Just somewhere for people to post anything on the game ‘Men and Monsters’ (http://menandmonsters.storynexus.com)
The basis is a Van Helsing style vampire hunt, but with an opportunity for you to become one of the monsters yourself at the end of the prologue.
Any critiques would be very much appreciated :)
Well, it would have been nice to have some cards to play once i typed in my name and started chuckles softly knowing my luck tho i signed in just as you were changing something
i forgot to change the key of dreams setting on the first storylet
how very like me :/
should be fixed now
also just to be clear i haven’t finished to prologue yet, i still have a long way to go :)
It’s an interesting story so far, but I’ve got one little grammatical error to point out. In “Ashes to ashes”, the option where you burn the master’s body, the second “you” ought to be capitalized.
I was reading this article in the Atlantic the other day about how to teach writing. Mostly it’s about essay composition, but I think it has some valuable things to say about fiction, too. Here’s the relevant part:
[quote=]I believe in conscious skill instruction and over the years have made my own list of missing skills. One is the skill of giving specific concrete examples in an essay. One might naturally assume that giving good concrete examples is unteachable, that it’s just an aspect of a student’s thinking, and that a student with good mind will use good examples in his or her essays. But it’s much more useful to regard the giving of examples as a skill, because then you can find ways to train for it.
I’m going to explain one way to do it.
How should one train students to give good, vivid examples in their writing? Should you tell them, Be more specific? I used to do that but I don’t any more, because it’s too vague, not operational. Today I give students a shortcut. I say, “Write physically. Write with physical objects. Put physical objects in your essay.”[/quote]
In an early storylet, you have the choice to burn your master on a funeral pyre. The branch result text reads:
It’s full of abstract concepts. What does burning with vigor look like? What is surprising about it? What are you seeing when you watch it burn? And most importantly, what is being “complete alone” like in this context?
You might try incorporating more object-oriented prose. For example, tie the vision of the burning church – which is a big abstract concept made up of lots of little concrete things – to a specific detail.
Like: it turns out the old wooden cross on the roof is rotted out; while the rest of the church burns in slow stages, the cross burns up like a dry newspaper: nothing, then pfft – red ashes spiraling in the wind.
Now that we’ve turned monetization on, worlds like this one that have playtesting threads can request if they’re ready.
You can work out whether a world is ready for monetizing here: