WRITING DOWN THE LORE
2023
Laying Down the Lore is proud to announce our first edition of our annual writing contest – Writing Down The Lore (Yes, we know it's a cheesy title)
Fancy yourself a bit of a writer or poet? Then we have the very opportunity for you to shine, Writing down the Lore is our own community writing contest. We have three categories for you creative bastards to enter and 3 prompts from which to draw inspiration.
The Categories and Prompts
We are opening 3 categories for this year for our discord members. These are;
• Vignette: A short piece of no more that 300 words. We’re looking for economy of storytelling in this one.
• Prose: A 750 words short-short story, one with a distinct beginning, middle, and end
• Poem: Up to 40 lines of text in any structural form, sometimes less is more but we’re looking for something to punch us in our poem-valves.
In terms of content the three prompts below are given without context and may be interpreted in any way you see fit. It should be clear from your piece which prompt you are using.
- Duel
- Chaos
- Badger
The Piece
Each piece MUST be set in the worlds of Warhammer Fantasy/The Old World or Warhammer 40K, or any of their sub-settings such as Blood Bowl, Mordheim, Gorkamorka etc…
• The piece must be submitted on our discord under the writing-down-the-lore-2023, channel.
• Your entry must include the category and a title, which should appear in bold at the start of your entry. The total word count, excluding title, should be noted below the title in brackets. E.g.
Category: Title
(700 words)
Body text
• Note – As the nature of the prize will make these stories publicly available offensive content and profanities should be kept to a respectful minimum or not used at all.
Submitting
• All submissions are to be posted between midnight 31st October and midnight 31st December 2023, your personal timezone.
• You may enter each category only once, though you are free to delete your existing entry and re-post as you choose.
• Please understand that as this contest revolves around another company’s intellectual property your entry will be considered “public domain fanfiction” as soon as you post them. Our hands are, quite correctly, tied on this one. If you can’t accept that condition please do not submit your entry.
Judging & Results
• A secret panel of 3 judges will review and rank the submissions for each category.
• A winner and runner up will be chosen from each of the 3 categories (Vignette, Prose & Poetry).
• There will also be a special “community champion” prize which will be voted on by our discord members (more on this to come)
• Results will be announced prior to 31st of January 2024
Prize
• All entries by winners, runners up, and the community champion will be posted on our website with a dedicated page, suitable fanfare, and full credits.
• The community champion will also receive a special, secret, treat.
• There are no cash prizes…. Nice try…