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Summer 2008 Smitemaster's Selection:
Devilishly Dangerous Dungeons of Doom - Set straight after TCB

The Witherwood Castle Trilogy:
Witherwood Castle - my first hold in JtRH
Below Witherwood - a more difficult sequel, with a brand new monster, the warba.
Pathways of Witherwood - End of the trilogy, with more warba puzzles included

Other holds
At A Distance - Long distance monster manipulation
Symphony - A nice standard TCB hold
The Old School - An Architect's Edition hold for the modern era
Way Forward - A collaborative hold with the work of seven architects

×There was an interesting range here, though there were very few I voted below a 5. (Sorry, VIPCOOL.) I thought some people did a good job of hitting the cliffhanger/resolution theme, and some people did a good job of excruciatingly bad writing, but only a few did both. Namely:

Lamkin's "resonant rumblings": the unnecessary alliteration was a nice touch, and "synchronized" was the sort of lame-attempt-at-pun that truly says "this is bad writing"; what really pushed it into high territory for me was the ridiculously tense writing about...cows.

zwetschenwasser's "furious rolls": It might have been the alliteration, or again the unnecessary drama about a kid in a thunderstorm. I suspect that "muffinpumpkin" was the clincher for me.

Lamkin's "Time works wonders": "Helen" was a lovely choice, because it did a terrific job of setting up the sense of a classical struggle. The redundancy definitely helped here ("applaud with clapping"? "lightning never alighted"?), and a big part of the appeal was the way the drama just kind of faded out into vulgarisms like "stuffing his face" and "foodstuffs".

Nuntar's "Haxar grunted": there's nothing like overuse of adjectives and ludicrously inappropriate metaphor to made bad writing worse. The icing on the cake, here, was the "tasty lobster sandwiches" bit, which not only wandered into the ridiculous but segued back into the plot of the sentence. Lovely.

×My holds: Beethro's Brain, Entropy, Further Up and Further In, Washed Ashore, Hinterlands, Hypercube, jfflpnk, Lavender Levels.
Collaborations: Way Forward, Advanced Concepts 2

×My holds: Beethro's Brain, Entropy, Further Up and Further In, Washed Ashore, Hinterlands, Hypercube, jfflpnk, Lavender Levels.
Collaborations: Way Forward, Advanced Concepts 2

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First Delver! (I was the first non-tester/dev
to conquer TCB.)
d/dy