Victory speech time. Some time since I did one of those.
Amusingly, I think this is the first time I've won this particular award; While it is many years since I was a prolific AAR writer (2002-2006 period), I have written no less that 31 AARs (some multiplayer or collaborative), and am currently writing my 32nd,
Born to Breed: House of the Prophets, so I thought I had won most of the awards by now*, but this one has apparently evaded me. I'll chalk it up to the excellent quality of the competition.
That being said, I thank you for correcting that oversight,
@Macavity116, even if my AAR won your appreciation only by a hair over Stellaris Wars, and fitting that it should happen to one of my strongly character-focused AARs.
Apart from AARs I am a frequent contributor to
Guess The Author with 14 entries over the years, which mention admittedly has nothing whatsoever to do with this award and everything to do with me wanting to promote GTA to any reader of this thread, who is not already aware of that venerable AARland institution.
The AAR
@Macavity116 has nominated me for,
Born to Breed: House of the Prophets is a spiritual sequel of sorts to
Born to Breed: The Estridsen Lectures (abandoned due to overwork/crunch time), my CK2 AAR, and
The Byzantine Letters (abandoned due to the court going critical with too many Ducases causing extreme slowdown), my CK1 AAR.
It originated as a thought experiment. I usually have a specific set of overall goals for my AAR games, but beyond that the story follows the gameplay. What if I were to write an AAR where the gameplay flowed from the story rather than, as is usual, the reverse? How would I go about doing that? And would it make for a good or a bad fit?
When I got CK3 this spring I realized I had an excellent platform for the experiment. Write a story outline with prophets and other major characters at key points in the development of a realm, filling in the details of what each character must achieve through his life – and then play the game, with any character theoretically able to meet the next milestone in the story attempting to achieve it. So House of the Prophets goes
story outline => gameplay => AAR based on gameplay.
The story follows the dynasty of Sigurd, and so far playing to a script is working fine, even if it occasionally gives me trouble when the game doesn't want to do what my story outline calls for, so I am hopeful that it will keep me interested long enough to enough to complete it... always assuming that COVID-19 gives me enough spare time and that PDS DLC releases/free updates don't mess up my savegame or mods beyond repair along the way, that is.
* If nobody else,
Khünbish Jalair from
My Inevitable Greatness should have been a shoe-in. Such a memorable character.
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As for handing on the award; Am I limited to nominating people based on currently ongoing AARs or can I choose a blast from the past? (within some reasonable time range)