Saturday was Blackspire’s Kingdom Quals and Warmaster Tournament in Silvermoon (Salem OR). It was an early day. The Queen, Aurora, broke with tradition and started the event at 10 am,. 10 is when quals entry could be submitted. Judging then began at 11 and the tournament was scheduled to start at noon. Everything started reasonably on time. I think the tournament started about 20 minutes late.
I arrived around 10:40. I wanted to enter something into quals but I wasn’t trying to qual, I just wanted feedback on a written article. I wanted to see where my score would fall. It was my Site Evaluation article. I tweaked it slightly and I should update it on the site too. There were some grammar errors and some sentence structure that I changed to make it read better. After feedback I also changed a few sentences to make its intent more clear. I was reasonably happy with the scores I received, 4.5, 3.5 and 4.5. All around decent scores. Hopefully it will score higher with the changes I made after feedback.
You might be asking why I needed to get a gauge on my scores? Well I plan on entering in Dragon Master at Pacific War. Not just a few items either, I plan on putting effort into winning over all. I’ll be putting in the required five categories. It might be a long shot but you never know. I will be entering mostly non-traditional categories when it comes to what often wins over all.
I’ll be entering a plasti dipped shield, a cake, the feast article I wrote, one of my longer lore entries for Shattered Kingdoms and a photo. The shield I made a while ago but have hardly used, it looks new. The feast article is the one on this site, Baelnorn’s Guide to Feast Preparation. I have done some work editing it, I missed a lot of things. I plan on updating it on the website when I’m finished.
The cake is a German chocolate cake. I’ve done well with it in the past. I plan on doing a more complicated chocolate frosting though. It won’t be decorated amazingly but it will be a very solid cake. The lore entry I’ll probably be entering is the Valshoom entry. It’s by far my favorite. It’s pretty solid where it sits so I don’t think I’ll need to do to much editing on it, if any. I also plan on entering my site evaluation article too, just to give me a second chance in the non-fiction category. However the piece pièce de ré·sis·tance is my photography entry.
Perhaps many of you don’t realize that I’ve been pretty big into photography for years. While my photography involvement waxes and wanes I assure you it’s been a pretty big hobby. While I didn’t get a degree in it, I did take several photography classes while I was in university. They were some of my favorite classes. You have no idea how good the creative freedom they allowed me felt. I produced some pretty good works of art and I’ve not shared any of them with Amtgard. This will be the first time I do so and I hope it goes really well. Photography as art in Amtgard exists but doesn’t really seem to be seen at the same level of the other arts. There is also a difference between seeing photos online and seeing them in their intended in person presentation. Hopefully what I enter will start to change a few minds.
Sorry to go off on a Dragon Master tangent but I’m looking forward to it. I’d like to see what kind of competition I can give people like Rowana and Requiem. The competition will not be in a direct fashion but will be limited as very few or, perhaps, none of our categories will over lap. I realize it might not have been smart to play my hand before the contest by letting everyone see most of the entries I’ll be entering but it wouldn’t be much of a blog if I kept this secret.
I honestly don’t think I’ll be Dragon Master but I do like to think about it. I believe my chances of winning best in a category is more likely and I think there is a reasonable chance it will happen. I look forward to see how it plays out. I’m not really known for the arts side of Amtgard but I think I have something to give to the community and this is my chance to prove it. I just hope I don’t fall flat.
Back to Quals and Weapon Master!
The tournament went pretty smoothly and was fun to watch. It was reasonably clean, although there were some people not taking hits like they should have, but it was minor and the people who placed in the top brackets were not the ones cheating.
Critias won both the tournament portion of Warmaster and the battle game aspect. He’s our new Warmaster! Big mac was our close second place winner. The actual battle game was pretty close too, it was 4 to 6.
A good portion of my day was sitting in on meetings. I sat in the BoD meeting which was about 45 minutes long and then the althing took about 2 hours. There were 9 proposals for us to vote on, but I didn’t need to sit in on the discussion, I already knew what I was going to vote yes and no on. I voted, handed in my ballot and then Uriel and I made a quick journey to Panda Express. We got back just in time for them to have finished discussing the 9 proposals and were moving into the Circle of Monarchs discussion.
The CoM discussion was by far the longest discussion. Despite it’s length there wasn’t much said that hadn’t already been said online. I didn’t personally have much to add. The only thing I volunteered was on the topic of fundraising. I reiterated that we should be trying to fundraise from sources outside our club. I gave the example given by Gorin. His example was arena pits at ren fairs and conventions. He said he would easily make over $1,000 a weekend. I said it isn’t hard to make money it just take some investment and a few dedicated individuals to make it happen.
When all was said and done it was nearly 6 o’clock. At nearly 8 hours it was a very long day for Amtgard. I packed up my things and made my way over to Warmaster Critias’ house for his birthday.
Despite how long the day was I had a decent day. I got to hangout with Uriel and Gustav, see my friend get Warmaster and get some good scores and feedback on my writing. I even got some encouragement from Terarin in the form of him suggesting I enter Dragon Master. I don’t often get encouragement outside of my close friends so it was a very nice thing to hear, even if it was just a quick suggestion. Next week you’ll find me at my local park Silvermoon.