So EndMaster has put up the annual Contest (#5!) roughly 12 hours ago and already 20 prompts are claimed. Are you planning to participate? Have you already claimed a prompt? Mystic hasn't even signed up yet, but they are probably already beating you on wordcount. Have you hit your first block yet?
I took pompt 6. I'm not far in at all, not even 1,000 words. Started around 30 minutes ago.
I took prompt #50 and will work on it between creating a rough plan for Safety Not Found. I'm probably going to procrastinate and rush out a half-finished project, but here's hoping that isn't the case
I took prompt 49, and I have a title.
So far, that's it.
XD
I'm not going to miss out on Endmaster's contest, and I'm using it as an excuse to write a storygame that people have been waiting for...
I only have 58 words so far:
Our world is a grave, yet here we live on. Our allies have fallen, yet here we stand strong. In darkest night we are the torch. In deepest cold we are the forge. Winterthorne weathers the storm!
For your walls, our lives. For your king, our blood. While Winterhorne shines, we shall not give up. Winterthorne is home!
*Gasp* No way! How did you do that?! That's insane!!! :D
Ok frick looking at scripting later I HAVE to have this.
I really liked the first page! How did you code something like that?
Scripting, propably very advanced scripting. Can't tell you more than that :P
Oh... I'm dumb ><
Thanks! :D
So... it isn't complex then? That also explains how you made Arise fade in.
Oh... well I guess being able to do something so cool with something so simple is all the more reason to start learning scripting!
I agree, you can do really cool stuff with scripting.
I know, I just didn't realize you could to the cool stuff in the easier levels. The way most things work is it gets better when it gets harder.
I guess all of them. CYS right now though, because I'm making stories on here.
Do you have a concrete idea (or even a loose one) for what you want to use this for or is this being driven by a novelty "wow" factor at the moment? (I'm mainly just asking out of curiosity here! lol :P)
Mostly wow, but I've wanted to do scripting for a while now and was scared by how hard it looked. I also want to do coding, but my mom always sends me to the same beginner camp using basic block code... I can't even figure out the variable blocks in scratch T-T
I have youtube. AI... I don't want my parents catching that on my history.
...You're a computer science professor? Or are you telling me to lie?
I unironically reccomend DMing Ogre about some scriptng stuff for CYS that you can't figure out via on site guides or googling. At least with me he tended to respond pretty well to that sort of thing. Maybe that's not the best idea per say, but its nice to have someone you can ask directly when everything else doesn't end up sufficing enough for learning this stuff.
Thanks. Not sure if I'm actually going to do that though. Is... this spamming?
Was going to edit my post to say Nevermind since others (like Fabrikant and Cavus) seem to know just as much. I only mentioned Ogre due to anecdotal experience on my part! My b... :/ (lol :P)
Sorry...
Wrong reply >_<
Ok. This is important. Ogre is so heart to the site there a phrase "I like Ogre" that people say here. I honestly don't know that much, so maybe bury through the forums or look at his profile.
Thanks!
No problem! :D
I like Ogre
I think, like with any skill, it comes down to understanding the basics, a desire to use the skill itself, and the willingness to learn more about craft behind the skill. I too was wowed by this, but then I started to question what exactly I'd use it for and if it was worth learning even if its not as "hard as it looks". I'm probably just really lazy though. Your still young though, you ought to be learning as much as possible before you turn 19! (obviously one should be open to learning new things in general, but its especially important at an early age for reasons I'm sure you can deduce well enough on your own accord! lol :P) (I heard at one point that your brain starts to develop differently once you turn 19, but I never looked into it so idk at this point if that's even one of the main cutoff points anymore...or if there even is one to begin with! So take that with a bit of grain of salt I guess! :/)
It does, but not entirely until 21 or 25 I'm not sure which. You can still learn after that, it's just harder. At that point you have better judgement, which is also why the drinking age is (I think) 21 because that's the earliest someone's likely to be responsible about their drinking.
I was thinking of somehow using it for my shopkeeper story, but didn't decide yet ;D
That's cool! Maybe you want to just join the conversation, but just in case, do you have threaded veiw on?
Yes, I think. Is it the thing were the reply's move a small bit to the right?
Yes! That's good. And you know if a post is floating it's replying to the first post above it a bit to the left?
Oh, I didn't know that. Thanks for the info :p
No problem. It was just that Alien was responding to me, so generally that would mean he's addressing me unless a mistake was made. You can still join the conversation, it just could be considered rude or seen as you don't know who to reply to or you don't have threaded view or something.
That's incredible, how are you and Gryphon using magic on the storygame editor?
Okay, how the hell did you manage this sorcery?! It's almost exactly what I wanted to do for some parts of Name Not Found, but I could never figure out anything to do with scripting! Please, teach me your ways!
Top 5? I don't see Mysic around. Or anyone else crazy unless I don't know about the skill of someone here. Well, actually she's probably the mystery contestant. Let me check the thread quickly.
EDIT: Yeah.
Oh ok. I just thought it looked so cool. Or maybe that's just because I'm a kid...
:D
True.
Just reached 2k words in my story so far! Do you guys think 1k words a day is a good target? I'm still feeling like a bit of a newbie since there are so many great writers on this site. >_<
That's great! That's better than most people in the contest are (probably) going to do (no offense meant to anyone), and most definitely better than practically all the noobs in their first week.
My progress is now 2k words... T-T
What do you mean? 2k is nothing.
Ah, ok. This is my second sitting and I've done around 500 so far.
As someone who is known to write quickly, I think 2k in three days is pretty good. Consistency beats speed every time. I personally find it more difficult to write the start of stories, but once you're partway through, you're more accustomed to the narrative style, characters, world and writing daily in general, so that's where the occasional 5k a day (or even 10k a day) may appear. Just to clear up confusion, although I know it's tradition to suspect me of always being in these prompt contests, I have too many January deadlines to join. Writing would be too fun of a distraction at the moment. But that means someone else could write the epic this time around!
I was just hoping to have been more productive.
Prompt #15
I already have a plan for what the plot is going to be. Currently laying out the groundwork.
Cool! If I'm not wrong this will be your first story (assuming you get it done), right?
yes
Cool! Can't wait to see how you do! :D (lol, maybe this thread with get your posts into the double digits, just one more!)
I have about 1200 words written. I'm definitely planning on doing better with this contest than the last ones.
Nice! I got 1,000
That's awesome!
Despite this, you placed second in Sherb's summer contest, and won last year's prompt contest. You'll be fine.
And he's won a contest! :D
Lol, that's fine. And I don't know what coaches you're talking about, maybe (probably) they know better than me but I think it really depends on who you're talking about.
There's a reason I stopped entering NaNoWriMo. Writing a 50,000 word novel in a month just wasn't giving me anything that was either good or could be good.
I'm what I believe is a plantser - somewhere between plotter and pantser.
If you don't mind me asking, what's a plotter and a pantser? I don't think you mean the definition that I got.
A plotter - someone who works out every step of the way before starting writing.
A pantser - someone who just writes without a plan. AKA 'flying by the seat of your pants.'
It's been a while, but I think those are the definitions.
Oh, ok that makes sense. I think I'm a mix, but definitely more pantser than plotter.
Everybody is a mix, but it's good to have the self-awareness of where you are on the scale and adjust when necessary. Plotters can produce brilliant plots with cool twists and surprises, but they run a high risk of writers block and their characters can at times feel stiff. Pantsers excell typically excell at character and creating novelty from convincing character development, but they tend to get stuck in editing and often struggle with pacing.
Brandon Sanderson is very far on the plotter scale. Many of his books have elaborate plots with a firework of twists in the last pages. Stephen King is an example of someone who is far on the pantser scale. His plots are very simple but his best books really bring the characters to life.
Ideally you can adjust at least a little bit to the challenge that you are currently facing. Plot a bit more when you set big things in motion, pants a bit more when dealing with characters' internal life.
Oh, thanks!
I don't have that issue. I actually find making ideas for CYOAs easier because whether I actually want it or not I tend to come up with mutiple ideas of how something could go. I can't write all of those even with CYOA though, because it's different actions for all of the characters/monsters/ect.
I rather have the opposite problem. I think as if I am the protagonist. If there is just one course of action in a situation it is fine, and there will only be one choice. But usually I come up with multiple things that I could possibly do in that situation, and then the question is these chpoices would actually lead to branches that are sufficiently different to merit their existance.
I usually follow the "Save the Cat" story beats to get the plot in shape, and thus when I branch I still need to find a way to create the right beats.
To avoid creating branches that are too similar my condition is that each branch must introduce a new flavor to the story. For me that means usually it must let the character evolve in a different way or change the archetype of the story.
For example in Rainbow-1 the first choice is if you actually want a story about the firefighter or a story about a prison break. If you choose the prison break the next choice is literally if you want to embrace your life of crime or try to turn everything around and be good, and so on.
Of course I create way too many branches. Rainbow-1 has over 70 endings now and will have close to 100 when it is fully implemented.
I have a hard time making decisions so CYOAs are perfect because I can do both anytime I can't make a choice in story direction.
I was telling a friend about how I entered a writing contest and my prompt required incest. She told me "that's gross" and I "should've picked a different prompt." Clearly she does not understand fine art.
I've only written a couple scenes so far but the story is about falling into a court drama / romance video game and romancing the male leads... all of which the main character is related to.
That sounds interesting, I'll have to read it.I honestly hadn't even considered taking "court drama" as a legal court room drama. It would be a fun way to interpret the prompt though.
I think Mystic's Constellaris Court is a good example of court drama.
Glad to hear that you not only spoke proudly of your prompt choice, you fully committed to it.
Remember, you currently got the secret Group Hug bonus prompt so all point rewards are doubled. And if you win the contest, you'll double your double!
I currently am planning out my characters and trying to figure out some kind of plot! Since my prompt specifies what kind of protagonist I should have, I've been tweaking things here and there. I'll most likely actually start writing once the next semester starts because I have to study for my exams..
Your prompt is not easy. A passive protagonist in a CYOA sounds like an oxymoron but I'm sure there's a few directions you could take it. I wish you luck.
Thank you Orange! Since Undertale and other games have "pacifist runs", I believe there's some hope for a CYOA with one...
I just realized I misread Orange's reponse.. Thanks for informing me!
Not really! I have tons of ideas for the protagonist, but none of them feel right yet! I've been fiddling with ideas so I can choose the best out of all of them.
Well, the idea is kinda okay to do if you have this character be a diplomat, interrogator or just be so physically weak that they have to scheme their way to get what they want.
Being a Marauder does not make some one better, every order has a shit pile at the bottom. If you really want to think of it in the way you are, then I think the best way to put it is you have to contribute to distinct yourself as a member of the order and not another bumbling noob.
Hey, none of my characters has committed murder!
(yet)
That was actually one of my ideas LOL. I thought it would be too straight forward so I've been experimenting.
I've got an idea for the intro and general plot, and that's it. Haven't even taken notes on it yet, lol
._.
Does anyone here know a lot about ancient gods? I want to put some of them into my storygame, but I don't know too much about them, lol.
LMAO, how in the world did you do that?!
And while yes, I know I can just Google it, I find that people who know a good deal about a topic also know a lot of random trivia regarding it that you can't easily find via Google. Besides, it's more fun to see/hear someone talk about something they are passionate about.
All of them.
Here is unsolicited advice: Don't put too much in your story or you'll just spin your wheels. You should probably learn a little bit about all types of gods so you can get token representation, but focus only on one or two as major antagonists or major side-characters or important side-characters.
In fact, maybe disregard what I said and go read Rick Riordan's stuff. Not just "Olympians," but also the Kane Chronicles. What he did is use a few major gods for plot and conflict and the rest as background texture/world building.
That's a good idea. I have read quite a few books by Rick Riordan, and they were one of the reasons why I chose the prompt I did.
OK some thoughts:
We generally know very little about prehistoric gods, because in prehistrory people didn't write anything down (by definition). This is kind of crazy given that gods are probably as old as humanity, so about 1.2M years and we only know about the beliefs of people for about 3k years, so 0.25%.
What we do know are the ancient historic gods, particularly from culutures that wrote in stone (Greece, Egypt, Assyriah) or Clay (Babylon, Summeria). So if you want to go ancient this limits you to a small corner of the world. There are other cultures from which we know a little bit Norse/Keltic/Germanic, Chinese/Japanese, Aboriginal, Native American, but all this stuff is much younger. The sources that we have are typically 1000 years old, so technically medieval rather then ancient.
So let me stick to the really ancient stuff that happened somewhere areound the Mediteranean and the Red Sea. In these region we have a strong transition between the copper age and the broze age that happened almost accidentally (this is another super fascinating story). Copper age civilizations were not able to sustain large empires; They were city states, and this was also reflected in religion, each city would have there own god or gods. In the Bronze age we get large empires which all come with their state religions, so this is the first time that alot of people believe in the same thing.
Now if we focus on the early Bronze age the first question is are you monotheistic or polytheistic. Interestingly we know much less of the religions that believed in one god, compared to those who believed in many gods. This is partly because there is a tendency for monotheistic religions to eradicate each other. I guess, if you beleive in many gods anyway, it is easier to accept that others beleive in some more.
So on the monotheistic side we have mainly that guy called Jaweh, who you might know as 'God'. He started out as a high-priest in Ur, so he was actually priest to another god, which survived in the form of the 'Holy Spirit'. If you want to piss people off it is good to remember that there is more historical evidence for Jaweh than for Jesus (it's debatable, but the debate is winnable).
Polytheistic religions are more fun, there seems to be widespread belief that humanity started with polytheistic religions. The polytheistic gods start out half as explanations for natural phenomena (who made these islands, why does the sun rise, where does the lightning come from) and half as historical people whose tales have grown out of proportion. So all of these gods are people or animals and they typically fill archetypical roles of ancient societies (hunter, mother, thief, ruler are recurring topics.)
For specific examples: You probably know the Graeco-Roman gods, the romans basically copied from the Greeks and gave them their own names, for example Mars and Ares are the same and so are Minerva and Athene. Interestingly the ancient Greeks are aware that there religion replaced an older religion "the Titans" which is perhaps the oldest religion we know off. The other large empires of the region are Egypt, which you probably also know, and Assyria/Babylon, which again have many parallels.
Personally, I would go for Assyria, as there is quite a lot of primary information, and it hasn't been covered in stories nearly as much as the other options.
Oh wow, thanks for all this! I'll look into Assyria first then.
This is such a retarded and wrong take on the BIble that it's not worth really talking about.
OP, read Walter Burkert's Greek Religion and John Day's Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan for some actual scholarship about antique paganism. God help me.
Thank you :)
Well, I hope I haven't seriously offended anyone. Otherwise my apologies.
Honestly, I tried to properly read up on this history at some point, but 40 papers or so in I gave up because the field is so poisoned by exterior interests that its pretty pointless.
Ok some thoughts:
This is very wrongheaded and bizarre, and leads me to believe you either read a lot of information faster than you could understand it or made shit up to fill in the gaps of what you didn't know. Or you might have read some gormless AI search result to do both of those for you, who knows at this point. Now, I don't know a lot, but I know just enough about this to know your shit's ALL fucked up. Like, holy shit man. It's so intellectually annoying that I kind of couldn't think of anything else outside of writing this post, I have to untangle this. I have a problem.
For one, we don't have the Iliad because it was all written down in stone somewhere like the fuckin' Xi'an Stele, we have it because people made several, several copies of it (on papyrus, mind you) and some of those made it to the modern era. Writing on stone is expensive as hell in terms of time and resources, it limited the information you could write down to just the size of the flattest part of the stone, and it certainly didn't travel well. Clay tablets and cylinders did preserve a little better than papyrus generally, but we have more papyrus and other paper types because you can make more copies that will, by random chance, survive.
For another thing, the closest thing there is to a "default" stance in the bronze-age Mediterranean is a position called Henotheism, which acknowledges some level of reality for gods outside the general purview of the ones the individual worshipped. There are aspects of this still practiced today in the large web of Dharmic religions, where a lot of them only revere one or a few gods but acknowledge that others are possible and might be more valid for other people. I don't know what you mean by "there was a tendency for monotheist religions to wipe each other out" as if it's some sociological/doctrinal thing, but that's, like...
Okay, I realize there's so many blatant fuckeries here with the mechanics of how these things played out, that I've actually started in the wrong place to begin to explain them. Like, enough that it feels like I'm reading a historical account by somebody whose main interaction with historical content was Civ 6,and I've started out my explanation by saying that the colonization of India did not happen because Catherine De Medici and Elizabeth I declared war on Gandhi. Like, that's true, but it isn't addressing the underlying problems here which is bad if you want to establish an understanding not of that individual event but of the systems that brought it about in general. And that's what this kid is after, learning about the ancient gods, all of them.
Religion is generally theorized to have started out not as polytheism, but a much broader umbrella of practices called "shamanism", but this is kind of a loaded term that has a lot of scholarly debate around it due to the way it's been used historically by religions with centralized political authority to kind of root out and imperialize religions that don't. There are many diverse practices that fall under shamanism but for the purposes of creating a narrative to understand how one thing might become what we're currently talking about, there is less of a hierarchical understanding of capital g gods in the sense of immortal creators or embodiments of things, and more of an interest in "animism", or, the anthropomorphic assignment of personhood, will, and intent to natural forces. Fire is an easy one for modern people to understand because so much poetry and fantasy writing still treats fire like this. But there's also, like, other belief systems and practices that have some commonalities-- Ancestor spirits, spirits belonging to places and inanimate objects, belief in a sort of personal system of magic that can be practiced to ward off misfortunes or bring about good things. This isn't a cut and dry category, not all religions that are called Shamanism have this, and, you will find, studying the practices of polytheist and even monotheist religions that follow after, they are not devoid of these things either. (In fact it could be argued that in actual practice, norse pagans were closer to practitioners of "shamanism" as previously described than they were to "polytheism" in the sense that ancient greeks practiced it. But it's all gray areas here because scholarly language is meant to describe, not prescribe, what a thing is, and every individual believer is different, let alone the way every belief system can function in practice.) But this is an illustrative model you you can kind of see, in an iterative system of storytelling and ecosystem of diverse beliefs, how these might spread and change into other things over time.
Ancient Egypt is a good example of this, in a sense, because the religion and its practices feature a lot of these precursor beliefs, namely a kind of animism, everything having its own spirit, personal magic woven into everyday life, and sometimes appeasing ancestors or petitioning them for help. Ancient Egyptian religion was highly syncretic, and had a niche god for just about everything. The world of physics itself was, in fact, a system of gods who made everything work, in the mind of an ancient Egyptian. A lot is made about Anubis's role as a psychopomp and a tomb guardian, because to the modern mind making him a kind of Ancient Egyptian Grim Reaper is more evocative and gives him a kind of wider-reaching role, but it should be emphasized that he was also the god of the mummification process itself, and back then, that was considered equally if not more significant. The steps of mummification were not understood as merely a sequence of chemical reactions (Or, I guess they kind of were, the roots of what we consider to be alchemy pretty much started in Egypt, but I don't want to be here literally all day so let's move on from that) but like, as something that happens because you are working with Anubis. He is the process, it isn't sodium chloride drawing h2o molecules out of the body, they didn't have microscopes or a table of elements. A lot of the gods of nature, civilization, and individual households were like this, but then you get into the idea of the major, "head gods", and you get something more akin to what other civilizations were primarily doing, which was the state religion.
I'm going to be EXTREMELY broad here to save myself hours of describing edge cases and compare-contrast here and say, if you want to get a lot of things wrong but still be mostly right, the "meta", by and large, for bronze age citystate-style civilizations, was this: You would have a god, a big god, usually related to objects in the sky or the weather, and he would represent your area, your place where you lived. They didn't have an idea of a nation as this secular intellectual idea, you were a person from Ur, who belonged to the city, if you worshipped Nanna-Suen, the Moon, and participated in his rites and holidays, which were major economic and social events for the city. That's like, a large part of what made the system work. And furthermore, that god would also typically have a spouse and children to denote not only relationships (usually of subordination or inter-reliance) between other cities or important industries and resources, but also so that that divine bloodline could be traced down to a human who would be the king or queen of that place and exercise authority over it by divine right.
So with that understood, now we're finally ready to actually address that point you made. In most cases, if a person venerated only one god, it was most likely either the god of their tribe or citystate that they would have been socially if not legally obligated to worship. If that person's culture was destroyed, moved to a different place, or otherwise just changed in a significant enough way, that god would also most likely change. But it wouldn't always simply be lost. Very often it was a propaganda victory for the oppressor if they could make the god of another place subordinate to theirs, or indicate that for some reason the god of another region was angry at its people. It also need not strictly be negative, it could be the result of an alliance or large shared influence. Sometimes they change names to reflect a shift in language, sometimes they combine with other gods when two cultures notice similarities between them. The history of mythology is full of stories where the characters are different between different areas. If you've been on the internet long enough, you're probably aware of many cultures having a "flood myth", and only in one case is this attributed to the god of Abraham.
Like, most of us probably don't imagine Artemis, goddess of the hunt and single ladies, as the patron deity of Ephesus. But she was, and the fact that people came to her for all kinds of things, not just stuff strictly related to hunting or archery, that led to a lot of people coming from all over Greece to her temple in Ephesus, which was one of the 7 wonders of the ancient world and gave the place a ton of money and clout in the Hellenistic world. In a lot of cases where individual cults or religious practitioners who revered one god above all the others didn't make it through history, their god would survive as an addition to part of the rest of mythology. And that's the part we actually don't know. Because we don't know if that's actually the case with Artemis, only that she's very different in Ephesus than she is in other parts of Greece that recognized the Olympians, and she's the primary goddess of that place. We don't know if they started as "monotheist" (at least, to the extent that monotheism was ever officially practiced in that time). The origins of the gods are not recorded, we do not have the first drafts of the myths, we only know the earliest things that were written down AND survived, and we never exactly got to see and record the differences in every cult of the gods who ever practiced.
Speaking of the Greek Gods, that aforementioned state deity thing where the lineage of royalty to the gods is their justification for rule, is sort of what the Greco-Roman gods were doing. It's also a big part of why they're famously so incestuous, because back in the day when the ancient Greek gods actually were supplanting (or, more likely, co-mingling, but we're getting into that) with other religions and individual practices, it was cool to add them to your family tree by making them the ancestors of your local heroes and then being descended from those heroes, who are very often kings and queens and other royalty themselves. And at that point you're drawing from a pool of 12, maybe 20 gods, and you pick the ones that might make symbolic sense, but nobody wants to think they're only following the king who's descended from a chump god who's lower on the totem pole, so naturally Zeus or Poseidon have to be involved at least at some point in the arrangement, but also those guys are close blood relatives to all those people too. But that's merely a funny side note, I forgot why I needed to delve further into the Greek gods here, let me read the post again.
Oh, right, Yahweh. Goddamn, the thing that bothered me from the start. I spent a long time googling trying to find where you even found this claim and even the sketchy websites weren't turning up anything. It's actually batshit insane. For entertainment's sake alone I would actually like to hear what deranged source you have on this shit, or at least hear the debates you managed to win making this point, because that isn't even the most atheistic interpretation of current scholarly consensus. This doesn't even stand up to very basic scrutiny because the trinitarian idea of the Holy Spirit as an agential being in itself is a heavily Christian, trinitarian interpretation, and the Jewish concept of the Holy Spirit is something entirely different, and it's used as a term to denote the force of god causing things to happen, more akin to saying "Hoganly Resilience" if you were describing the supernatural durability of Hulk Hogan. ('Twas the Hoganly Resilience that moved the Super Twin to no-sell the Tombstone at WrestleMania, not the weird ego problems of a dude who was going to WCW next year anyway) the idea that it could be a semi-separate entity in itself is an interpretation put upon the text, it is not explicitly treated this way in the bible. There is no surviving evidence that this "Holy Spirit" is the fossilized remnant of a pagan god that's fallen out of popularity-- And we know this, because the bible has fossilized remnants of pagan gods that have fallen out of popularity, and we know what to look for.
The historical and archeological evidence we have, would suggest that Yahweh was a god of storms and river flooding, who came to represent an individual tribe that became part of the Israelite cultural complex. If I'm really stretching what I think you might have misread or been trying to say to its absolute limit, there was a point where, when Israel was part of the Canaanite sphere of influence, Yahweh the storm/war god was viewed as subordinate to El, a kind of elder/king figure in Canaanite mythology, but over time they seemed to merge into one identity due to perceived shared features between them, and convenience of treatment. As previously mentioned, this isn't an unusual thing to happen over time in this religious landscape, look up statues of Hermanubis if you'd like to see a particularly interesting example of this. The idea of Yahweh actually goes through several very interesting transcendances like this over the course of the bible as Israel's situation changes.
It's a very long book and I don't remember everything exactly in order, I'm just going in order of what makes this easy to explain, but the bible begins to implement a number of rejections of the ways other primary deities functioned in response to things the Israelites were dealing with at the time. Much of the very early bible is Henotheistic, and the earliest statements about God having no other are less about the rejection of the existence of other gods, and more, like... Well, for one thing, he's supposed to be the head god, in charge of Israel, and revered by Israelites above all others. But the other thing is actually quite interesting-- God has no wife. You might think that sounds weird, like, of course, if you're a monotheist your god probably doesn't have a wife. But the thing is, if you were the kind of guy that only went to efforts to revere one of your gods, your state god, even then you'd probably acknowledge that your civic god had a wife, because how else would he have descendants? And if your god didn't have descendants, where did your king come from? This is why the bible has rules against "Making an Asherah", and all manner of other idols associated with this sort of deal. Like, it was considered normative practice at this time to assume that your god, even if you only cared about the one, had some kind of family unit, but the God of Abraham was and is, I daresay, something queerer, operating outside the bounds of human reproduction.
The royal line of Israel is not that way because they were infallible superhumans literally descended from the MIGHTY SUN, who would all unilaterally belong on the throne no matter what, but because they were directly chosen by god, and we are all equally "children of god" in the sense that we are descendants of Adam and Eve, who he made. The religion of the Israelites would be shaken multiple times in their history in ways that would drive them in ways to further separate their idea of God from being, like, tied down to a specific place and a specific people the way other gods were. There are predecessors of this line of thought in previous points in Jewish history, and even in some neighboring mythologies, but because I don't know enough to feel confident talking about it I'll say this really crystallized when Rome destroyed the second temple, and economic circumstances (and a bit of slavery) wound up scattering the Jewish people all over the empire. Very suddenly, the holiness of God couldn't just be tied to a place, because that place was gone, and there were a lot of Jews who could not return there anyway. It couldn't be tied to a kingdom, because that kingdom was vassal to an empire that had just committed probably the biggest blasphemy that it was possible for a state to commit. This led to a fascinating period in theology called "apocalyptic Judaism" which I'm not even going to bother getting into here. Probably the most famous figure from this period was a guy they call Jesus-- Some of the conclusions that he and theologians after him came to about the nature of a singular monotheist god should be familiar to anyone reading this post. We gotta move on from this eventually though, and since this is a discussion about mythology I can literally say I've made the mistake of starting parts of my explanation at the fucking beginning of time. I need to be quicker about the next thing.
These next two things are wrong in a more abstract way, the first is just a common phrasing of things that annoys me, that the romans "copied" the gods which, like, I know few people ever actually say that genuinely, but it's still fairly annoying. The Romans simply had the same religious dialect as other dudes on the north coast of the Mediterranean. They believed in the 12 olympians-- Not that they all had thrones at the top of Mt Olympus, but that was not a universally held belief by everyone who believed in the gods we call the "Olympians" either. In fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find a kind of universally held belief between them! Because here's the thing about "polytheism", or really, how all religion worked in ancient times. It is, very distinctly, not Christianity!
There wasn't a pope, there wasn't an administrative oversight committee of highly educated book nerds all collaborating to make sure everyone has an agreed-upon set of stories and names that are all kept straight. In the age of citystates, you had temples and holy sites that were tended to by a priesthood, and those priests more or less were part of the nationstate of that city. They might have had hierarchy or done some oversight to keep the story straight within their own area, but the "rules" of that religion were handled, from a practical perspective, more or less at the civic level. If somebody declared themselves the Pope of Zeusism*, they might be able to get away with it, within their city, but it would be that city's Zeus. The cultural network around which these gods were recognized spanned a very wide region, across numerous cultures, languages, time periods, and styles of government. You might think it's funny that the gods of Rome are like the same guys with different names, I think it's funny that these different-named guys managed to be so similar!
The truth of the matter is, there is no singular "Zeus". A lot of cults in the Greco-Roman world had a guy like Zeus, and the religious concept of Zeus gradually developed as religious institutions in different citystates communicated, and other travelers recognized commonalities in the beliefs, stories, and practices of different places. But just like DC has Superman and Marvel has Wonderman, different interpretations of the same shit can wind up being really different!
Like, take Mars and Ares for example, they're characterized very differently because they are meant to communicate different things, by two societies who valued different things. All the "Olympians", or "Dii Consentes" from the Roman perspective, have little differences between their Greek and Roman counterparts. Some stories fall out of favor or have details changed. But Mars and Ares are a good case study because they are the two most clearly different versions of one of the big 12, you can tell from their statues, you can tell from the shift in how people talk about them. They are practically different characters, though their domain and role in some of the stories is the same.
Ares in the stories that feature him is stubborn, bestial, brutal, barbaric, full of false bravado, and morally wretched. He is still a powerful archetype to be revered, but he is the kind of spirit of war that is useful to the soldier but not to the general, embodying the pure act of fighting other humans. This is treated as having a very limited place in Greek society. Often stories serve to humiliate Ares or highlight his repugnance in comparison to Athena, who represented a kind of civilized organizational view of war that was viewed as preferable. Mars could hardly be a more different depiction-- He is, to use a very anachronistic term here, chivalrous, and represents courage as well as a sort of idealized conduct. Roman society placed great value on the concept of a virtue they called "Virtus" (look it up, I've been at this too long as it is.) which was heavily associated with the conduct expected of ideal military men, and while Virtus was literally embodied by a goddess named after the concept, Mars was meant to possess virtus in spades. Men in Rome were expected to acquire virtus by going to war, and nobody has been in more war than Mars! That would maybe have sent a weird message if they went with the other interpretation.
Anyway, the other point, and the point on the polytheism end of things that strikes me as the most obnoxiously ignorant, was the "The Ancient Greeks were aware their religion replaced an older religion, 'The Titans', which were perhaps the oldest religion we know of". Now, if you've been reading along here hopefully you've had enough concepts established about how the Greco-Roman Religious Complex "worked" that you can already see how shaky the ground is for this statement.
But let me be very clear, "The Titans" do not comprise the oldest religion we know of. For one thing, if the bar is as low as "we know of it", then anything we have names and written stories for is probably not on the first page of the oldest religions we know, because then we're competing with the likes of stonehenge and paleolithic Shaktiism. For another, there is no singular start date for just about anything in the Greek Myths**. Individual gods may be way older or way younger, we don't know exactly where a lot of these things came from, we merely record when they appear in data that survives. They are also, for most intents and purposes, the same religion as the rest of the Greek Gods. Athens had a temple to Cronos, he was considered as valid a deity for reverence as any other, and was worshipped at the same time as the other Greek Gods. The Titans and The Olympians are the same species of being, the difference is more like a generational social class-- There was a time when Cronus's generation of gods ruled the heavens, and now Zeus's does. That's the difference. If you want to get especially trippy, it's possible that the concept of the current holy family having overthrown a previous generation of gods goes back before the Greeks, but rather to the Hittites, and became a shared/adapted story in Greece. If indeed new gods replaced any old ones, it was somebody else entirely. Much like in the Bible, there is Greek mythological evidence, which, paired with archeological evidence, can be used to deduce the case where the Olympian cults actually did gradually replace an older religion, and it is not the Titans. An example of this would actually be the story of the Minotaur, which would seem to contain references to an ancient bull cult which we know existed in Crete before they started worshipping gods more familiar to the rest of the Grecosphere-- But also establishes that the royal family of Minos are descended from multiple Olympians, who got involved with multiple generations of King Minos' family. (Yuck!)
*This is a stupid thing for a person to do, for a number of reasons, because that game was locked down tight by dangerous people. Folks who were going into business for themselves, religiously speaking, tended to form cults for local heroes or city patron deities where their influence wasn't entangled with the voices of everyone else in the greco-roman world who would certainly have an opinion on it. Though if you were more philosophically inclined, you could yourself become a kind of guru-- I also don't want to take too long here at this point because the post isn't even done and I'm writing ADHD footnotes, but if you would like to go down a funny rabbithole, let it be known: that all that triangle shit? Absolutely the least interesting thing about Pythagoras. If you're still in school be sure to read up on the guy and let your math teacher know what a psycho that guy was. **Unless, of course, we have reason to believe one of the stories or interpretations of these stories which went on to become very popular was original content written by a guy in the form of a play or a parable or whathaveyou.
I don't know how to end this, I refuted what I wanted to refute, said more than I wanted to say, and now it's midnight. Fuck you. Fuck off. Go home. I'm sleeping. If you've ever heard it said in a sunday school class or history class or whathaveyou, that before Christianity, Rome generally didn't care what you believed as long as you paid taxes? This is why. All this shit. And of course this comes with the standard disclaimer that this has all been rattled off the top of my head out of spite, so UD please make sure you actually read things written by real people with real labcoats. Don't listen to me, but ESPECIALLY DO NOT LISTEN TO THIS GORMLESS FREAK.
Apologies again, after the other discussion how tolerant this site is to everything including Nazis, I thought it would be a fun to see how people react to the Yahweh hypothesis, which is typically one that people take badly. I wouldn't have thought that it blows up quite so much, aehm sorry.
On a different note, it's pretty cool that people here care about these things, and thanks sent for the long post. I don't want to reply to everything because it will only result in pointless discussions. But I here are three things:
Hard vs. Soft media: This is a thing. We have tons of papyrus, we have the Dead Sea Scrolls etc. but vast volume of these soft media is comparatively young. Still there are some soft media from the Bronze age. The oldest is the Diary of Merer with is about 4500 years old, then there is the Cairo leather roll which is about 4400 years old. The surviving "old" Papyri are all younger about ~3500 years (Prisse Papyrus, Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, Edwin Smith Payprus, Ebers Papyrus, Westcar Papyrus, Moscow Math Papyrus), but this is not much compared to say the Hittite clay tablets that we have from this time. In the Hittite civilization wooden books probably outnumbered the clay tablets, but we still have ~30.000 clay tablets and zero wooden books. In summary, regarding textual sources from the Bronze age and earlier periods hard-media sources vastly outnumber soft-media sources.
Regarding the titans we are pretty sure what happened. Here is the detailed version of the story. In ancient Greece (which wasn't even really ancient Greece yet, as we are talking before the Cleisthenic reforms) the titans are an example of "Old Gods", what historians would call "Former Gods". They were not the gods that the people who lived in the geographical area of modern Greece had worshipped before. Instead they were a myth that these people had copied---the idea that there were other gods before the gods.
The Greeks get this idea from the Hittites (a Bronze Age superpower from modern Turkey). We know this because there is a one-to-one correspondence between the Greek titans and the "former gods" of the Hittites [1,2]. But even the theogony of these former gods even further. The hittite former gods (Karuilies Siunes) were not previously worshipped by the Hittites instead they seem to have merged two other beliefs of former gods. The main influence seem to be Hurrian civilization who had their own former gods. Again there is a strong structural correspondence between the Hurrian "Old Kings" and the Greek Titans [3]. But the Hurrians didn't invent the old gods either. They merged previous ideas including Sumerian, Akkadian, and even Vedic influences [4].
So the idea of the "old gods" was super popular in the ancient world (Lovecraft did get this stuff from somewhere after all). Moreover there are large structural similarities. Almost everybody seems to agree that there are 12 of them, that you worship them by dropping offerings into pits. There are structural similarities between their stories and linguistics anlogies between their names. So there is pleanty of evidence that this is not parallel evolution, but likely stems from a single source. The most likely OP are the Sumerians, who had a previous religion that got replaced (though less violently). These previous gods are of Sumer (The Enmesharra or Anunaki). Hence my statement that the Titans are basically a remembrance of the oldest gods we know about.
Shamanism: This term is still widely used in popular science, but it is essentially a collonial term, that is used to devalue indigineous religions [5]. It is probably better to avoid it.
[1] Güterbock, Hans Gustav. "The Hittite Version of the Hurrian Kumarbi Myths: Oriental Forerunners of Hesiod." American Journal of Archaeology 52.1 (1948): 123–139.
[2] Bachvarova, Mary R. "From 'Kingship in Heaven' to King Lists: Syro-Anatolian Courts and the History of the World." Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12.1 (2012): 97–118.
[3] Van Dongen, Erik. "The 'Kingship in Heaven'-Theme of the Hesiodic Theogony: Origin, Function, Composition." Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies, vol. 51 (2011): 181–201.
[4] Pengglase, Charles. "The Greek Gods and the Mesopotamian Religious Context." The Classical World, vol. 84, no. 5 (1991): 329–339.
[5] Sidky, H. (2010). "On the Antiquity of Shamanism and its Role in Human Religiosity." Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 22(1), 68-92.
Very good points.
The "Yahweh-hypothesis" --- The pop-culture reference is Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash." Stephenson uses this as a metaphor for dangerous knowledge that must be kept from the public. However, he did not invent this. It was a hypothesis that seriously debated during the first years of the twentieth century, before it was silenced for various reasons, which was likely the reason Stephenson was interested in it.
Most primary sources are in German. The best is perhaps this one:
Hugo Winckler – Himmels- und Weltenbild der Babylonier als Grundlage der Weltanschauung und Mythologie aller Völker (1903) (link)
Before people get this wrong: I don't endorse this book, but it contains summary of these ideas. It is great trolling material though, and this whole academic debate (Pan-Babylonism) is a nice Dan Brown-ish story with tomes of forbidden knowledge uncovered in libraries etc.
I'm not really certain I know what you mean by "largely the same". I think unless you draw an extremely wide umbrella and flatten a lot of things down to ignore the contradictions, you would be hard-pressed to find a strong consensus between the world religions of the same time period other than a kind of vague general belief in anthropomorphic will assigned to natural forces, and similar historical and social issues that effected different populations of that time, that some of these religious teachings may have had similar reactions to. Even the individual philosophers whose names we know, stand in different places regarding the relative existence of the gods, or a god, and the roles they play in our human lives. Stoicism and Aristotelianism, for examples off the top of my head, took on religious traits after people at large began adopting beliefs from their writings, and they come with a lot of mutually exclusive ideas about physics and the way the physical world works that couldn't really be tested by science at the time.
The fact that most of the sun gods have "become mythology" in the minds of most people today has a lot more to do with everyone who worshipped most of them being dead than it does with us simply knowing what the sun is. There were non-supernatural explanations for the sun even when the sun was being worshipped as a god! Granted, a lot of them were scientifically wrong, but a person even at the time could believe both things. Sol Invictus was a Roman sun cult that was popular well near the time of Christ. And like... A very easy way to tell why this isn't true, is like... Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin is not a household name for discovering the physical makeup of the sun and proving that it's just a self-sustaining radioactive hydrogen explosion floating around in space. This discovery didn't suddenly kill a bunch of sun gods, it was a discovery made in the 1930s. By that point, everybody who didn't worship the sun already didn't, for completely other reasons. It already was not significant to them that way. And the sun gods and goddesses in India and Japan? Nothing really happened to them. There are people who still worship them, and though their religion may have declined in significance I think that has a lot more to do with global socioeconomic pressures than simply discovering that aspects of the stories are not literally true. Like, the Greek Gods had a pretty long run. You think in 4,000 years nobody climbed Mount Olympus even once and saw nothing was up there? Or even, like, looked at Mount Olympus, and saw that there was no sign of life at the top, like a light or smoke from a brazier or literally anything? Hell, have you actually seen Mount Olympus? It's like somebody half-buried a giant pringles chip on its side. Do you think they noticed that a big palace where 12 giants sat in a big circle might be tricky to balance? Or, maybe their relationship to their religion was not so expressly physical, and if somebody climbing Mount Olympus actually believed the gods were seated there, a literal circle of giant motherfuckers on golden thrones was not what they actually, literally expected to see at the top.
This happens commonly all over Italy and Greece, actually. When the sea air carries all the olive oil fumes toward the mountain, it gets caught there and sort of just starts to look like a Renaissance painting of people sitting on clouds.
Wait- I thought my spelling was pretty good? Is it one of the more complex words? ><
Oh shoot you probably mean other middle schoolers...
Even if none of it is useful for my storygame, it's still useful for me in the sense that I get both a free history lesson and free entertainment (from both the arguments and the crazy things that people thought their gods did). Hell, we even have popcorn left over from an event yesterday that I've been eating while reading these posts! So please, do continue supplying me with knowledge and entertainment!
This was an outstanding post worthy of commendation. But I'm not gonna lie... the one thing I'm going to remember from all this is that Yahweh doesn't have a wife because he's apparently queer. You damn near made me drench my monitor in coffee with that one.
RE:Pythagoras. Just to be fair, "all that triangle shit" goes way beyond triangles in math and physics. It's freaking everywhere in mathy stuff, things that are quite removed from triangles. You might even say that triangles are only the tip of the... triangle.
Behold, Pythagoras in its Final Form.
I know, but there is no way the word wasn't used deliberately, especially considering mere sentences before he was talking about gods with wives, and how particular it was that the God of Abraham doesn't have one.
Joking aside, even if you don't believe in any god or gods, this particular god, IMHO, was probably a necessary foundation for modern Western society. Not to be all pseudo-historian/archeologist (talking way outside my lane), but I feel like without Yahweh, you don't get the more abstract version of him found in early Christianity (where everything is centered on "spiritual law" rather than tedious prescriptions about how to run a society, like you have in Islam), and without that, maybe 1500 or so years later you don't have the Protestant Reformation, and that probably helped set the cultural, intellectual, and institutional conditions necessary to produce the Enlightenment, which in turn is the foundation of modern Western society as far as I can tell.
Again, I acknowledge I'm speaking way outside my lane, but it seems like that to me. So, in this case Yahweh would be the key to modern Western civilization in a weird, convoluted way.
I intended it a little bit both ways. Rejecting the typical narrative of the state deity as the literal, sexual progenitor of the royal family, while not 100% unique in mythologies of the area, was a tacit removal of the expected traditional divine masculine role in near east mythology, and it served a social purpose in the way that belief applied to human practice. I'm not gonna go about hallucinating bits of the text that imply something I will read as queer here, but it is, absolutely, nonstandard sexual practice for the gods of the Near East-- It was in fact a nonstandard sexual practice for mortals at that time. To this day a lot of Jewish sects hold marriage to be a duty, and if you didn't do it back then, you would have been capital Q Queer by their measurement, and faced legal and social consequences. I wouldn't call it revolutionary because, in the end, it served primarily to reify certain teachings about the exact nature of God. But in the understanding of the gods of the ancient world as knowable personalities, this is a queer trait, and serves to elevate the evolving idea of God above what was considered essential human behavior.
After a somewhat thorough skim through this, I can already tell this is going to be helpful. I will be reading through it all at a later date, btw; Thanks for the information, and I'll make sure not to trust anyone unless they have a lab coat on.
Sadly, you seem to be wearing a jacket, not a lab coat, so I can not trust you either. As such, this entire thing is rendered moot, and thus all information given in this is clearly false.
When you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.
Finally managed to read through it all. It was quite an interesting read, and I'm glad to see that people care this much about what they are interested in. Sadly, most of it is irrelevant to my storygame, but it's still a good impromptu history lesson.
Y'know I hate to directly influence creativity here, but when I said "old gods" I was thinking more along the lines of unspeakable abominations from the outer reaches of reality.
But yeah sure I suppose the old pagan ones work too.
Honestly I was hoping one of the more skilled vets take that one and just loaded it up with unnatural body horror and the nihilistic dread of the inevitable terrors from beyond as the protagonist suffers mind warping insanity while trying to survive.
But whatever.
Well I mean proving himself worse at writing then we thought he was isn't exactly up, but I doubt that will happen anyway.
Really? What if I were to ******* ******* with ****** ** **** to ******* * ***** ** and ****** **** *** ********?
(Edit: These are just random amounts of asterisks, don't bother trying to guess what it is uncensored.)
0.0
I mean it could have at least been the Edrazi.
But perhaps UD can make something as epic as these types of horrifying elder gods.
Damn, that's a great card, despite it's obscene mana cost. Although I might have a deck that it could work in, lol.
Ehh, I thought of that, but I'm trying other things out first
There's a discussion thread for this contest that's better for sharing your progress.
That is this thread
Oh shoot I'm dumb ><
I'm catching up on all the posts I missed and keep getting threads mixed up :P
It's okay, I do the same thing sometimes, lol. Makes it worse when someone changes the name of a post to something completely unrelated, and I have two different names for notifications from the same thread.
I know!
Slightly unrelated, but when you look at forum posts, are some of them indented (i.e., in threaded view)?
That sounds like an ambitious project. Out of curiosity, how many words are you planning for your story to be?
That's definitely ambitious, I would wait before trying scripting but you do you.
Is it possible to make multiple if statements to conclude one destination? Like even more possible pages depending on your relation with multiple other characters?
Dang, already? You've gotten a lot done
Just found this and wanted to participate... it keeps me motivated.
I picked 19) A story involving a war between two galactic super powers fighting over planet Earth (Humans are the “primitives” caught in the middle).
I had an idea for a liner story before that fits this theme semi well, so I'm adapting it and adding branches. Its something I don't usually write, but it will be a sci-fi with romance elements. Sci-fi is something I always thought I would be good at and romance is a genere I really like to include in stories but am terrible at writing.
The concept is going to be that there are two alien races and one human protagonist who will meet the first aliens to crash land on the planet. I'm thinking that you will pick a side and learn more about that one alien race while making decisions that form the entire races opinion of humans. The other race will progress without a positive human relationship and begin to try to enslave the planet. Then, you will either make all the aliens hate humans or befriend one race to fight the other with the humans.
I have a lot of lofty ideas, but I already have my core characters and setting. I came here today to start writing before getting distracted here, so I will get back on task... I do love talking about story concepts and bouncing ideas off people though so I'll be back!
Well, my plan of making a fairly simple storygame has gone out of the window. I'm not actually sure where some of these paths are going, or why I now have a slew of other characters who just happened to show up.
The storygame itself is apparently inspired by a horror movie I saw years ago. I don't remember the title, though I might be able to find it again based on what I do remember.
I don't have the exect same situation, but yeah things got kind of out of hand for me too. I though what I was writing was too compact and my story would be too short, so I tried to loosten it up but now it's headed to be way longer than I originally meant it to be. I had a similar issue with Shifter, actually.
Fucking Christ, you lot are arguing over religious shit that doesn't matter since UD totally missed the mark on the "old gods" prompt anyway. Anything he uses from the text walls isn't going to help him.
There is truly no way you're being serious at this point.
So I guess I can poke my head in here now officially.
I took a while to get in because I was originally taking time to see if I had some workable ideas for the sports prompt combined with some sprinkles of the "literally retarded" prompt. I still might write that story down the line but I just didn't have enough interest to commit to what I had in mind at the time.
Zero words as of now but that's because I'm still wrapping up my branching diagram. I'm gonna try to keep my scope relatively small so I can deliver something rather than overreach and get fed to rape scorpions. It would be my first fictional work I've finished in a very long time so I'm excited, even if it'll be something short or ass.
It's cancer, we're just having fun with it!
I still don't get the whole pacing thing.
My biggest problem at the moment is remembering which branch has told the reader what information and not getting it crossed up or confused.
Thats a crazy amount of words although it needs also to be good quality to win. Anymwho, is it on sneak peak on CYS?
It is by standards here. Everyone has lives besides CYS and a ton of people procrastinate, so many people can find it hard to write 1k every day. I participated in the Edutainment contest and only got 20k words in (it wasn't great quality...).
Thanks :)
Professional? That's pretty good.
I have 11k, sorta slowed down with the semester ending. Friday was the last chance to get any missing work in. Anyway that's ended so hope fully I have time to start typing more again. ^-^
For all of you who feel sad about only having written a few paragraphs for your storygame, I'd like to share that I don't even have a full outline by now. So, as long as you have more than that, you can rest easy knowing that: yes, there is indeed someone who has done less than you.
On ~8 you have this:
You sidled along the near side of its wagon to the rear and peeked towards your target. He had successfully lit the pipe he was fiddling with and was now blowing out smoke, blissfully aware of your steel drawing closer.
I imagine you intended that to be blissfully UNaware.
So far it's pretty good. I'm interested in the action. The protagonist and Trixie seem to have a good rapport. I also like that the same event unfolds differently if you make a different choice (having Trixie untied). I like that kind of thing in story games, where the world doesn't magically change based on your choice, and only the things you directly affect (or things that are affected by what you affect) change the world.
Probably not everything, just a quick pass:
The first sentence could use more showing rather than telling.
On that note, you drew the curtains of the wagon open to check on your wife, Beatrice or Trixie as you called her, who was taking her turn to sleep. --> check on your wife Beatrice, or Trixie as you called her, who was taking
Bandits. There are probably more, hiding for an ambush," you thought to yourself. --> if you're going to use italics, then you don't need the quotation marks anymore.
arrow-tips --> arrow tips
No need to capitalize hey if you're using an exclamation mark.
Shit, it's that poison gas again. Cover your eyes and your mouth. Don't breathe," one of the bandits barked. --> at least some of his orders probably would work better with exclamation marks
I like the action and tactical decisions.
Good branching so far.
There doesn't seem to be any clues as to which choices lead to surviving and which lead to you dying, making outcomes feel random and unearned.
It feels weird that you would be so immediately certain that the guy on the road is a bandit that you wouldn't even leave room for a choice to treat them as if they were not bandits. Some guy commanding you to stop doesn't seem overtly bandit-y. If you want me to treat them like they are certainly bandits, then maybe revise the writing so that the guy looks or acts in a way that certainly only bandits would.
It's pretty good so far overall, like a 6.5/8 for what it is.
Showing: My wife opened the door and walked outside, her luscious locks swaying over her curvy hips with every step.
Telling: My beautiful wife left the house.
Showing: "Hi."
Telling: She greeted the man.
Showing: "Good morning, students! We will be having meat loaf for lunch today," the loudspeakers blared with the principal's voice. "The chess team finished in 2nd place in the state championships, and sign-ups for the fall play are in Room 236."
Telling: I heard the principal make the announcements over the loudspeaker.
I've finally started work on the storygame with a measly 532 words written down so far. Here's hoping my brief burst of productivity lasts.
Here's what I consider to be the true start of the story I have so far; all criticisms are welcome:
(pushing down formatting)
You wake up silently. There is no scream, no gasp for air, nothing. Dying was a silent thing that came and went, and the aftermath is just as quiet. The room you stand in is a plain, unadorned space, with two chairs and a table in the middle; Papers and folders are scattered haphazardly on it, and a few rings indicate where a nearby mug had been laid on top of them. A man sits in one of them, idly shuffling around papers. He notices you standing, and confusion flashes across his face before he gestures at the chair, which you suddenly find yourself in. Two cold, dark eyes bore into you, and a shudder runs up your spine, then recognition seemingly dawns on him. He goes back to the papers, boredom returning to his face, seemingly ignoring you.
Thanks for the help, I'm glad to know I'm achieving the right effect with it!
Thank you; I'll fix the grammar here soon!
I can relate. My idea continues to marinate and I have practically nothing. I'm not worried—yet. Usually after the idea/plot solidifies, I can do dozens of pages a day. But I fear it may not get there. :/
Regarding your cutting block choice, I hope you execute the correct one. Don't need a proverbial Barabbas running around (although I suppose Barabbas being freed worked out for the best).
