Judges were around for sometime after Alaric's death, although they had little actual power. Efforts were being made to assassinate them at the time of Downfall. The story opens with the Judge in Cademia (also unnamed, hence simply Judge) fleeing an attempt on her life. I think that Mage is helping her, but, in any case, Selax returns (after a long absence from Cythera) and rescues her.

Mage, Judge, and Selax then embark on a quest to recreate the Crolna and to forge a coalition to reunite southern Cythera and defeat Warlord. In the process, they learn Warlord is Alaric's son and possesses the powers of four of the five elements. Based on the Downfall prophecy, they deduce that Warlord's child shall unify all five of the elements. I hadn't really planned out this portion of the story, but I do know they encounter Malthus and are able to defeat him, stealing his enchanted blade. Meanwhile, Admiral finds that the disappearances are due to scylla and polyps and that the undine have been secretly breeding a massive army of the creatures even as they engage in open warfare elsewhere.

At any rate, the characters succeed in gathering the Crolna and an army to fight Warlord, while Admiral leads the navy against the scylla. Selax sends Mage to lead the army. He then reveals that he knows Judge is Warlord's daughter and that she has been manipulating them in an effort to obtain the Crolna herself. He attacks her using the Crolna and Malthas's sword. In the ensuing chaos, Warlord and his army are defeated (somehow), but the southern army takes heavy losses. The navy defeats the scylla but is almost annihilated in the effort. Wielding all five elements, Judge defeats Selax, but, as she attempts to take the Crolna, he stabs her with the crystal in a last desperate attack. This attack kills her and destroys the Crolna.

With the destruction of the Crolna, the elementals lose their cohesion and dissipate, magic begins to rapidly fade, and Cythera is integrated into Earth. This idea was based on the premise (used in the Hand of Fate and a couple of other chrons, I think) that Cythera was part of Earth but was separated by some sort of barrier which falls when the Crolna is destroyed. At the ending, Selax (who has somehow survived) meets Mage and Admiral. He tells them what has occurred and suggests that Cythera attempt to blend in with the rest of the world. He leaves them with the warning that the elementals might someday begin to regain their sense of self and return.

(In retrospect, I should have handled Warlord differently, since he would be more powerful than Alaric. Probably, it would have been better to explain that Alaric's son died some time prior to the story, having been murdered by Judge, and make Warlord a different character.)

I'm so pleased with the response to this challenge! I really didn't think anyone would attempt it (I wasn't even sure I would), but y'all are amazing and reading these new chronicles has been awesome. If only Sely, Shorty, and Nezmy would join in... but oh well, I guess I'm getting greedy.

Avatara, on 26 May 2014 - 11:28 PM, said:

The challenge was supposed to be hard! I picked what was probably the easiest story to continue, and even then I kept going back and re-reading bellerophon's stories over & over, trying to copy his writing style (I don't know how good of a job I did with that). & I didn't even have to deal with multiple writers' abandoned characters!

iKaterei, on 27 May 2014 - 10:29 PM, said:

How so? ^_^

Selax, on 28 May 2014 - 01:37 PM, said:

Oh, come on!

Your story idea is really interesting though, and I like how you use the Undine and the elementals, who generally get ignored for chronicles. It does sound like it'd be a really long series (I think your summary was longer than any of my chapters of The Powerful Demon), but you know, for this challenge, you'd only have to write one chapter :D

BreadWorldMercy453, on 29 May 2014 - 09:41 AM, said:

I thought I was going to be writing an ordinary story about boats. Then I read to the end of the first chapter and realized it ended with a brigand ambush, which I didn't want to write.

And of course I'm too stubborn to pick a different story so I just had to come up with some absurd way out

This post has been edited by iKaterei: 29 May 2014 - 10:22 AM

I see ^_^ After thirty chapters of Grapper's Return, a giant man&boat-eating pelican doesn't seem weird at all!

I wonder if Odysseus didn't want to write the brigand ambush either?

BreadWorldMercy453, on 29 May 2014 - 01:30 PM, said:

Well, that made this challenge considerably more ridiculous too

BreadWorldMercy453, on 29 May 2014 - 09:41 AM, said:

I said "defeats" not "kills" .

And one chapter is still more effort than I feel like expending on that particular story at this point in time.


EDIT:
Happy now ?

Very happy! :D Thrilled! :D

So many chrons! *throws confetti*

This chronicle challenge is now over ;_; (of course, late submissions are a Cythera board tradition...) Thank you to Fiery, Rogan, Tyry, Kat, and Sely for participating! We had an amazing 39 entries to this challenge! If this were the Olden Days when only one chronicle was released per week, it'd take like 9 months to release all of these! :D

So Sely, are you going to do a Summer Chron challenge this year? ^_^

May Chron Challenge Meaningless statistics:
There were 39 entries to the May Chron Challenge, including 31 additions to Grapper's Return by Fiery, 4 additions to The Powerful Demon by myself, an addition to The Shadow Warriors by Rogan, an addition to The Shadow Prophecies by Tyry, an addition to Coastal Empire by Kat, and Sely's chronicle which I'm not sure which series it belongs to.

The word counts for each chapter posted in order of when they were posted:
The Powerful Demon, Part 3 - 557
Grapper's Return, part 2 - 156
Grapper's Return, part 3 - 189
Grapper's Return, part 4 - 202
Grapper's Return, part 5 - 242
Grapper's Return, part 6 - 229
Grapper's Return, part 7 - 216
Grapper's Return, part 8 - 158
Grapper's Return, part 9 - 196
Grapper's Return, part 10 - 196
Grapper's Return, part 11 - 269
Grapper's Return, part 12 - 216
Grapper's Return, part 13 - 215
Grapper's Return, part 14 - 344
Grapper's Return, part 15 - 172
Grapper's Return, part 16 - 351
Grapper's Return, part 17 - 243
Grapper's Return, part 18 - 288
Grapper's Return, part 19 - 226
Grapper's Return, part 20 - 323
Grapper's Return, part 21 - 14
Grapper's Return, part 22 - 273
Grapper's Return, part 23 - 252
Grapper's Return, part 24 - 341
Grapper's Return, part 25 - 193
Grapper's Return, part 26 - 259
Grapper's Return, part 27 - 257
Grapper's Return, part 28 - 241
Grapper's Return, part 29 - 243
Grapper's Return, part 30 - 278
Grapper's Return, part 31 - 292
Grapper's Return, part 32 - 535
Shadow Warriors, chapter 8 - 2922
The Powerful Demon, part 4 - 522
The Powerful Demon, part 5 - 559
Shadow Prophecies, chapter 6 - 1742
Coastal Empire, chapter 2 - 637
The Powerful Demon, part 6 - 561
This is (not) the End - 2853

Total word counts per writer for this challenge:
Kat- 637
Tyry- 1742
Me- 2199
Sely- 2853
Rogan- 2922
Fiery- 7609

Updated word counts for the chronicle series (old count + challenge entry count = total count)
Grapper's Return: 204 + 7609 = 7813
The Shadow Warriors: 12628 + 2922 = 15550
The Shadow Prophecies: 16381 + 1742 = 18123
Coastal Empire: 1619 + 637 = 2256
The Powerful Demon: 1046 + 2199 = 3245

Each of these series had been abandoned for over ten years before this challenge, unless you count the release of the fifth chapter of Shadow Prophecies, which Kat finally posted eleven years after she wrote it.

This post has been edited by BreadWorldMercy453: 28 March 2016 - 08:18 PM

Mine was actually a standalone story, so you don't have to count it if you don't want to.


Regarding a summer chron challenge, I'll make an effort at it, but I can't say that it will necessarily be that successful.

Really? I thought it was a stand-alone while I was reading it, but then in the end you said it was for this challenge, so I thought it was mysteriously related to another series, which Tyry confirmed (he'll probably deny this). Anyway, the most important thing was to generate May Chrons, so I'm still counting it ^_^

Thank you for your generosity .