Descriptions Wanted 1.0

Silas

My point was more I just don't think you need the extra reference. Somebody has already had to 'look x wings' to see them, so it's easily inferred.

Crathen

Oh. I thought this was a room emote. Descriptions can't be made to refer to the specific person who's wearing them, as far as I know - my bad.

Antonius

Synbios said:

I'll be honest, I'm really glad that I get honest responses - from gripes about grammar to observations of over-opulence. Thanks for the input! This is one of my biggest customisation projects as of yet.

I'm just starting a pretty large customisation project of my own, which essentially involves customising the descriptions on most of my artefacts as and when I have the credits (and descriptions) to do so. One of the issues I'm facing  is keeping the descriptions for a lot of them relatively simple, but making it clear that they are artefacts and not just regular items of jewellery.

The other issue I'm faced with is indicating what each of them do, without having to sit there and explain that I've just handed them a level two health regen ring, level one mana regen ring, level two sip ring, armband of celerity, anklet of dashing, etc etc. The solution I've settled on is reactions when worn that give an indication of what I think it would feel like to put on, for example, a health regen ring. That's an additional credit cost per item, though, so will likely come after I've got all of the descriptions done.

My wings are going to be the big item, though. I have an idea of what I'd like to do with them, but haven't been able to get the image in my head into words yet. There'll also (hopefully - haven't checked on viability yet) be a number of reactions involved.

Anyway, since this is all about description critique, I'll actually post one of my own. This is what I currently have planned for my artefact bracelets. I'll also point out now that I have a tendency to shamelessly abuse commas.

SHORT_DESC: a pair of intricately runed gold bracelets

LONG_DESC: The intricate runes upon their surfaces shining brightly, a pair of golden bracelets lay nearby.

EXT_DESC: At three inches wide and crafted simply from solid gold these bracelets would be unremarkable if not for the runes that almost entirely cover their surfaces. Formed to wrap comfortably around the wrists of the wearer, there is an almost imperceptible seam where they clasp together. The painstakingly etched runes shine brightly and bathe the bracelets in a soft golden glow; the slightest shimmer the only indication that they vibrate slightly with power.

REACTION (WORN): As you clasp the bracelets around your wrists you feel a surge of physical and mental energy flow through you.

Eld

@Jiraishin I don't see the ambiguity with the "each" in the second sentence, especially since "storm" isn't plural in the first.

Peak

Synbios said:

Problem is that all the other hits from the thesaurus in dictionary.com do not evoke the imagery that I'm hoping for, sadly. 

Probably the closest nonthesaurused word I could come up is 'flechette', but isn't that a modern term?

sliver wut wut

Daslin

Hell with it, I'm kinda bored with my desc a bit. Help me change it up?

He is a stout dwarf. He stands with his chin jutted out proudly. He stands proud and upright, his 

bearing distinctly military. Though he might be considered short for a dwarf, his posture and build 

make him imposing, with thick banded muscles lining what you flesh you can see. His dirty-blond hair 

is set into dreadlocks and then pulled back and set into a bristling ponytail. His hair is pulled 

back in such a way to accentute his beautifully stretched earlobes, with intricately carved large 

gauge hoops set into them. His beard is thick an coarse, like his hair, but is intricately pleated 

and braided downwards and then into his beltline, wrapping around his belt several times before 

tying off into a beltloop. Despite the severity of his face and poise, his eyes smiling constantly, 

a shining and happy brown that peer out from beneath his craggy eyebrowns, mirroring the laugh-lines 

that cover his face. Every aspect of his bearing carries a new force behind it. You can almost feel 

heat radiating off of him, bleeding through his kai aura.

Yes, I know there are spelling mistakes.

Delphinus

@Daslin:
- Vary sentence structure, but be careful of run-ons. Don't load a sentence down with dependent clauses. ("Doing a thing, the guy acts, doing another thing, doing still another thing.")
- Muscles wouldn't limit the amount of visible flesh. Muscles are flesh. So is skin, which I'm hoping covers the muscles.
- Avoid making quality judgements like "beautifully." Not everyone's going to feel the same way about gauged earlobes, for example.
- Avoid mentioning the reader ("you").
- It's doubtful that your character will be carrying the same expression constantly, or that his features will always suggest the same mood.
- Radiating heat sort of verges into special snowflake territory.
- When you can, avoid things like "feels like," "seems like," or "might be considered." Be bold and definite.

Daslin

@Delphinus Ahah! Thank you Delph. You're a good man.

I'll rewrite this over the next couple days.

Cinya

Just rewrote my description earlier today, and I've been playing around with it for the past few hours. Input would be greatly appreciated. 

She is a mhun who carries herself with an air of cautious discretion, her movements brisk and purposeful. Tousled reddish-auburn hair falls to graze her shoulders, complete with long, sideswept bangs that hang precariously close to her eyes, often partially obscuring the right from certain angles. Although one could easily accredit this hairstyle to laziness, something about it creates a not-altogether-unappealing aura of brazen indifference. Her eyes themselves are bright and expressive, steely grey in colour and framed with short dark lashes. The rest of her face is rather nondescript, with pencil-thin lips, a slightly upturned nose, and rounded cheeks that would lend her a girlish vibe if not for her more seasoned carriage. Her build is thick and athletic, and both arms have been wrapped with linen from wrist to elbow. The pinky finger of her left hand is conspicuously missing from where it should be emerging from her glove.

Eld

@Daslin Agree with most of @Delphinus' points.
 I didn't initially read the muscle bit as the muscles limiting the amount of visible flesh, but rather as the amount of visible flesh being limited for some other reason, with what's visible being very muscular. Could probably be made a bit clearer, though. Muscles "lining" the visible flesh sounds weird to me, though; sounds like he's got rings of random muscle around sections of somehow muscleless flesh.
The two sentences starting with "He stands" feel redundant. They could probably be combined.
Unsure about the kai aura. You're not always in the kai trance, and even when you are, I would assume you're not constantly so full up on kai that you're radiating power. In addition to bordering on special snowflake territory, it just doesn't seem to fit with the mechanics of kaido to be constantly visibly radiating kai.

Sena

I'd be fine with the kai aura line at the end, if it's only in the description when at full or nearly full kai.

Eld

Cinya said:

Just rewrote my description earlier today, and I've been playing around with it for the past few hours. Input would be greatly appreciated. 

She is a mhun who carries herself with an air of cautious discretion, her movements brisk and purposeful. Tousled reddish-auburn[1] hair falls to graze her shoulders, complete with long, sideswept bangs that hang precariously close to her eyes, often partially obscuring the right from certain angles. Although one could easily accredit this hairstyle to laziness, something about it creates a not-altogether-unappealing aura of brazen indifference[2]. Her eyes themselves are bright and expressive, steely grey in colour and framed with short dark lashes. The rest of her face is rather nondescript, with pencil-thin lips, a slightly upturned nose, and rounded cheeks that would lend her a girlish vibe if not for her more seasoned carriage[3]. Her build is thick and athletic, and both arms have been wrapped with linen from wrist to elbow. The pinky finger of her left hand is conspicuously missing from where it should be emerging from her glove.

Comments on bolded parts:
1. I think of "auburn" as sort of a reddish brown to begin with, so "reddish-auburn" feels redundant to me.
2. This is getting into telling the observer what they think, rather than what they see. Just saying that it conveys an aura of indifference might be fine - it's still telling me how to interpret your appearance, but you could claim that her lack of concern for her appearance is SO brazen as to be intuitively obvious to the most casual observer. But the "not-entirely-unappealing", aside from suffering from a surfeit of dashes, forbids me from finding it utterly repellant, which my character may.
3. I would guess that it's not only her posture that prevents her cheeks from making her look like a child. I might just say "...with pencil-thin lips, a slightly upturned nose, and rounded, almost girlish, cheeks" or something of the like.

Eld

Sena said:

I'd be fine with the kai aura line at the end, if it's only in the description when at full or nearly full kai.

Yeah, I think I would be too. But I assumed that he was not going to be changing his description based on kai levels, and that people aren't going to be reading his description in combat situations, which is when he's most likely to be kai'd up.

Sena

I've been thinking of rewriting the room descriptions for Sena's house, but I'm terrible at writing descriptions (which is why I'm not satisfied with them in the first place), so I figured I'd post the current descriptions here for advice.

First room. I don't think this one is too bad, maybe just changing it a bit to flow better.

A dim, runed cavern.
From the entrance to the room, a stone stairway leads downwards from the door, into the centre of a large, domed earthen chamber. The walls appear to be solid rock, and the only sources of light in the room are seven dim, pulsating orbs of light suspended near the ceiling. The orbs constantly shift colour, never staying the same for more than a few seconds. The walls are covered in hundreds of runes, of which no two are alike, painted on the walls with several different substances of varying colours and textures. The air is cool, with an earthy scent, an occasional draft flowing past you. There are several small pits and depressions that have filled with water, the deeper pools being home to numerous thin, silver fish. Towards the eastern side of the room is a substantially larger pool, which seems to lead to a larger water source deeper underground. Scattered around the edges of the room are dozens of cracks, crawlspaces, and shafts of varying sizes, most of them appearing to lead nowhere, ending after a short distance. Small lizards can occasionally be seen darting in and out of the various pools of water and cracks in the rock. A runic totem is planted solidly in the ground. An obsidian eye sigil is here. A sigil in the shape of a small, rectangular monolith is on the ground. Lying flat on the ground is a key-shaped sigil.
You see a single exit leading out (closed door).

Down from the first room. This one isn't terrible either.

An underground bedchamber.
This elliptical chamber is fairly small, appearing to be roughly sixty feet long from north to south, and twenty feet across at the widest point. A large bed, covered in several layers of thick cloth, is connected to the eastern wall, apparently carved from the stone when the room was created. Near the northern end is a long, narrow bench, with two steel rings attached securely to the wall nearby. The rest of the room is simple and sparsely decorated, though much cleaner than expected for a cave. A runic totem is planted solidly in the ground. A sienna stone bed with a covering of pale maroon silk is here. An obsidian eye sigil is here. A sigil in the shape of a small, rectangular monolith is on the ground. Lying flat on the ground is a key-shaped sigil.
You see a single exit leading up (open door) and enter a sienna stone bed with a covering of pale maroon silk.

Up from the first room. This is the one with the most problems, it's pretty terrible. I especially don't like how list-y it is. I think it would be better to start over from scratch on this one than to make a bunch of small adjustments.

A deadly, moonlit garden.
As you walk through the door at the end of a steeply sloping path through the rock, the myriad of seductive colours and scents nearly overwhelms you. Every corner of the room is filled with beautiful plants in every shape and size and colour. Glancing up, there appears to be no ceiling, and the night sky is permanently visible, the full moon sitting at the centre of the illusory sky, casting an eerie bluish glow over the garden. At the core of the garden is a massive laburnum tree in full bloom, the bright yellow blossoms catching the moonlight alluringly. At the base of the tree is a large, desultory patch of various species of nightshade, with lotus blossoms scattered through them. The rest of the garden is filled with flowers and plants of various colours and poisons. You can see patches of oleander, larkspur, digitalis, belladonna, aconite, laceflower, datura, bloodflower, adonis, and delphinium, as well as dozens of different types of trees and smaller clusters of flowers scattered randomly throughout the garden. A small bench carved of yew is seated on a hill near the entrance, overlooking the poisonous and deadly garden, with short darnel grass covering the hill. A blue roan ambles about here, tail swishing. A runic totem is planted solidly in the ground. A midnight blue draught horse stands patiently awaiting direction. An obsidian eye sigil is here. A sigil in the shape of a small, rectangular monolith is on the ground. Lying flat on the ground is a key-shaped sigil. Tail swishing agitatedly, a black desert stallion stands here regally.
You see a single exit leading down (open door).

Cinya

Eld said:

Cinya said:

Just rewrote my description earlier today, and I've been playing around with it for the past few hours. Input would be greatly appreciated. 

She is a mhun who carries herself with an air of cautious discretion, her movements brisk and purposeful. Tousled reddish-auburn[1] hair falls to graze her shoulders, complete with long, sideswept bangs that hang precariously close to her eyes, often partially obscuring the right from certain angles. Although one could easily accredit this hairstyle to laziness, something about it creates a not-altogether-unappealing aura of brazen indifference[2]. Her eyes themselves are bright and expressive, steely grey in colour and framed with short dark lashes. The rest of her face is rather nondescript, with pencil-thin lips, a slightly upturned nose, and rounded cheeks that would lend her a girlish vibe if not for her more seasoned carriage[3]. Her build is thick and athletic, and both arms have been wrapped with linen from wrist to elbow. The pinky finger of her left hand is conspicuously missing from where it should be emerging from her glove.

Comments on bolded parts:
1. I think of "auburn" as sort of a reddish brown to begin with, so "reddish-auburn" feels redundant to me.
2. This is getting into telling the observer what they think, rather than what they see. Just saying that it conveys an aura of indifference might be fine - it's still telling me how to interpret your appearance, but you could claim that her lack of concern for her appearance is SO brazen as to be intuitively obvious to the most casual observer. But the "not-entirely-unappealing", aside from suffering from a surfeit of dashes, forbids me from finding it utterly repellant, which my character may.
3. I would guess that it's not only her posture that prevents her cheeks from making her look like a child. I might just say "...with pencil-thin lips, a slightly upturned nose, and rounded, almost girlish, cheeks" or something of the like.

Thanks for the feedback, Eld. 

1) Her hair is on the redder side of auburn, but I don't like simply leaving it "red" because then people start thinking of The Little Mermaid. I've also described her hair as this color since she was 18 and I like to think of it as kind of characteristic, so that's staying. 

2) Good point. I think that your bolded section has been the part that I've tweaked the most over the course of the day, as I haven't found a phrasing yet that I'm entirely happy with. I'll keep projection in mind as I move forward with it. 

3) I specifically chose the word 'carriage' over something like 'posture' because, to me at least, it implies not only posture but also mannerisms, general vibe, etc - literally, 'how one carries oneself'. But you're probably right in that it doesn't need to be drawn out. I'll look at that as well. 

Eld

@Cinya
-Fair enough on the auburn. I figured since auburn spans a range of shades, you were going for something on the red end of the range, it was just the specific wording that jumped out at me. Maybe it could be rephrased to still evoke the same thing, but not a big deal.
-On the carriage thing, I didn't mean to emphasise posture over the rest of it, so much as to say that I would expect that even with one girlish feature (the round cheeks in this case), the rest of her features would belie the girlishness, with or without the posture/mannerisms/etc. On a second read, I guess that's the difference between "a girlish vibe" and "looks like a little girl". ("vibe" also feels really modern to me, but we already use it for crystalism vibes, so I probably don't have much room to complain there)

Synbios

A storm of shards slices lazily through the air, silently orbiting its owner in a sinister nimbus of flashing blades. Each shard is the size of a small dagger, composed of varying metals - from mundane steel to rare mithril - and honed to a razor's edge. As they follow their trajectories, the shards occasionally consolidate into ten floating sword-shaped pinions, radiating outward and downward behind the owner's shoulder blades into as two wing-like formations.

to this next draft, considering Silas's suggestion to mention the wing formations first.

Arranged into two wing-like formations, ten floating pinions - each the size and shape of a single-edged longsword - radiate outward and downward behind the shoulder blades. Upon closer scrutiny, each pinion is a tesselation of slivers composed of a variety of metals, ranging from mundane steel to rare mithril. From time to time, the pinions disperse into a storm of razor-sharp shards that orbit its owner in a sinister nimbus of flashing blades.

Synbios

Also, reactions!

PGAZE:

1st person: At your pointed gaze, a network of minute lines begins to form on the sword-shaped pinions floating behind you, dispersing the tesselations of their component shards into the air, where they begin to orbit silently around you in a storm of blades.

3rd person: At $wearer's pointed gaze, minute lines begin to form on the sword-shaped pinions floating behind $him, dispersing into a storm of metallic shards that orbit silently around $him.

Antonius

I initially read that as you gazing -at- the wings and causing the blades to disperse into shards, which makes no sense considering they're only ever behind you. I assume that wasn't the intention?

Synbios

I could turn my head and look at them, though. Or at least part of them.

Jespar

He is a tiger-like rajamala. He has deep red fur almost the colour of blood, with thick
jet black stripes that look like giant claw marks running all over his sleek, shining fur.
 He has pure white teeth and whiskers, bright yellow eyes, pointy ears and a lightly
muscular body like that of a runner he is roughly 5 foot 4 inches tall.

ideas? extensions?

Jiraishin

@Synbios I really like your second-to-last description. Also that reaction is really cool. Sorry for not responding earlier, have been offline for the past 2 days.

@Cinya the word 'vibe' seems a bit weird. Might write "reddish, auburn" rather than "reddish-auburn" if it were me, but that might just be a stylistic thing.

I've posted my own description here at least once and never got any responses. Still sort of torn as to whether I should change anything about it-- it's mercifully brief but it also doesn't describe much.

Synbios

Jiraishin said:

@Synbios I really like your second-to-last description. Also that reaction is really cool. Sorry for not responding earlier, have been offline for the past 2 days.

By second-to-last description, are you referring to the 'shards first, wings next' description?

Also, repost your description again?

Jiraishin

I clicked 'like' on the post containing the description. Think it was on the previous page.

Synbios

This one?

"A storm of shards slices lazily through the air, silently orbiting its owner in a sinister nimbus of flashing blades. Each shard is the size of a small dagger, composed of varying metals - from mundane steel to rare mithril - and honed to a razor's edge. As they follow their trajectories, the shards occasionally consolidate into ten floating sword-shaped pinions, radiating outward and downward behind the owner's shoulder blades as two wing-like formations."

Jiraishin

Yeah, that one.

Nadiel

@Synbios - I think you have the phrasing down on your descriptions now. One thing is throwing me off a bit, though. In the one case, being a nimbus that occasionally aligns into wing formation, it seems to make the reaction a bit redundant since, more often than not, you're going to have the storm of blades anyway, and therefore have that sinister thing going most of the time.

For that reason, I like the whole starting as wings and occasionally breaking apart idea better.

Jiraishin

Just caught @Synbios's request to post my description while rereading the thread. Here it is, all three sentences:

He is a mhun of average height. Lean and lightly built, he moves with swift economy, grey eyes constantly assessing and re-assessing his surroundings. Framed by short-cropped dark hair, his features are thin and youthful, lined by hardships and weariness rather than age.

Cinya

@Jiraishin: As you've told me before yourself, there's a lot more to Jiraishin's appearance than you put in his desc. I'd love to see just one more sentence describing a general impression of his features (I don't think you need to describe any features specifically, nor does it go with the "broad strokes" tone that you pull off really well here). Perhaps between the second and third line. 

Synbios

@Jiraishin: I agree with @Cinya. Let me see if I can make a draft of your description that essentially says the same thing, but with more sentences(lol).