Bob has had his job of shuffling about the various billions of dead in his hometown for nearly four-thousand years now. In all those years, he has learned three important things:
1). Most gods disapprove of Liches handling their dead worshipers.
2). Find one Jermlaine, and there's bound to be more.
3). Beating a god at chess does not mean you have 'conquered' them, and saying so is likely to get you smote.
Because of numbers one and three, Bob is about to be taking another trip to some place very far away, and meeting some folks that honestly aren't the strangest or most unusual he has met. Once there, he'll find out some things he'd rather wish he didn't know, browbeat some princesses into spiritual reform, and find out precisely why Equestria has such a lack of real evil.
=====
Crossover with Dungeons and Dragons, specifically a campaign setting of my own design.
Yes, Bob has a character sheet. Yes, there will be a link to it once it's cleaned up a bit.
ALSO: Looking for a drawfriend willing to pony up (har har) some art of Bob for the cover image.
Good start. I'll be watching this...
Good start. I'll be watching this...
Hmmm. An intriguing beginning. Nice Lemony Narration going on. Good use of the differing power levels in Equestria as compared to D&D. Following.
A few critiques:
I'm assuming you're European and that's why you have the single quotes rather than the double quotes, but there should be a comma after "illusions" either way.
You wrote most of the fic in past tense, but you went a bit into present tense in these paragraphs. Might wanna fix that.
4358518 Both critiques are valid, and things I worried about. I squashed most of the shenaniganery, but some slipped through.
It's an unfortunate result of my editing process. The single/double quote problem is because my writing, in an effort to be slightly more straightforward, uses unique combinations of formatting to denote things, and I actually broke some of my rules.
Double quotes is spoken word.
Single quotes is a character quoting something (whether it's in dialogue or not).
Single quotes on Italics means thought.
Italics alone, or with a combination of double-quotes is emphasis.
So my bad there. I'll try to keep it more in mind in the future, so I can maintain consistence.
The tense change is because the ending of the story was actually scrapped and re-written. I naïvely considered it fine because it's all supposed to be present-tense from his point of view, and immortals with thousands of years under their belts should think strangely.
It's at least better than the previous ending, where things mysteriously resolve themselves with no prompting, there is no description as to how or why it is doing so, and the ending is SO open-ended that there is no reasonable way for the reader to guess what comes next.
Still, 'It could have been worse!' isn't a good justification for not trying.
And thanks for taking an interest and being constructive about it. It's hard to fix your failings if you don't notice them, yeah?
Wha? The Wall of Souls doesn't even exist in other Prime Material planes in the Forgotten Realms cosmology. Unless that's the big change you're talking about?
Err, the whole of Canterlot mountain? Don't you think that is a little excessive?
EDIT:
Ok ok, I read it wrong, I thought it was disintegrating outwards from the circle like powder on water, not a straight line.
I wrote a long review but you're getting the short version now. You can thank my back button for that.
-Good story so far. Usually ones like this are shit.
-Good comedy.
-Be careful with your tense, you're using 1st AND 3rd person present tense, it'll be easy to cock it up.
-There are 2 missing word errors near the beginning of ch2. Dunno where they are, cuz I lost my review. Aren't you an editor?
-Your description is meh. I would have written it like this:
Shorter, to the point. Was No. 3 supposed to be a chess games of the gods reference btw?
-Why are the princesses so harsh with Bob? The hell has he done wrong? I understand Luna yelling at him, she apparently sees him as evil, but I'd imagine Celestia, at least, would be a lot more gentle with him than she has been. Hell, they treat him like a criminal. That's... a bit much. I mean, yeah, she kind of tries to talk him through the magic he's using to try and help him, but I just got a really cruel vibe from Tia especially. Sort of... how a judge might explain shit to the accused. High and mighty, but strictly professional. Maybe that's your point? That they're gods and they act high and mighty? But... they don't. It just... doesn't sit well with me that Celestia of all princesses would act that way. She's far too benevolent. Have I mentioned Celestia is best pony?
-Why is Bob just suggesting he be made to do a 'job' in the afterlife? I get that he kind of wants to, in a manner of speaking. But you make it seem as though he accepts that he's being punished for something, and suggests the punishments he'd be ok with doing. Uh... what's he being punished for? That's never mentioned as far as I've seen. He's just like 'I can't get home. That one's not a god. Yes I will do community service.' I don't get it. If he was indeed just asking for shit to do, wouldn't he be like: 'I can't get home, can I just work in your afterlife for the time being?' But he literally says 'Just have me do community service.' That's like what you say to the judge if you're guilty of some minor offence and being cocky about it. Not what you say if you want a job.
-I figure Bob has an English accent. English guy named Bob made me think of this:
4873473 "...the wall was Myrkul's idea originally, but that changed when all the gods formed a parliament and started press-ganging Ao into making changes to reality. The wall is as ubiquitous as dragons now..."
4873925 - Thanks
- Thanks
- I tense as I please
- Looking for these missing words, their absence may haunt me forever. We need a search party!
-Jermlaine infestations are horrifying.
- Bob is, by all objective measures, the most evil thing Equestria has ever, or will ever see. Luna is pissed because not only has she been burned by evil before, not only is everyone else allowing him to exist instead of trying to destroy the obviously evil monstrosity, but Bob shows up on one of the worst days of her life since being controlled by a horrible eldritch evil. (Because of him showing up, she never finally got to the resolution of Luna Eclipsed).
Celestia is trying to pull the impartial party bit, because she HAS to be as even handed as possible in this situation. She has no idea if Bob is telling the truth about his situation (he's evil!), has no idea what Bob's motives are in doing any of the things he does, and is trying desperately to make sure that he doesn't enslave them, or annihilate them all, or bring eternal winter to their lands (DC 60 Spellcraft check!). She has to assume that the worst is a possibility in this situation, and try and keep that from happening. Which is completely unnecessary because Bob doesn't roll like that, and she's just being unnecessarily awkward.
- Bob is immortal. Depending on headcanon, he is significantly MORE immortal than Celestia or Luna. He's upset that he's failed his job as a tomb guardian, but he might finally be rid of the constant nagging of the gods, and let's be honest, nothing lasts forever. Not like what forever means to Bob at least.
Nothing they say or do to him can be 'punishment' because they are completely incapable of enforcing any such punishment on him. He's submitting to them because, in his experience, that's how you get gods to leave you alone. Then again, Bob has moral compunctions with the princesses' choices in managing their people, and has pretty much ruined his own chances to be left alone for the next couple millennia. Oh well, in for a penny, in for a pound.
- His accent is protean. Mostly because different accents are funny in different situations. This is not an easy thing to convey textually. Use whatever accent you want. It should probably still work.
4875104 I see. Well, you didn't quite convey those ideas. In fact, the only evil thing about Bob that the readers knows so far, is that you called him evil in the description, that's about it.
4875813 Liches are evil. To become a lich, a being must willingly participate in "an act of absolute evil". There are no mitigating factors, it doesn't matter how nice they are in general, or how many good things they do afterwards, they are stained permanently in a way that is very obvious to anyone with the means to understand it.
Other than that single act, all those millennia ago, and the twisted mentality of a being that has existed for far longer than it should, Bob doesn't act evil. But by definition he is, and that's the only information they have.
4876056 Yeah, well, ya need to explain it at some point. Readers are dumb. They don't necessarily pick up on subtlties and don't always make the assumptions you want them to make. It's really as simple as adding a single line of thought from Bob at the right point.
I want this to be continued...