Wow. It hardly seems like it's already been a year, but it has! The 1998 Magespace Short Story Contest was a lot of fun and we got a lot of great entries, so we decided to do it again! This year the prize isn't quite as nice as a BABY, but it's still pretty nice and one-of-a-kind--and on top of that, there are two of them! Yes, that's right--this year there'll be a first and a second prize!
About the Prizes
This year's prizes, obtained at Gen Con from the artists themselves, are two pieces of original Shadowrun artwork. I don't have my scanner hooked up yet so I can't show you what they look like, but one is by Steve Bryant and appeared in the Harlequin's Back adventure, and the other one is by Fred Hooper and appeared in Blood in the Boardroom. Both are signed by their respective artists. The first prize winner will choose the one he/she wants, and the second prize winner will get the other one.
About the Contest
This year we're going to do something a little different. I have always been fascinated by the world of Shadowrun--the part that's not populated by the typical overcybered gunbunnies and spellslingers and Matrix runners. I think that is one of the reasons Shadowrun is such a successful game: because FASA goes through so much effort to flesh out the world and make it real.So, that said, here's the challenge for this year's contest: Write a story where the main character(s) are "normal" people. Not shadowrunners. Not members of the Special Forces or the Sioux Wildcats or the crew of the Jolly Roger, most feared vessel on the high seas. Just people. The characters can interact with runners if you want, but the runners can't be the point-of-view characters in the story. I want to see the world of Shadowrun through the eyes of the 90+% of people who don't take this stuff for granted.
About the Rules
Yeah, there are some, and here they are.
- Entries must be submitted to winterhawk@magespace.net no later than October 31, 1999 (NOTE: Deadline has been extended to November 10, 1999!). Entries received after that date will not be considered. Winning entries will appear on the Magespace approximately two weeks later.
- All entries must be the original work of the submitter.
- All entries must be new stories written specifically for the contest. Nothing previously published, even on your web page.
- All stories must take place in FASA's Shadowrun universe.
- All stories must conform to the guidelines described in "About the Contest" above.
- Each entry must contain no fewer than 500 and no more than 5,000 words. This rule is a bit flexible, but please don't exceed the maximum by much.
- Each entry must have a title. This time I'm not kidding. I accepted too many entries with no title before, but for this contest anything without a title won't win.
- Entries must be submitted in plain-text format. (We accepted HTML before, but we got so many weird permutations created by so many HTML editors that we decided it would just be easier to do it ourselves. Exception: If you want to submit it using ONLY common tags (bold, italics, underline, paragraph, line break), that's fine. Just please, no fancy stuff. I just have to strip it out when I post the stories. And I won't disqualify stories that indent with bazillions of non-breaking spaces, but I'll get really annoyed about it, so please don't do it. Thank you. :) )
- Each entrant can enter only one story.
- Please mark each entry "99 STORY ENTRY" so I can keep track of them.
- As always, this contest is in no way affiliated with FASA.
- The judges for this contest will be me (Rat), and Marshall Costello, spousal unit of DeckerM and author of The Long Sleep. Decisions of the judges are final.
- The Magespace reserves the right to publish any and all stories on our site for as long as we wish. Once the contest is over you, of course, have the right to publish them anywhere else as well. Authors retain copyright of their stories.
- If you are well known to one or both of the judges, please submit your entry using a different email address (such as Yahoo or Hotmail).
- Like last year, the Magespace reserves the right to extend the deadline if we don't get any entries that we consider to be winner material.
- Have fun!