Ladies, gentlemen, and distinguished guests of indeterminate or eldritch gender!

Welcome to the Kyren Story Auction Game! In this game, the prize is more work, the points are assigned by manipulative goblins, and the real winners are the audience! Long have the goblins of Mercadia secretly plotted from the shadows against the rulers of this forum and now I have let loose the floodgates and all shall play the games of the Mercadian bazaar!

The game works like this:

First, there's an auction day, where you take the points you've earned and bid to spend them on a limited number of story prompts!

Second, there's several days where the winners of the vicious bidding war may post their stories in response to the prompts!

Finally, our kangaroo court--wait, is it a kangaroo court if it's run by goblins? Nevermind, it's not important AT THE END OF THE WEEK our kangaroo court made of goblins rather than. strictly speaking, kangaroos will rank the stories based on their prose, imagery, effective expression of the prompt, pizazz, homoeroticism, and whether or not we ate something satisfying for breakfast that day! The higher your rank, the more points you earn back!

Here's how bidding works:

Bidding is done by adding a point to the pieces you want to bid on.

1. You can only add one point per post
2. You cannot double post--you can only bid again after someone else
3. You CAN add a bid on more than one prompt at once!
4. In the event of a tie, the first person to reach the tying number wins
5. Your TOTAL POINTS ASSIGNED TO ALL PROMPTS must not exceed the points you have available
6. If you win a bid, you gain that prompt and can write about it... but you pay for it with the bid's worth of points.
7. You can at any point declare your bidding over. You may not bid after that point.
8. In the event of someone winning more than one bid, first the lowest bids are forfeited, and second if there is still a double win any ties are forfeited. If that STILL doesn't fix things, bugger it, that person just wins two prompts that week, congratufreakinlations, I hope you're happy.

You can post stories at any point during the week based on your prompt. At the end of the week the pieces will be ranked and receive points based on how well they did.

Out of a spread of eight prompts, typically the spread will be like this:

1. +16 points
2. +13 points
3. +11 points
4. +9 points
5. +7 points
6. +6
7. +5
8. +4

Voting would look something like this:

HOW TO JOIN:

Announce that you are joining and you will be included as the next round of bidding begins. I will assign you 10 points to start with. From that point on you are in the game and your points will be recorded in perpetuity by the Kyren scribes who watch over all deals and trades in the Bazaar of Mercadia. You can join at any time.

If all that is perfectly clear, we will take sign ups now for the first round! This week I'm going to let signups go for about a day to make sure folks have time to jump on, after that it will work as described above. On Sunday I'll open up the actual auction, and then you will have until not THIS tuesday but the FOLLOWING tuesday night to finish your entry if you win--so, until November 17th. I'm giving folks extra time on this first run since we're just getting started, and also because that will mean I will receive a birthday present of eight stories.

This week the prompt theme is:

DOMINIA POST-MENDING

Write a story that features, in some way, one of the following finely crafted cards:

So one of the things that I noticed with the old boards as I was going through them is that we did a LOT more stuff like this previously... so I figured, what the heck, let's try an experiment.

The goal here for me was to create a game that would require fairly little maintenance on my part but that could spark some good, rapid-fire creation. It's also something that is potentially HIGHLY mutable, so if it catches on I may use this later as a way of running art or worldbuilding or character contests as well, and I can always hand things off to another judge for a few weeks. Basically the watchword is flux.

Anyway I hope people are interested in this. I'd love to see folks who aren't normally from around this board try their hand at this honestly--there are eight slots, after all, and I'm anticipating that given the time limits the stories are going to be fairly short.

Yeah, I'm in.

I'm going to go ahead and bid on Gift of Orzhova and Eaten by Spiders.


So, something like this, yeah?



I have 10 points, and 2 have been assigned.

I'm in, bidding on Vectis Agents and It That Betrays



Ruwin: 10 (2 assigned)
Tevish 10 (2 assigned)

Wait wait I was going to make sure everyone had time to sign up before bidding!

Though uh I guess if you want to just go for it we can do that too, I just wanted to make sure we didn't unfairly disadvantage folks who arrive later.

You're both bidding correctly though! So that's good!

I'm a little nervous about filling all 8 slots but it's only been an hour and a half so I should Probably Just Relax

Count me IN

I'm bidding on Bazaar Trader



Ruwin: 10 (2 assigned)
Tevish: 10 (2 assigned)
Squids: 10 (1 assigned)

Iiiiii guess we're just gonna go for it then. Ok!

Also I am shocked, just shocked, to see Ruwin bidding on an Orzhov card. Just shocked

Remember that you can bid again once someone else bids! But, of course, that means that you may assign too many points early...

Priest of Urabrask and Tehmos High Priest.



Ruwin: 10 (2 assigned)
Tevish: 10 (2 assigned)
Squids: 10 (1 assigned)
Heliosphoros: 10 (2 assigned)

Don't forget to put the numbers beside your bids:



Ruwin: 10 (2 assigned)
Tevish: 10 (2 assigned)
Squids: 10 (1 assigned)
Heliosphoros: 10 (2 assigned)


I am very interested in the fact that of four people who have jumped on this so far, all selected cards that no one else selected.

Of course there's only one more card left without bids so here's where the fun will really begin (I hope).

That's a lot of rules. I wonder if I would be able to stick with something like this.

Well, you can drop in and out at will. I structured things so that it can be pretty low commitment for both participants and for me, even if the rules seem complex at first blush.

But yeah your points will be saved so even if you don't participate for a year you can drop right back in. It'll be possible to accumulate points but I'm going to try to structure things so that it's just as possible to blow those points betting for a popular card against other players with a bunch of points.

If you mean commit to this week's... keep in mind that with a week to write, unless you're RavenoftheBlack you're probably not going to write a full scale epic. Something short is perfectly viable.

Hell if someone this week can write a 100 word microfic that moves me to tears, that'd have a shot at first place.

I mean... there's a reason that I named this game after the rules of a city where you turn right twice to go left.

Flexibility is going to be a major component of this.

I'm going to come back and read this properly when I haven't had a long eventful day and can properly process the purpley prose of a proposition pending my personal perusal.

And sadly, this is literally the worst week I can imagine to think of starting this for me...

I think I'm going to have to sit this one out, sadly. If it doesn't fill, I might be able to join in two or three days.

I'd like to participate, but I simply can't.
I overplan 9/10ths of any given prompt, and the more abstract the prompt the more structure I'm inclined to build into it. With things like this, there's no way I could do anything short, but short is about all I would have time and trouble to produce.

man I'd be into this if it was less specific but I feel like I have to do so much research on these to get this right.

I think this is a great idea and I'll probably join once I've gotten the time to look at all the prompts. (Although, let's be honest, I'll probably be bidding on Vectis Agents.)

Oh, what the heck. I'm in!



Ruwin: 10 (2 assigned)
Tevish: 10 (2 assigned)
Squids: 10 (1 assigned)
Heliosphoros: 10 (2 assigned)
Aaarrrgh: 10 (3 assigned)

What would count as less specific? for future rounds I mean

fwiw Caged Sun has zero information anywhere as far as I can recall, which is kinda why I chose it--I'd love to see someone explain just what the heck is happening there. And Eaten by Spiders and Bazaar Trader are both pretty much completely open ended

@Yxoque:

Hmmm I'll be interested to see, when you look through the rest of the prompts, if you stick with that. There's one other that I immediately thought of in terms of oh yeah Yxoque will probably bid on this.



Competition for It That Betrays and Eaten By Spiders heating up! Nice.

Once again just a reminder: you can bid again as soon as someone else bids.

I can't tell if people are being wary or if my instructions were just unclear

honestly I'd been assuming there was more backstory to them. if not... eh, why not. what are your word length guidelines?



Ruwin: 10 (2 assigned)
Tevish: 10 (2 assigned)
Squids: 10 (1 assigned)
Heliosphoros: 10 (2 assigned)
Aaarrrgh: 10 (3 assigned)
razorborne: 10 (2 assigned)

also are there judges other than you