Book III - Challenge V: Intrigue On The Island Guild - RESULTS POSTED!

[mrcp6d]

Entry to Category B: La Conspirazione
Team: W. Navarre (Varlyrio), ZlatanXVIGustaf (Varlyrio) and KevinyWu (Avalonia), mrcp6d (Mitgardia)

 

 

[Grover]

Our team: @Aurore, @Basiliscus, @Grover, @LittleJohn

Our team's main thread:

And each individual Flickr album, for judging individual builds.

Aurore

Basiliscus

Grover

LittleJohn

[Basiliscus]

Fantastic entries all round everyone!

Also thanks to the judges for putting this on. I do think the collaborative nature of this challenge was a big success!

[Garmadon]

Team de Fiori!

Puvel:

Ayrlego:

Kahir88:

And Garmadon:

 

[Garmadon]

And it's a wrap!  Awesome work, guys - great job flooding the forum with Varlyrian builds!  This I like to see!  

I've made a list of all the entries in this thread and linked them here for leadership so they can go ahead and get started on the judging process - let me know if I've missed anything though, please.

And once again, fantastic job y'all, and I'm looking forward to checking out everybody's builds and stories in detail!

Category A:

kahir88 - The Missing Letter

jtooker - Off-Course Contingent

Louis of Nutwood - Howling in the Mountain

 

Category B:

Team Baiamonte - Rise of the Baiamontes; Louis of Nutwood, Gideon, Henjin_Quilones (and full story thread)

Team di Carlo - La Conspirazione; W Navarre, KevinyWu, ZlatanXVIGustaf, mrcp6d (and full story thread)

Team Conzaga - Downfall of the Rego; Aurore, Basiliscus, Grover, LittleJohn (GoH full story thread)

Team de Fiori - Fall of the Amancios; Puvel, Ayrlego, kahir88, Garmadon (also full story thread)

[Garmadon]

Challenge V - Results

News from the Island Guild!

For the past few months, rumors of great happens and dark secrets in Varlyrio had been surfacing on the mainland of Historica - plottings and rumblings, an uprising of the denizens of the vast underworld of the island, huge wolves in the mountains and dragons invading the cities, and the Rego's ship, landing short-manned and hard beat on the shores of Avalonia with stories of pirates and blood.  Between it all only one thing has been clear - the guild of intrigue has been anything but at rest.  Even in Varlyrio itself the families eagerly await news of what their political landscape would look like when the dust finally settles and count heads to make sure that everybody's still alive.  But, at last, the fog enshrouding the island has lifted.

Queen Ylspeth wandered up the halls of the great palace in Cedrica gazing absentmindedly over the gorgeous sight of the proud ships sailing in and out of the river's harbour, pondering the new situation.  There had been little love lost between her and the Rego of Varlyrio, Supano Amancio - but a new ruler always meant a situation to require her best tact to deal with rightly.  And then, the old Rego, although proud and somewhat stubborn, had not been altogether remiss in his duties in fulfilling the promised company of troops, it would appear - the troops of the island had been sadly depleted, it seemed, by a great menace in the mountains which had been decimating their forces - that, along with, the new ambassador had hinted to be sure, a bit of mismanagement on the Rego's part.  Ylspeth shivered a bit at the tales of the dreadful werewolff and gathered her regal cloak around her, once again thankful - she almost laughed at the thought - that the seat of power in the Guilds was far off from the shores of that tumultuous guild.  The madman riding a dragon into the streets of the capital and the news of some very questionable dealings of the guild leader with his Kolgari subjects did not serve to substantially change her opinion on that, even if the dragon had flown off with it's mad rider to the western badlands and the Kolgari had been freed from the Rego's tyranny by his disappearance at sea.  She could not but hope that the new Rego would be kinder and more gentle in his treatment of all his subjects.  But then, he was "of the people," they said...  She quickened her steps, curious to see what she could gather about the new Rego from an interview with his chosen ambassador.

The doors of the queen's throne room swung open grandly and the Rego's courier burst in.

"Your majesty!" the courier knelt before Queen Ylspeth's throne, "Greetings from Luca di Carlo, Rego of Varlyrio."

---------------------------------------------------------

Challenge Results!

Category A:
1st place: @Louis of Nutwood (Mitgardia) - Howling in the Mountain.  Prize: 70658 Oni Titan
Runner-up: @kahir88 (Avalonia) - The Missing Letter

Category B:
Highest Scoring Teams:
1st place: La Cospirazione (@ZlatanXVIGustaf, @KevinyWu, @mrcp6d, @W Navarre).  Prize: Custom minifigure(s)
2nd place: Rise of the Baiamontes (Team Baiamonte)
3rd place: Downfall of the Rego (Team Conzaga)
4th place: Fall of the Amancios (Team De Fiori)

Top Scoring Entries:
1st place: @ZlatanXVIGustaf (Varlyrio) - 15.33.  Prize: 70679 Ultra Dragon
Runner-ups: @LittleJohn (Kaliphlin) - 15.17
@Henjin_Quilones (Avalonia) - 15

---

Thank you to everyone who participated to help flesh out the lore of the Island guild both building and story-wise!  I've included the scores for the top three entries in Category B to show just how stiff the competition was there - excellent work, everyone!  @soccerkid6 and @Rogue Angel will be contacting the winners shortly to be able to ship out the prizes, and Team di Cioto (@ZlatanXVIGustaf, @KevinyWu, @mrcp6d, @W Navarre) will need to put their heads together to decide how they would like to divide up their prize as the winning team   A special thanks to all those from other guilds who came by to experience and contribute to Varlyrio in this challenge! 

Update to the Varlyrian Family Intrigue Thread with a few more precise notes on the guild developments to come shortly!

And finally:

Guild Points:
Varlyrio - 56 gold
Mitgardia - 64 gold
Avalonia - 61 gold
Kaliphlin - 37 gold

[kahir88]

I'm a little disappointed with the results...

I know, my builds are shitty, my stories are dull, and my photographing skills like using a potato, to take pictures and edit them.

When I first read about this challenge, I wasn't sure, I wanted to participate in it. Didn't know anything about Varlyrio and it's politics. Also, who would want a no-skill-builder in their collaboration? Later I got an idea, which sounded great (at least in my mind), and it could be fit in cat.A. I made research, read a lot of about this guild. Who hates who, who conspiring against a third person, why, etc, etc... Planned everything, who and what to say, how the entire build should look. I read others are complaining about they can build only for cat.B and I thought maybe it's my time to shine. This one sentence helped me to start:

On 2/29/2020 at 8:11 PM, Garmadon said:

And, only waiting for the moment to spring into action or come to the light, lies all the backstabbing, family warfare, assassinations, blackmailing, alliances made and broken, and, in a word, all the intrigue and scheming that Varlyrio is famous for. 

I thought this guild is mostly about this, this is why I made my entry about this theme. Yet again, I failed once more. Who needs planning, making researches, investing their time so their story could fit in the lore when you could make a giant monster, and craft a long story about it, and then telling the cause in two-line: "I have no more soldier to send".

The entry was good, both the build and the story, my compliment isn't about this entry. More like the choice... Go on, call me a whimper, cause not my entry won. I don't care about the prize, but I'm interested, why this entry won.

[Grover]

Congrats to all the winners!  There were some really great builds here.  Thank you to all the judges.  I know the job is difficult and sometimes thankless, so thank you to everyone for taking your time to judge all the entries.

As a general comment, it is my opinion that the guilds have some of the top builders anywhere on the forums, so there are no 'crappy' builders here from what I can see.  I think we should all keep our heads held high.  There is a high standard here because of our skilled builders, but I would label everyone here as very high quality.  I, for one, would he happy to collaborate with any of our members, and learned a lot from my collaboration this time around!

I do have a couple of questions for the guild leaders at large:

1. Are the couple of paragraphs in @Garmadon's post above the codification of the canon for this story?  It was my understanding that the winning entry would be canon and then as much of the non-winning entries as possible would become canon insofar as they did not conflict with the winning entry's story.  I would be interested to see the collected story someplace, and a summary of the story posted in the Varlyrian Intrigue thread so the stories can be kept track of.

2. Can we get the di Carlo family fleshed out?  They're now the ruling family of Varlyrio and they still don't have a family thread posted.

3. Is it possible to ask the admins not to front page the entries until judging is done?  I felt that Category B was anti climactic since the winning entries had been front paged, in the order in which they won, well before the contest had been judged, something I have not seen before.  Whether or not this had anything to do with the judging, it certainly made it appear that the judging was a foregone conclusion, which was somewhat disheartening.

[Garmadon]

@kahir88 You'd have to ask the judges for their particular reasons for ranking the entries that way, but coming in second in a challenge in the guilds isn't bad at all, however many entries there are!  I didn't make nearly that in Category B,    But yes - story and build are both part of the judging criteria, and I think part of it is that you might have missed how Louis' story was actually all tied together.  I for one loved your story though, and in the end it will always come down to some degree to a question of taste with the judges since which is the better entry won't always be perfectly objective.  And of course, that's why we try to get as many judges as we can so that any unavoidable personal biases are canceled out as much as possible 

We definitely enjoyed having you on the Cat. B team though, and your ideas and story planning were a huge bonus for us behind the scenes! 

21 hours ago, Grover said:

1. Are the couple of paragraphs in @Garmadon's post above the codification of the canon for this story?  It was my understanding that the winning entry would be canon and then as much of the non-winning entries as possible would become canon insofar as they did not conflict with the winning entry's story.  I would be interested to see the collected story someplace, and a summary of the story posted in the Varlyrian Intrigue thread so the stories can be kept track of.

2. Can we get the di Carlo family fleshed out?  They're now the ruling family of Varlyrio and they still don't have a family thread posted.

3. Is it possible to ask the admins not to front page the entries until judging is done?  I felt that Category B was anti climactic since the winning entries had been front paged, in the order in which they won, well before the contest had been judged, something I have not seen before.  Whether or not this had anything to do with the judging, it certainly made it appear that the judging was a foregone conclusion, which was somewhat disheartening.

1. Yes and yes.  I will indeed be posting a quick summary in the Intrigue thread soon (hopefully later today), but the couple of paragraphs above were meant to deal with the loose ends/conflicts created by the different story-lines.  I'm afraid you won't be getting a collected story from our end since that would just be too long, but yes, you're right that as far as possible each story is canon except where it conflicts with/doesn't really fit well with the winning story.  So for example, as in the summary above, Mad Rufus did indeed ride a dragon into the streets of Illyrian, but instead of becoming Rego right afterwards it flew off with him to the badlands for now, and whether we hear from him again or not will be up to you and anybody else who'd like to build in Varlyrio 
2. That would be @ZlatanXVIGustaf's job, but hopefully yes!
3. That's a valid request, but in this case I can assure you that none of the judges had anything to do with the front-pagings, so it was essentially coincidence.  To be honest though, I think we all know that the three of them really blew it out of the water this time, so I don't think it's too surprising to anyone to see them on top   But I get where your coming from and that's a good idea in a challenge like this, though of course the ultimate decision making there is up to the Regs and Mods who can actually do such things 

[Grover]

1. It looks like you've posted a summary, so I'll take a good look at it and see if I have any questions, since others may have similar questions as well.  I'd be happy to write up something if people want.

2. It is my opinion that this should happen sooner rather than later due to the position of the family and their active role in destroying other families.  It made sense that, for instance, the Baiamonte family wasn't fleshed out since they weren't active in the intrigue, but the di Carlos are now quite active.

3. I think you misunderstand.  It was the story posts, not individual builds that were frontpaged.  I would also disagree that any of the builds blew the others out of the water.  I think that the builds were all quite close in quality, and that none of them were heads and shoulders above the others.  In any case, it would be nice if something were to get frontpaged that the guild leaders contacted the admins and had them remove it until the contest is over.

[Louis of Nutwood]

On 9/12/2020 at 10:34 PM, Garmadon said:

Challenge Results!

Aaah, YES! 

The northern winds are pushing us forth into an abyss of pride and glory! I raise my axe to the sky and thank the gods for letting us live another day to fight another battle. 

Skol!

I scratch my ale-soaked beard and cling another iron ring for myself and my foes to know the countless battles I've been to; the countless times I've laughed at the face of misfortune and grown stronger in the process. For we do not fight to win, we fight to justify our time among the living and to worship the ones who give us strength and inspiration. But destiny is the only truth, and it cannot be changed.

Skol!

Sir Garmadon and all the judges, you give us your time and inspiration, your leadership and wisdom. And for this, I thank you all. For without you and your commitment, there would not be a reason to fight through and keep building. I raise my horn and drink to you.

And to all the contributors, I shout once more. You are the greatest inspirations of all. I did not know this land you call Varlyrio, but fell in love with its rich story and deceiving past, so I plan on building a little shack to go to every once in a while when I get tired of all this snow.. I can only wish the future ruler is wise enough not to poke the northern bears of Mitgardia, standing on top of the charts once more.

Skol!

 

Edited September 17, 2020 by Louis of Nutwood

[socalbricks]

Congratulations to all the winners! There were some truly great builds this year.

[jtooker]

I enjoyed all the entries, both the builds and the stories.  Congratulations to the winners.  Thank you, judges, for your time and consideration; I do not envy having to decide a winner.

[mrcp6d]

This was a cool challenge!  Very unique story requirement for both categories.  I'd never participated in any of the team challenges, so major thanks to @W Navarre, @KevinyWu, and@ZlatanXVIGustaf for all the comments on WIPs, etc.!

Edited September 23, 2020 by mrcp6d
Fixed the @usernames.

[W Navarre]

6 hours ago, mrcp6d said:

This was a cool challenge!  Very unique story requirement for both categories.  I'd never participated in any of the team challenges, so major thanks to @W Navarre, @KevinyWu , and @ZlatanXVIGustav for all the comments on WIPs, etc.!

Your welcome, and thanks for joining the team! The collaboration was great fun! 

On 9/13/2020 at 8:52 AM, kahir88 said:

I thought this guild is mostly about this, this is why I made my entry about this theme. Yet again, I failed once more. Who needs planning, making researches, investing their time so their story could fit in the lore when you could make a giant monster, and craft a long story about it, and then telling the cause in two-line: "I have no more soldier to send".

The entry was good, both the build and the story, my compliment isn't about this entry. More like the choice... Go on, call me a whimper, cause not my entry won. I don't care about the prize, but I'm interested, why this entry won.

From what I understand the story is a very minor part of the judging. Something like one fourth? Probably presentation is also one fourth. This is unfortunate for you since like you say, it's difficult for you to capture a perfect photo. Your story was really detailed and well thought out, I loved it and the way you embraced the concept of Varlyrio perfectly. No one else did that so well for this contest. I hope you don't think it was time wasted because you didn't come out as the best in a combined judgement including presentation and other things, and with close competition! Your work was valued by me for example, and the art you ended up with was more important than winning, as you noted  . Keep up the great work!