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Wednesday, February 20, 2013

The Pimp-Your-Own-Stronghold Contest


Many months ago—two years and some change, sweet lord where does the time ago—it popped into (one of many) discussions about domain play that one of the greatest pleasures of that arena back in the hoary day was the pimping out of ever-wilder paper designs of your dream stronghold.
Bombasticus wrote at the time: “For our gang, the tween years--10 to 12--were the developmental 'sweet spot' for this kind of domain creation. There was something hugely appealing about the construction rules at that age and we all spent many hours outfitting hidden valleys, cloud castles, secret undersea lairs.”

Rereading the comment resonated hard with me as it jivved with both my own past attempts at personalized utopias (sideviews, top-down graph papers, free-hand sketches, etc.) and more recently with teaching fantasy worldbuilding to kids of that very age group. 

So when the ever-tangential explosions of conversation that makes up Google Plus ran straight back into discussion of that old joy--strangely around discussion of this real life medieval fortress-city of suburban paranoia, the Citadel Project, and its oddly similar 'cool features' elements like a Firearm Museum with a matching Reflecting Pool (seen here)--my brain immediately went to “it's time for another stupid-ass Hill Cantons contest.”

So here are the particulars:
1. Contest participants will design their dream “fantasy stronghold”. The medium used can vary according to the whim of the participant but should include a visual medium (side-views, floor plans, etc) with some written content of the what the hell is going on.

2. Bonus points for filtering the designs through the twisted lens of one of your player-characters.

3. Bonus brownie (again not required) points for attaching some bonafide, vaguely plausible game justifications consistent with the rules of your choice (crap like budgets for construction, labor force, or whatever).

4. The contest deadline is February 27 (that's a week from today). All entries should be emailed to me at kutalik at the gmail dot the com.

What you can win (besides the sweet accolades of me and your fellow gamers):
First place: $10 gift certificate from Amazon.

Second and Third: a book of your choice from my obsessively-growing “book rescue” collection of pulp fantasy.

Winning entries may make their appearance in a corner of my campaign world even.

5 comments:

  1. Stupid-ass Hill Cantons Contest? Now that's a blog post title. Good luck to all who enter, and a great big boogie boogie to you, Cake.

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  2. Entering the hell out of this one. A group I played with in middle school found a diamond that could dig tunnels, and they never looked back.

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  3. I like your contests plenty whether I take part or not, but this one is timed very right, with Greg Gorgonmilk's arcane architecture project just starting up. I'll give it some thought and see if the machineries can't be got up to a good enough speed over the week.

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  4. This should prove to be a cool contest. If I can scrape up the time, I may have to do this. If for nothing else, to get into practice.

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  5. Chris, just submitted TERMEX's abode.

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