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Thread: My first AAR : any suggestions or advices are welcome!

  1. #1

    Default My first AAR : any suggestions or advices are welcome!

    Greetings sires!




    I'm planning to make my first AAR and will get to it as soon as my life permits it, but until then I'd like to collect some of your advices. Some suggestions, some advices about things to avoid, things you might think benificial for me to address in the story. Of course, let me tell you first a bit about what I'm about to write. I will play the Kingdom of France (SS6.4) with a couple of personnal tweaks and also, I guess, some submods. I'll let you discover most of the new things I added to SS6.4, some will be quite obvious and let's hope you all like it. But what I can tell you, apart from what faction I'll play (at VH/VH by the way), is that it will be a 4TPY campaign, the story being about a specific character, which will loosely be based on an historical one. I've planned great things for him, I'll let you discover him with the first part of my story. I'm also actually reading some AAR to get an idea of how people write them. And by doing that I must tell you right away that since english is not my native language, don't expect any shakespearean story. I'll do my best to make it as much immersive as I possibly can, but it will mostly be, hum, polished reports? Anywhoooo... now that all is said, I'm impatient to read anything you might suggest me or warn me about.




    To your keyboard my Lords!





    Note 1 : Since we will be following the story of a character, this AAR won't be about a full long campaign even though its duration will be similar (around 200 turn for 50 years of gameplay).

    Teaser : It will be called > Honor & Blood : A Knightly Tale of [...] > It's about a count that will become a Knight Templar and eventually ascend to Kinghood. Here's what a contemporary of his has to say about him : "He was a ruddy man, like David... faithful and gentle, affable and kind... an experienced warrior full of patience and wisdom in military affairs. His chief fault was an inability to remember names and faces. A capable soldier and able politician nonetheless..." And here what his enemy had to say about him : "He was not sound in his judgment nor was he successful in his administration."
    Last edited by R.P. Gryphus; June 30, 2018 at 05:30 AM.

  2. #2
    Alwyn's Avatar Frothy Goodness
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    Default Re: My first AAR : any suggestions or advices are welcome!

    Welcome to you as a new AAR writer! I look forward to discovering your character. Using historical elements, when they help your story, sounds like a good idea.

    You asked for things to avoid or which would be beneficial to address. I suggest thinking about what motivates your character and how his expectations, values, hopes and preferences were formed. What did the previous generation (such as his parents) do which annoyed him, or which he swore he wouldn't do when he got older? What does he look for in a good friend? If he's a high-status character, how does he treat low-status people in his society? What does his think is the greatest danger to France? What lessons in life does he need to learn?

    If you want to keep your reports immersive and polished, then I suggest keeping them relatively brief and posting no more than one update a week, even if you have other updates ready. With shorter updates, you need to spend less time writing which gives you more time for editing. If you post more than one update a week, then readers might struggle to keep up - it would be a shame to lose readers.

    I suggest reading other AARs and creative writing, not to copy what they do, but to help you see what styles you like. This also shows how much freedom you have. For example: some AARs have a lot of screenshots, others use few or none. Some focus on in-game events, others have in-game events happening in the background (or don't rely on a campaign at all, and just use the game as a setting.)

    I suggest commenting on other AARs and creative writing, because this will introduce you to the community of writers here and it might encourage other writers to comment on your AAR (especially if you include a link to it in your signature).

    Critic's Quill articles might help, such as Dodging Bullets: Overcoming problems when writing AARs, Writing a First AAR: Ten things you can do and My Ten Rules for Writing an AAR. There's a full list of Critic's Quill articles, with links, in the Log Book of Juvenal (a sticky thread here in the Writers' Lounge).

  3. #3

    Default Re: My first AAR : any suggestions or advices are welcome!

    Thank you for you time Alwyn, and your advices, I'll go check those links right away!

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