Cyrodiil Options

[Alexander]

Ok, so for the unavoidable introduction babble, as most of you know I was rather pleased with Morrowind. I thought it was far better then the dribble I wrote prior to that, and most people seemed to agree with me. After I finished Morrowind I already had an idea for a sequel, I actually wrote the very first chapter of said sequel while I was posting up parts of Morrowind. Unfortunately though, after that first chapter I kind of lost interest. I didn’t think the ideas I had back then were enough to weave an entire story together, and I was probably right.

But as these things have a habit of developing themselves, over the past months I kept thinking back to the sequel, and kept adding ideas to the pile I already had. Now it’s done. I once again enjoyed writing this, and I hope you’ll have similar fun reading it.

As I’ve explained in the past, I’m not very good at making up things like titles, Akatosh knows it took me about as long to come up with the various titles of the chapters as it did to write the entire thing, so I’ve named the story “Cyrodiil” (catchy wot? )

Before I end my babbling and get on with posting the story, I once again would like to thank Treydog for agreeing to help with my story as editor, and for fixing the many, many, many grammatical and spelling errors, and placing every comma, semicolon and whatchamacallit in the correct place. And thanks to everyone who ever read Morrowind, and commented. I really enjoy the comments.


Now, while you don’t have to have read Morrowind, I believe in order to get the most out of Cyrodiil, it would be recommended.


So, enough babbling and on to Cyrodiil.

[Colonel Mustard]

Hmm, an interesting start, especially with the Nerevarine's kidnap by Mehrunes Dagon (I take it Varvur is the Nerevarine-I've yet to read Morrowind). I wander what horrific tortures the Big D will inflict on him. They will be horrific, right? Only you can't really have a character being kidnapped by a daedric prince without horrific tortures. It's just not the done thing!

Sorry, I'm going off on a tangent here...

Anyway, writing wise I have to say it could do with improvement. The entire thing seems to suffer from Show-not-tell syndrome. One example would be: “I’m not, Janus.” Even after calling him that for months now, it still felt strange. During her time in Skingrad she had had to visit the castle often, and while she was at first shocked to see a Vampire rule an Imperial city, she soon found out why. Janus had one of the most flexible minds she had ever met, and they soon became close friends. Janus had insisted she call him by his first name, and after he nagged her about it for weeks, she had agreed. As close as they were, Filben never allowed herself to forget he was a Count though. “I’m not at all sure Janus, but I’ll try to face my expulsion with dignity.”

This entire bit is just too big for being in the middle of dialogue, and really breaks up the flow.

And also: Journeyman indeed. Oh Filben was a Journeyman, but it hadn’t been exactly conventional. She had done all the recommendation quests save the one from Cheydinhal as she had heard the ranking member there was none too pleasant, so she wanted to save it for last, when the Oblivion crisis erupted. All conventions were thrown out of the window at that point, and Filben was made apprentice and stationed at Skingrad to assist the rest of the mages there. For her work there she was promoted once again to Journeyman and was presented a choice of staves. After some consideration she chose one with a powerful shock damage spell on it because while skilled in the arts of healing and even subversive magic, destructive magic had always been her worst side.

It's a info dump. And info dumps are very rarely a good thing.

Work on it, Alexander. The only way to get better is to practice, and you're shaping up to be damn good. Keep it up.

This post has been edited by The Bean: Mar 22 2009, 09:32 PM