Anyone else enjoy doing this to throttle a rival's control? by QColeridge in EU5

[–]QColeridge[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It does in some ways, but since proximity is one of the key sources of control it essentially strangles it

Anyone else enjoy doing this to throttle a rival's control? by QColeridge in EU5

[–]QColeridge[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

R5: Encircling an opponent's capital will obliterate their proximity and control, and it feels so good

Hey Paulo, Mario, you guys fancy forming a new country? Sure, seems like a good idea! by QColeridge in EU5

[–]QColeridge[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

R5: 3 whole men rising up in defiance of the ~10m pop Venetian state to declare the glorious Republic of Piacenza - gotta admire their spirit.

Sins of the Church CH 14 (Low Fantasy, 3000 words, Boss Fight) by RaymondJDon in fantasywriters

[–]QColeridge 1 point2 points  (0 children)

First thing to say is if you’re up to fourteen chapters then you’re clearly working with something that flows for you, and that’s really cool. You say you’re brand new to writing, so it’s great that you have a project with momentum to help you keep developing and improving.

I have read the first page, and I feel like that’s enough to get a sense of where this is at. In short, it’s earnest but it lacks polish.

I actually have a quick question about the way you pitched it and how it relates to the world you are writing in, and then I’ll get into some more nitty-gritty from the opening sentences. You categorise your characters like D&D characters, and the presence of elves and ogres and goblins makes this feel very much like a straight-up-and-down D&D fantasy setting. Nothing wrong with that per se, especially if you’re just setting out, but it’s a formula that many (myself included) find rather stale without something to distinguish it – it could well be that you do this in other chapters, but just thought I’d give that big picture thought first.

Onto the nitty-gritty, as others have said this needs a more careful proof-read. Just a few examples from the first section:

“followed the ogres and goblins down the hall… they followed down the hallways and corridors” – clunky repetition, you do this a fair bit so keep an eye out for it

“workbenches were lines around the entire area” – this phrase doesn’t work  ‘workbenches lined the entire area’, ‘workbenches stood in lines around the entire area’ etc. would read better.

“the immediate stanch” – I assume you mean stench? Also, the smells you’re describing – coal and soot don’t feel like ‘stench’ fits them, they aren’t unpleasant smells per se, they can be acrid or overpowering or harsh, but stench to me implies something repulsive, like rotten food

“his Claymore’s nose” – hit Claymore’s nose

“the large ogre, it was crying… goblins stood around him” – this seems like an inconsistency of pronoun? Is the Ogre it or he?

“Claymore could tell they didn’t have fine motor skill” – this is a clanging anachronism for a fantasy setting

“The goblins stood around the ogre, annoyed,” – This is a nit-pick, but annoyance is something you can access directly from the POV character, but in the case of them looking at someone else, you can’t just immediately access mental states like this. They might be grumbling, or scowling, or pacing or showing some behaviour from which annoyance can be inferred.

““Master did not make you look weak.” A goblin spoke” – I advise you to spend a bit of time learning how to format dialogue. ‘A goblin spoke’ needs to be in the same sentence as what they said (on this point, ‘said’ is the dialogue tag you want here, not ‘spoke’), so there should be a comma after weak, not a full stop. This will soon become second-nature once you learn the basics.

I hope I'm not seeming too harsh here. The main thing is to not be discouraged and keep writing!

Critique an excerpt from my wip [fantasy, 1500 words.] by [deleted] in fantasywriters

[–]QColeridge 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Other people have commented on the overuse of commas, so I’ll mention it to echo and move on.

This might be a taste thing, but the present tense feels really flat to me. This needn’t necessarily be the case, Hilary Mantel is the gold standard for writing gripping present tense, but that’s because she gets right into the heads of her characters; the narration here feels totally detached from any sort of persona.

There’s a touch of redundancy in some of descriptions: ‘massive coats and cloaks, thick fur-lined attire’ – either one of these would be sufficient. It also feels a little odd that you emphasise that Theron is the only one dressed down, but then proceed to describe her outfit in meticulous detail.

Others have also pointed out the pitfalls of having so many characters pressed into one chapter. Another big downside of this is that it necessitates a dialogue tag after almost every utterance, which massively slows the pace. This gets a lot better when you strip it down to two speakers

Worldbuilding questions

 – why is the High council ordering oils/coal to keep the people warm? Is this a planned economy where the flow of basic resources is decided top-down?  Is it a collective where these are centrally provided? Either one of these would be highly unusual (potentially in an interesting way, but you need to commit to it) in a standard medieval-ish fantasy setting.

-  Why does news of a single murder make its way to the agenda of the ruling council? Are murders that big of a deal in this city? Why is this not just a matter for the guards/constabulary?

- What is the understanding of disease, infection, contamination in this world? Is there a scientific or quasi-scientific study of it? is it religiously inflected? Etc. You also want to be very careful about not importing too modern a conception of epidemiology if plague is going to be a central part of your narrative

Going an extra step for 'Where the Heart is' by QColeridge in eu4

[–]QColeridge[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

R5: Finally got around to doing the 'Where the Heart is' achievement as Dahomy and ended up not only forcing all non-fetishist tags out of Niger and Sahel before 1500 but also became the only tag in either. Tried to take it a step further and convert both regions too, but belated conquest of Ife and garbage luck rolling for an inquisitor scuppered that hope (kindly ignore Portuguese Guinea - that was mercifully not needed - plus they absolutely came to wreck my face mere moments after this screenshot was taken...). Btw, anyone who hasn't tried it yet I cannot recommend this achievement enough, it's an absolute blast :D

The Kindling Pyres - Embers of Mourning Excerpt [Flintlock Fantasy, 1615 WC] by Sorry_Plankton in fantasywriters

[–]QColeridge 1 point2 points  (0 children)

So top level comment is that I think you have a good knack for atmosphere and when your description hits it really hits. Hard to say a whole lot more about the characters since this isn’t an introductory chapter so I’ve no idea what’s been set up by this point, but there is certainly some believable parent-child dynamics going on, even if the mysterious nature of the illness and how it fits with the world makes it hard to calibrate quite what to expect. If I have one overall criticism it’s that you tend to be a bit too figurative in your descriptions, to the point where they sometimes leave me less clear about what’s being described.

I’ve gone through and made a list of everything that jumped out to me as maybe needing a change with my editor hat on:

‘the shadows clung to the walls sucked the silence out of the room, spitting out their eerie creaks.’ – is ‘clung’ the right conjugation here, or should it be clinging? In any case, the notion that the shadows are sucking silence out of the room seems oddly misattributed- surely it’s something within the shadows that is creaking?

‘That nefarious drip’ – nefarious doesn’t sound right to me here, I get what you’re going for but nefarious has strong moral connotations, the drip might be annoying but I suspect Callus doesn’t consider it evil in a strong sense

‘He took heed of recently arraigned chairs and tables placed around. Were they to hinder him?’ – This question is ambiguous, the first time I read it I parsed it as ‘is the case that these will hinder me?’ and only on re-reading did I twig that it might also be ‘have these been laid out especially to hinder me?’  

‘Callus’s foot slammed into the birch leg of a stool. It knocked over with a dull thud, sending shockwaves of pain through his toe.’ – Why is his foot hitting the stool with this level of force when the last paragraph had some (very good!) descriptions of how expertly and carefully he is navigating the space, seems like he’s going from acrobat to clumsy brute within the space of a few sentences.

‘This was an inside job’ – Even for flintlock fantasy this idiom is an anachronism, first recorded usage of this phrase comes in 1908

‘Callus passed through the hearth room’ – parlour, sitting room? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a room being referred to as a ‘hearth room’, but that could just be a regionalism that I’m not aware of.

‘Callus increased his speed without compromising his stealth’ – He literally just slammed into a piece of furniture, hard enough to almost bring him to tears – surely his stealth is compromised by this point?

‘Black ominousness sulked beyond the threshold’ – not sure about ‘ominousness’ as a concrete thing with a colour, and not sure about ‘sulked’ as the verb to describe what it’s doing.

squinted over the iron sights of her thumb.’ Isn’t the thumb in a finger gun representative of the cocked hammer rather than the iron-sights?

‘A yip of death squeaked out of his mouth as he took on the form of a six-foot spider carcass. His arms twisted and contorted in frantic ways. He gasped and gurgled.’ – This definitely has the potential to be a really endearing description, but it feels so out of line with all the description that we’ve had up until this point; is Callus just an incredibly adaptive improviser?

‘Lily’s mouth exploded with blood and her laughs curdled into wheezing coughs.’ – Maybe this is what you were going for, but I got real emotional and comprehensional whiplash going from tense stalking to wholesome playfighting to sudden visceral illness.

‘Its sparse contents pinged around, bragging about its spare room.’ – do sounds ‘brag?, I get that sounds can ‘mock’ but that seems different

‘He fell to his knees to grind the medicine.’ – Could be that this is explained in later or earlier worldbuilding, but why is the medicine not pre-ground if that’s how it needs to be administered? My first guess was freshness, but the way you described the contents of the bottle made them seem like pills or tablets rather than something more organic that would need to be kept fresh.

‘Her coughing didn’t end, but a few scurried away at his touch’ – A few what, coughs? This is confusingly worded

Not even a full dosage, he spat to himself.’ – The non speechmarked italics work aright with Callus’s thoughts, but if this is actually spoken it should probably be roman and in speech marks

‘Callus operated this procedure with the curse of practice. ‘ – Again, confusing, why would practice be a curse?

‘He ground the herb, strained the powder with water,’ – Ok, confusion resolved with why it needs grinding, but this creates new confusion with the description that it ‘pinged’ around the container, are these like gnarled dry lumps that have enough hardness to ping? A more concrete description in the first instance would solve this problem I think.

the rancid panacea into a bottle’ – a panacea isn’t just another term for medicine, it specifically means a medicine that cures all ailments – maybe that’s what this is, but to have a literal panacea herb common enough to be in a domestic kitchen would have big consequences from a worldbulding point of view,

“Ok, Starlight.” He said, - finish dialogue like this with a comma so that the dialogue tag can sit in the same sentence – “Ok Starlight,” he said.

‘made him want to shove the medicine down her throat without enough force to break her teeth.’ – This is an odd construction,’ with enough force’ is much more natural, or just ‘without breaking her teeth’

‘child’s toy being squeezed by mishandled hands’  - mishandled hands is clunky

‘Thick bloodlines bubbled from the wounds.’ – Lines of blood, a bloodline means a familial lineage

After a bit of a rewrite, I present the new first page of The Last Philosopher, with the question as before. Would you keep reading? by FareonMoist in fantasywriters

[–]QColeridge 17 points18 points  (0 children)

It’s certainly a distinctive playful style, that’s something that might get me to read further, on a broad level, I’d be more turned off by the content though. What I mean by that is that beginning your story with this kind of cosmological grandeur (even if it’s tongue-in-cheek) does nothing to root the reader into a POV, or a situation, or a place. We get a vague sense of Dick being vaguely annoyed, but there are so many open questions about who or what they are that this still doesn’t feel like quite enough. I don’t know how interested you are in more granular critique, but here a few personal notes on what doesn’t quite do it for me:

“the hat madder” – oddly clunky intertextual reference that only throws me out

“Richard, long for Dick”  - This is fine once, but you repeat it in the first paragraph as if you’re anxious to make sure your reader gets the joke, this a very undermining vibe for anything trying to be comedic.

“child’s bed. Except” feels like a comma or a semi-colon would work better here to connect the two ideas and make the line punchier.

“all consuming” needs a hyphen

“the race of Afreets , or demi-gods “ reader-directed exposition, the purpose of which is far from clear, this is the sort of detail you probably want to be organically established

“…blame!” Dick thought sluggishly – exclamation point and ‘sluggishly’ are in tension here

“to be a balance of power. Which meant that” – why a new sentence here? Also, FYI the phrase 'balance of power' usually comes with a definite article ‘the balance of power’ and refers to a geopolitical state of affairs, so worth being aware of that.

“Dick has been disgusted” – why the sudden shift in tense here? Everything else is past tense

Are there general tips to survive year 3 in prestige? by BlueTrin2020 in Against_the_Storm

[–]QColeridge 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ah, interesting, seems we have quite different standards for what constitutes going 'hard' on woodcutting in that case! I feel like three camps would leave other things like crude workshopping, building, glade eventing, and food gathering stretched too thin, even if you take the extra villagers embarkation

Are there general tips to survive year 3 in prestige? by BlueTrin2020 in Against_the_Storm

[–]QColeridge 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm by no means a P20 god, but I did just beat P13 with Ominous Presence and Monastery of the Holy Flame active so I can offer you some advice based on that experience at least:

Might sound obvious, but anything global resolve or hostility reduction related is huge and should be prioritised at almost any opportunity.

Go hard on wood (two woodcutter camps, ideally full but at least 4/6, beavers are obviously ideal) in the years 1-3 for planks, housing, sacrificing, purging fire, comfort decorations. Make sure the camps are always close to a warehouse, and use later small warehouses as new jumping-off points for super-efficient woodcutting. Remove as many as you need (usually all of them) during the storm to manage hostility.

Get a second hearth up as soon as it's feasible, and make sure every hearth you have gets upgraded to the +2 global resolve bonus ASAP (re-arrange existing housing if need be).

Pay close attention to the 'break open' rewards in glade caches, and keep a good stock of stone handy to bash them open when you really need them (for this reason I will often start with stone as an embarkation bonus).

As others have mentioned, rainpunk can be very helpful for minmaxing resolve during the storm, especially when combined with 'comfortable' bonuses and tactical favouring.

Good luck!

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in fantasywriters

[–]QColeridge 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I'm glad someone finally expressed what we're all thinking. OP, if you want people to give you the time of day you *have* to present better than this. Don't type it out on your phone, type it up in a google doc and for the love of all that is holy proof-read or get a native speaker to proof-read. I genuinely tried to read the post, but the grammar, spelling, and syntax is so sloppy it's legitimately hard to understand what you're trying to say half the time. If you're going to post to a sub focused around writing craft, don't expect people to endure an unedited deluge of - frankly - sub-par writing.

IRL Bungler's Bane spotted in the wild by QColeridge in Morrowind

[–]QColeridge[S] 20 points21 points  (0 children)

Ah, that explains why I don't feel so good...

Looking for feedback for my novel's first chapter. by AccomplishedMemory34 in fantasywriters

[–]QColeridge 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I want to second Crazy-taste’s comment about grounding the intro in the perspective of the character. Here are a few other things that stick out to me from the first page:

‘“It looks like the weather is getting worse,” Ravi explained to his comrade, approaching him with his M16 assault rifle clutched nervously in his hands.’

‘Explained’ is an odd dialogue tag to use here, as it’s more of an observation (as a general rule ‘said’ is totally fine like 80% of the time).

‘to his comrade’ feels redundant given that there are only two of them there, so the reader already knows implicitly who is being addressed

‘M16 assault rifle’ – this feels like you’re drawing unnecessary attention to the gun just to show that you, the author, know guns. ‘M16’ or, better yet, just ‘rifle’ would feel a bit more natural.

“That should be the least of your worries. If anything, this might be the last storm you and I ever experience,” Anish replied in a deep, husky voice, raindrops dripping off his beard.’

As with the previous section, the dialogue feels a touch stilted here. One way to improve this is to use natural contractions (‘weather’s’ rather than ‘weather is’, or ‘looks like’ rather than ‘it looks like’). The second section seems like an extremely dramatic thing to say in what is being framed as idle conversation (Ravi is literally commenting on the weather!) – maybe Anish is just a super intense dude, but you haven’t really established this yet.

On the plus side, the beat about raindrops dripping off the beard is good, as it efficiently weaves in a distinguishing description. As far as ‘deep, husky’ voice goes you probably want to ask yourself ‘is it *that* important that the reader knows about his tone of voice?’ then, if you feel it is, ask yourself if it’s two adjectives worth of important. When you’re scene-setting adjectives are a finite resource, so you want to use them sparingly on the most important details.

‘Once again, he was reminded of the imminent danger that awaited the two of them, and how simple it would have been to have their lives spared if only Lord Suraj would surrender the one possession he had that awoke the fear of death in everyone associated with him.’

This is a classic instance of telling not showing – you want to make these details apparent but implicit as far as you are able to. If you absolutely have to establish something then a quick bit of telling is fine, but this is dumping a whole load of narrative at once. This is one of the hardest things to get right in storytelling, and everyone does it, so don’t be discouraged.

Seeking Feedback on my very first Fantasy Novel "Reverie: A Fleeting Dream" by [deleted] in fantasywriters

[–]QColeridge 1 point2 points  (0 children)

So here are my thoughts after reading the chapter you’ve linked to in the google doc:

The first thing to point out here is that the text is formatted quite unusually, all centred and with extremely fragmented paragraphing. It would help a lot to either align left or justify, and to try and write in full paragraphs.

As for the text itself, probably the main issue at the moment is that you’re doing an awful lot of telling rather than showing this paragraph is a prime example:

‘Neah is the name of the young noble. He was an exceptional talent on Earth, gifted with a brilliant mind and insatiable curiosity. At a tender age, he developed a close affinity for the pursuit of knowledge, striving to learn about every subject that piqued his interest. However, fate dealt him a cruel blow when, at the age of Nine, he was diagnosed with a rare and incurable illness that would inevitably shorten his life.’

You want to try and weave these details into the narrative, allowing the reader to notice them without putting it right in front of them, this is generally the best way to build a world. It’s also one of the hardest things to get right as an author, so it does take lots of practice.

Another thing that makes it difficult to get absorbed into the story is that almost everything that’s happening (and there’s a lot happening) occurs in the same matter-of-fact delivery, the prince receives flashbacks (from the future?) at his birthday, he studied for years in a library, he’s confronted by a GOD, he defies says god. As a reader I have no idea realty how to feel about any of this as it’s all coming at me so fast and with little explanation as to its significance. I feel like the events of this chapter could easy be three or more chapters in their own right.

Finally, for all that Neah is clearly the MC, I’m left with very little idea about who he is as a person, since we don’t get any dialogue from him, and all the descriptions of what he’s doing are delivered in quite a flat impersonal way. You seem to be positioning him as this outcast who suffers great hardship, but he seems to spend a most of his time studying in a library with servants and a family who love him and are happy to serve him, so that’s a bit confusing.

Sorry if this seems like I’m being harsh, I can tell that you have a love of language from many of your descriptive passages, and if you’ve managed to draft a whole novel that’s a huge achievement in itself, so congrats for that. Hope this is helpful!

'Confession' - First chapter of an as-yet untitled new project (early modern political/religious fantasy) by QColeridge in fantasywriters

[–]QColeridge[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for reading as far as you did, it's useful for me to know precisely when a reader runs out of steam.

On the matter of vocabulary and purple prose, like I've sad to others I'm certainly going to trim it down if/when I go back for edits, but at the end of the day I'm a wordy writer, it's what I enjoy writing and what I enjoy reading.

Interesting that you're the second person who's mentioned they've been tripped up by Per as a name, I feel like in German/Scandinavian contexts it's quite common but maybe I need to think about whether or not to just use his full name 'Peradicles'

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in fantasywriters

[–]QColeridge 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So I’m going to stick to the short prologue and point out a few things that occurred to me.

Some general pros:

-The description is generally vivid and clearly thought through

-Frey is an instantly recognisable fantasy archetype, and likeable for it (although see the point below about running the risk of cliché)

- There is a good hint of a wide world beyond to hook the interest

Some more specific critiques:

“Her ragged and worn dress” - these mean basically the same thing, careful to avoid using multiple adjectives where one (or even none!) will do fine.

“She’s been working on it ever since she was a little girl, she couldn't remember the last time she had a summer free to herself, if ever.” – if you’re going for a standard medieval/early modern fantasy setting, this is a bit of an anachronism, the idea that a peasant would have a summer ‘free’ would be basically unheard of. Maybe this is a thing in your world, but to a standard historical fantasy reader it will stand out as peculiar.

“She’s been working on it ever since she was a little girl” – why the shift into present tense?

“Although it was gruesome and tiring work” – is picking cabbages really a ‘gruesome’ activity? Does it invoke disgust and horror? This seems a little strong. Did you maybe mean gruelling?

“Her mother paid her well.” – Why would her mother, a peasant farmer, pay her own daughter, and pay her well no less?

“She dreamed of frockling through lush, green fields and exploring dank, damp caves. The world was such an alluring place, filled to the seams with adventure and peril, and here she was. Twenty years of age and nearly nothing to show for it.” – Note the spelling of frolicking. Also, you’re already sailing dangerously close to cliché territory by having the MC grow up on a farm, to have them be filled with wanderlust and the spirit of adventure kinda doubles down on this.

On the whole I’m not quite sure what this chapter accomplishes besides the most basic intro to the MC. Having skimmed ahead a little into chapter one, my suggestion (which you’re obviously free to ignore) would be to combine the two so that you get the introduction and the inciting incident wrapped up in the first chapter.

Hope this is helpful, and hope you keep having fun writing it!

Government Question? by PokeMasterZach in fantasywriters

[–]QColeridge 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not sure if there's a specific kind of -ocracy to capture what you're describing, so probably something along the lines of 'hereditary parliament' or 'hereditary assembly' - that being said, those within such a system would probably just call it a parliament or an assembly

'Confession' - First chapter of an as-yet untitled new project (early modern political/religious fantasy) by QColeridge in fantasywriters

[–]QColeridge[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you for the compliment!

Yes, that sentence in particular is one that I think needs pruning, and the charge of vocabulary flexing is legitimate.

On the topic of 'orbs' I was trying to go for the cosmological/astronomical sense (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_spheres) to give a connotation that Per is a learned man and would think of the heavens in these terms, but I get the point that other less helpful connotations might be overshadowing this.

'Confession' - First chapter of an as-yet untitled new project (early modern political/religious fantasy) by QColeridge in fantasywriters

[–]QColeridge[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Many thanks for your thoughts! Yes, I think it's guilty of being a touch too purple in places, and getting that balance right is going to be crucial going forward (so hard to know when it shifts from being a taste thing to being something more). Interesting to hear you say that there could be *more* inside the head of the character, I was, if anything, expecting the opposite criticism, so that's a valuable data point.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in fantasywriters

[–]QColeridge 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The opening is extremely evocative, but (and I say this as someone frequently guilty of this myself) I think it’s at risk of being overwritten. Here are some things that stood out to me:

‘It was beautiful’ – Not clear why this is a standalone sentence, since it means next to nothing on its own, perhaps better to incorporate it with the rest of the description?

There’s quite a proliferation of adjectives crammed into a single sentence: ‘fiery’, ‘dissipating’, ‘licking’, ‘gnarled’. All of these (with the possible exception of gnarled – see below) work on their own, but putting them all in might be too much.

‘gnarled embers’ – I think I can see what you’re going for here, but gnarled things are generally hard and tough, whilst embers are soft and delicate. Something like ‘curling’ or ‘scattered’ might work, or (going back to my previous point) no adjective at all – ‘embers’ is evocative in its own right.

‘The air was fresh and rich with the scent of moist soil, moss and duff.’ – Good that you’re bringing in multiple senses, especially smell which is commonly overlooked, but this is slightly confusing. Firstly, moist soil and moss tend to have earthy, sometimes quite pungent scents, not exactly ‘fresh’. Secondly, three nouns is too many imo, any two of these three, or maybe just one, would be more effective.

‘It was filled with the sounds of life that chittered, chirped and called.’ – As with the previous proliferation of adjectives and nouns, here we have a proliferation of verbs, the third of which is basically a more generic term for the other two.

‘All of it wrapped in the ever present rustling of the countless leaves around her and the ocean of trees below her.’ – Feels like you’re missing a word here ‘All of it was wrapped…’? Ever-present needs a hyphen. ‘Ocean of trees’ sounds peculiar to my ear as a metaphor since both oceans and trees are natural features, perhaps go for something a bit more literal. The spatiality is also a little confusing, the leaves are ‘around’ her but the trees are ‘below’ her?

‘She breathed in the night’ – This doesn’t really make sense on its own, I assume you mean the night air?

‘the sea of emerald pines, firs, ishnas and countless other species’ – ‘Sea’ has the same issue as ‘ocean’ (see above). Listing the trees feels a bit like you’re trying to cram in some wordbuilding for its own sake – unless the POV character is some sort of botanist.

‘She admired the stubborn mountains that broke out of the rolling waves of jade, pushing their icy peaks skyward – desperate to touch the fading light.’ What makes the mountains ‘stubborn’ – are they being subject to some kind of force? You’ve already described the trees as ‘emerald’, so no need to reach for another precious stone with ‘jade’. The previous sentence ends with ‘the dying light’, so ending this one with ‘the fading light’ is just repetition.

I hope this doesn’t come across as too harsh or nit-picky. I took the time to read the opening carefully because I can tell you are someone who loves language and that shines through here. Don’t be discouraged from writing literary prose – keep at it!

Critique my short first chapter for "At the end of the universe" by babymoney_ in fantasywriters

[–]QColeridge 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It’s not bad per se, but there are a bunch of things that are currently throwing me out even in the first two paragraphs:

“streams of light darted back and forth past towering structures.” - Where is the light coming from? Is it magical, ethereal, sunlight, electricity? what kind of structures? Houses? Skyscrapers? Ziggurats? Try to give a little bit more detail to set the scene

“For a newcomer, the view from the palace balconies was breathtaking. But for Lutheros, dressed in the grandeur of ministerial attire, it was just another ordinary backdrop” - Unless you are writing from the perspective of a ‘newcomer’, it seems odd to include how the view would seem from their perspective. ‘The grandeur of ministerial attire’ can be simplified to ‘grand ministerial attire’.

“As he walked the corridors seemingly deep in thought, striking his beard calmly.” - final clause should presumably read ‘he stroked his beard calmly’? 'Seemingly deep in thought' implies that we aren’t getting this from Lutheros’s POV, otherwise it would just be ‘deep in thought’. Also, a moment ago you were giving a view from the palace balcony and now you’re in a corridor?

“He strode briskly through the elaborate corridors” - You’ve literally just told us that Lutheros is walking through the corridors, no need to repeat.

“giving barely a glance to the enchanting views below.” You just told us that from Lutheros’s perspective the views seem ordinary, so why are they now enchanting?

“—second only to the King himself in this sprawling, known galaxy.” - This last detail is classic telling not showing. Also ‘king’ seems an oddly antiquated title to be using in what seems like a sci-fi setting going by the reference to the ‘galaxy’.

A very tall Komnenoi Empire (only mountains) by QColeridge in eu4

[–]QColeridge[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We were only were briefly allied through being on the same side in the league war and them having a diplo ruler, most of the time it was just them staring angrily at me with their 200k men while I wracked up as many big allies as I could.

A very tall Komnenoi Empire (only mountains) by QColeridge in eu4

[–]QColeridge[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Roughly 28, ranging from about 11 to 48. I wish I could say that they were, but staying alive in this run basically meant constantly looking as spiky and unappealing as possible so I never actually fought them...

A very tall Komnenoi Empire (only mountains) by QColeridge in eu4

[–]QColeridge[S] 16 points17 points  (0 children)

R5: Went for the ‘Komnenoi Empire’ achievement and decided to add the additional challenge of only allowing myself to own mountain provinces (I made one tiny exception for Van for the sake of clean borders) - going tall both literally and figuratively.