Announcing the SotA Writing Round Table and A New Story Contest!

Announcing the SotA Writing Round Table

The imagination of this community is one of the greatest assets we have to help make Shroud of the Avatar succeed. It brings characters to life, raises up towns, and enriches the world created by Lord British and Tracy Hickman. We would like to do our own small part to enhance your contribution to this project. We want to encourage you to write. To share and refine your imagination to make a true contribution to the land we hope to one day call home.

To this end, we have created a simple forum: The SoTA Writing Round Table. It is a place for us amateur writers to post our story ideas and give feedback to each other. (We also would love to have professionals join us, Tracy?) We want to keep it simple to focus on the basic joy of writing and giving feedback.

We see the SotA Writing Round Table as a perfect complement to the SotA Library, adding a depth of community involvement in discussion about our work and the craft of writing. In fact, we are the ideal place to work on your ideas before posting them to the forum here. The goal is to actively engage each other so that we enhance our contributions.

By signing up, you are a full member of the round table from day one, and you can participate as much or as little as you'd like. Whatever you write remains yours and you are free to edit your tales or not as you see fit. There are no requirements for this site, except the forum rules that apply here. It is a round table precisely to identify it as a collaborative effort. Every person can have a voice at the table, especially those of you who may feel like you haven't had the opportunity to flex your writing muscles! If you have been afraid to write, we would gladly help you craft whatever you want to submit.

Our site is being hosted in conjunction with Caverns, Dungeons and Beyond. We are greatly indebted to Sir Stile for helping us launch this effort. (Show him some love!) We are happy to have him at the round table!

How to Use the SotA Writing Round Table

Initially, we have three areas we would like to promote within the forum. First, please post SoTA Stories about any aspect of the world you'd like to imagine. This will be the main forum to receive feedback and discuss your work. Second, we are willing to help you craft your character back story with our Lives of New Britannians. Have an idea for a side quest? There is a place for this too.

To help you write, we will have links to publicly available lore information as it is released and general resources on the craft of writing.

All of us on this forum are strongly committed to providing feedback for anything that is posted as we have time available. Hopefully others will join in and provide feedback as well. We all need extra eyes to review grammar, style and lore consistency! Again, this feedback can be used by the author as he or she sees fit. All content you post remains yours, to use in game or not. It is a place to have fun, and let imagination run free.

Why not start by providing your review of the beginning of a new series by Vyrin, Lily, the Queen of the World, or the trilogy of terror by Womby, Journey to Kingsport, The Perfect Crime, and The Gift?

Our technical skills are not the greatest, and Vyrin just learned CSS to mod our site. If you have suggestions on how we could do things better with the forum, we are happy to hear them.

Where We Are Heading with the SotA Writing Round Table

We want to encourage writing pre-launch through contests and hosting events in releases. Our contests will be judged through open voting by all members of the round table, not by a panel. Every discussion will be open, there will be nothing going on behind the scenes.

When book publishing is added to a release, we will explore and discuss the mechanics. We want to understand how we can develop a rich trove of player-lore in game, through things like a thriving book economy.

At launch, we want to be SotA's first publisher, Round Table Publishing. We will use our experience to help anyone publish their works in game, operate book sellers, host book and lore related events, and more. Nothing contributed on the forum now will be published unless you desire to do so once we launch. Again, on the Round Table forum, your work remains yours to do with as you see fit.

Announcing our First Contest (with Real Prizes)!

To launch our forum we are running a story contest! Here are the details:

Theme: You discover a book that someone has dropped in a side street of Ardoris. Entrants are to submit a collection of words (short story, poem, etc.) that describes what follows.
Length: The entry should not exceed 500 words, one entry per member of the Round Table. (Make it your best work!)
Deadline: Entries must be posted in the contest thread in the First Story Contest category by midnight UTC/GMT on November 3.
First Prize: $25 store credit + a special gift!**
Second Prize: $10 store credit.
Third Prize: $5 store credit.
Resources: You can find some pictures of Ardoris that may prove helpful here, and a map of Ardoris here (do not, however, include illustrations in your entry).
Language: Entries must be in English.
Judging criteria: Originality, creativity and depth of character development, successful use of words or phrases to create images or invoke emotional response, ability to capture and hold the reader's interest, plus other less glamorous but important stuff (grammar, spelling, conformance with established lore).
Judging process: Every member of the Round Table gets one vote. Voting will be done by adding a "+1" comment to the story on the forum, once the deadline has passed. We will post a notice in the SotA Library when voting can begin.
Restrictions: All submissions must be the original work of the person submitting the entry.

**Special Gift: Sir Stile Teckel has graciously agreed to contribute one of the Lord British designed Magic the Gathering Cards, the Shield of the Avatar!

Again, to submit your story, simply post a "discussion" in the"First Story Contest" category. This will not be our last contest or event before release, so stay tuned!

We stand committed to encouraging your work, and helping you write in any way we can.

So join us! Help bring New Britannia to life!

Vyrin & Womby

 

Awesome!

 

Hmm...a nice alternative to that other group I am intrigued...

 

Brilliant! I remain in awe at the talent and imagination bursting forth from the community. Anything to encourage more of this is a GOOD THING

 

Happy to see more groups dedicated to writing for the game. Looks like fun!

 

Oh, this looks like a fantastic group to be a part of. It always brings a smile to my face to see great creative minds given the freedom to flow in the direction they wish to flow, without walls, without boundaries. This is a fantastic idea! Knights of the round table are nothing in the face of a scribe with a pen!

I can now start writing again! ~smiles~ Wonderful!

 

This is a cool and interesting idea, but I'm curious about the intent to have in-game publishing. Considering this is a non-official entity, are you guys going to interface directly with the scholars of novia to get stuff approved for in-game use?

 

Yes, you and the other Scholars need opportunities to write and participate in contests as well!

 

Players can publish books at a cost through in-game printing presses. This just means making a single copy of a manuscript for gold. If an organization wants to reward an author by making, say, 100 copies of their book and distributing them across the land, that wouldn't require the involvement of the Scholars or Portalarium.

 

It is Portalarium that decides whether or not they will use written content to seed the game with. What the Scholars do is provide proof-reading/error checking and lore checking as an optional service. They do not provide an official "approval for in-game use". That is, and always has been the final decision of Portalarium. Which remains true even as a contest prize since it is Portalarium offering said prize.

If this round table were to run a contest, my understanding is they could work with Portalarium as well to have the same or similar option as a prize. Portalarium has given prizes out before to community run contests.

 

I would think this group would be just as official as the other, and would enjoy exactly the same access to the devs.

 

It does sound like the intent and scope is a little different though.

 

I took it that they were looking at the printing presses players "should" be getting at the time they are available.

As they stated = When book publishing is added to a release, we will explore and discuss the mechanics.

I could be wrong. I am not afraid to admit I am wrong often

 

Our only goal is to help people develop their own writing and to promote creativity. Everything someone writes on our forum remains theirs to use as they wish. Each individual author can decide to use it and publish it in other ways as they see fit, including with the Scholars, even post release. A great example of how to use our site is for the drafting process. Post your ideas, and then receive feedback. After you are satisfied with the edits you choose to make, post it to the Library, or another contest, or in game eventually.

Once the mechanics of publishing are released, it will become more clear on what we as "publishers" can do post release, but the simple goal will remain: to encourage and support each other in writing for SotA. If there are sufficient mechanics that we can be assistance to others in game, we will be happy to do so if authors want. Stay tuned!

 

That is true. We are not trying to launch anything official, but are open to ways that things could be enhanced as we go forward. If we can be of service in new ways, we are happy to consider it.

So, I hope you enter the contest Bowen, since you didn't have a chance with the Sisters.

 

Just wished to comment here - All scribes and lore masters were given the opportunity to submit a story in the Sisters contest. They were just asked to not participate as a scholar/lore master during the rest of *that* contest. They were all still given the opportunity to submit. It was the heads that were not to partake as they were the judges, at least for the first contest.

I personally still wrote for it ~smiles~ they just were not counted toward the contest - they were the "time is running out" poems.

 

For now, we want to focus on developing a mutually supportive writing community rather than worrying about the ins and outs of official connections. We don't know where this will take us eventully, but we are open to possibilities. For now, however, I'm such a noob at trying to launch something like this, I have enough to worry about.

 

Thanks for that clarification, but it doesn't change our desire for your submissions!

 

Unless you also want to make sure it contains "lore approved" content.

Like Bowen said:

So it is a cool intent, but even the scholars do not have a final say in what is ultimately "lore".

I like the idea of more "contests" for sure, but unless this is run through the group that is doing proper lore checks and lore approvals, I dont think that is a good selling point to get people to write content.

What we NEED is a list, from Port, about topics to write, LORE-WISE, just like with the asset request list or the music request list. Cause having everyone guess at what is going to be "lore" and "cannon" is just that: guessing.

I am also not 100% sure what the gain of splitting the community from itself into another forum gains.

 

It is true that technically we cannot say "this is lore" and "this isn't" on any official level. However, stories that "stand the test of time" could be adopted as official lore as I understand it.

Also, for anything that isn't canon.. and canon being defined by FireLotus as content written by paid employees for Portalarium (ie FireLotus or Tracy).. lore that is adopted by the community is just as good as any official lore. Whether that comes about through the efforts of the Scholars, the Writers Round Table or any other means. Speaking for myself, it is my hope that the effort to maintain a level of consistency will lead to the "unofficial" adoption of lore that Portalarium does not have the time or resources to deal with.

Also it is noteworthy here that Portalarium cannot solicit for written content lest we get back to lawyering over compensation and the like. So it is unlikely we will see any official list of needed lore-content. We will simply have to find the gaps and fill them in as we go and police ourselves to keep everything in order.