Re: The bigger you are...
 

"Listen! Do you smell that?" -- Ghostbusters I

Re: The bigger you are...
 

Ok, you asked for grammatical critiquing, so here it is. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Quotes and the stating of who said them should be separated by commas, not periods. This set:

"Order the Potemkin to fall back. Ravager and Osired are to escort her." Admiral Roeding ordered, clutching at the railing before him.

Should instead be:

"Order the Potemkin to fall back. Ravager and Osired are to escort her," Admiral Roeding ordered, clutching at the railing before him.

You've repeated this everywhere. Only when there is a question or exclamation do you use that instead of a comma.

Also, it is generally better to say who said it in the first sentence, rather than the second. This point isn't quite necessary if I remember correctly, so don't worry too much about it. As long as it is fairly close to the beginning of the paragraph it should be fine.

Re: The bigger you are...
 

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/eek.gif I knew that rule. I use that rule. WTF is going on?!

<pauses for a second.> I hate MS Word.

Re: The bigger you are...
 

It's freakin great. A great opener to a bigger story. Yeah, there are grammatical things, but it's freakin great!

[img]/threads/images/Graemlins/Dagger.gif[/img]Turin[img]/threads/images/Graemlins/icon42.gif[/img]

Re: The bigger you are...
 

Ron_Lugge said:
...I hate MS Word.

Maybe an alternative would be more to your liking? Check out Open Office.

Re: The bigger you are...
 

Proably a good idea to get a new program, but more often than not its more trouble than its worth -- Word works *great* for my essays and such.

And all I have to do is notice when its autoformat (which often saves my but) is screwing up my text. Like capitalizing *whenever* I close a quote. Or capitalizing the "i"s in my brackets.

Re: The bigger you are...
 

Guys, in addition to some pain-in-the-***-deleted(well, corrupted)-my-work problems, the story has a small element that may be a problem. One of the major players in our little drama is a "dark" version of Christianity -- think the inquisition on steriods, with the brakes taken ALL the way off (also a badly corrupted version, as... well, they don't have a very accurate version of history, much less religion).

edit:

Is anyone going to take offense at this?

Re: The bigger you are...
 

Please, please, for the sake of plots everwhere, avoid that cliche. It's been done to death, [Humour]primarily by half the wicans on the planet.[/Humour]

No, seriously, if you're going to have an evil religeon, come up with an original one. Evil druids, cultists, witches, christians and scientologists have been done to death.

Plus, you are essentially paradying a religeon. I doubt that's what you intend, but that is the end result.

The simpliest method to deal with all these problems, though, is to simply include a good version of the bad religeon. The upside is everyone knows you don't really mean it; the downside is everyone knows it's simply there to provide counterpoint.

Re: The bigger you are...
 

I agree with Narf. Apart from all the problems of pissing of Christians (admitedly probably the safest to annoy behind Budists) and unintentional parody its cliched.

Plus if you make up a religion it may involve a bit more back story but you get full control to do whatever you like without the shackles of doing an 'evil' version. Lets face it making up a religion isn't tricky. Deity, acolytes, afterlife, rituals and commandments/laws. Covers those five and the rest is detail. Eg:

The great god Bod demands you pray to him every second Tuesday and sacrifice 3 pints of milk once a month. Also don't set fire to goats on the 12th day of Sprune of you'll incur his wrath. Do all this, and listen to his most holy priests, and you too will end up in the sacred pub round the corner when you die.

Re: The bigger you are...
 

Eh, what's wrong with parodying Christianity? It could stand some parodying... and the advantage is you don't get brutally executed by right-wing religious fanatics when you do... you only have them put you on TV and publicly ridicule you, which gives you even more publicity! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

/me thinks of continuing my game of Dom2 as Marignon again... HAH! NO ONE ESCAPES THE MARIGNONIAN INQUISITION! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif