Winter's Festival 2007
Gnomekindle: A Winter Wonderland Festival

We are excited to announce a new contest to run in conjunction with this year's winter event. While the gnomes aren't quite ready to open the doors at the New Rachival Research Institute and let everyone see what they've been planning for this year's festival, they have released the following message to be posted in taverns throughout Istaria.

This years contest is actually in two parts.
* Chronicles of Istaria: Hearth and Home - A short story contest
* Chronicles of Istaria: Songs and Poems - A poetry and song writing contest

Are you the King of Jingling? Do you fancy yourself to be the Istarian version of Jean Shepherd? Or perhaps your talent lies more along the lines of Clement Clark Moore? Whether you're a storyteller, a poet, or a songwriter, we have a contest for you. We're looking for you to spark the creative side of your brain, because we are looking for the next Istarian Holiday Classic. Winners will be awarded in two categories. The Hearth and Home contest winner will be for the best short fiction, and the Songs and Poems contest winner will be for, well, obviously the best song or poem.

Short stories must be original works of fiction set in Istaria around a holiday tradition or event. Most races of Istaria view the Winter Festival as a time of new beginnings, though they all celebrate it in different ways. Writers are encouraged to reflect this theme, or something to do with winter holidays, in their stories.

Songs and poems must also center around the winter or holiday theme. The song or poem may be written to follow the tune of an existing song or melody, but please reference the song and artist when submitting your work.

We'd like to encourage anyone with an interest - regardless of experience and skill set - to submit an entry for this contest. We're really looking forward to hearing your stories and songs.

From all of us at Virtrium, developers of Horizons, we wish you a safe and happy holiday season. It's been an exciting (and interesting!) year for us and we're looking forward to 2008.

Faresha Headley
Contest Manager Extraordinaire

You can discuss the contest Here


---

Rules

Before you submit, please review the full rules here:
Official Rules

Remember! There's a guy with black sunglasses and suit insisting that we not accept any submission that does not follow the contest rules. If you don't follow the rules, we're going to be sad.

Now that you know you need to read the full rules, here's a quick summary (and yes, the full rules trump anything and everything we say here - so read those full rules):

* The Chronicles of Istaria contest begins November 19th, 2007 and ends December 31, 2007. All submissions must be received by midnight PST on the the contest end date.
* Submissions should be emailed to [email protected] and be in plain text, non HTML only - attachments will be rejected. That means PDF, OpenWriter, Word and anything else will not be opened.
* Your story must be no more than 2000 words, songs / poems no more than 30 lines and submitted in English (we're sorry to our international players that our German, French and Spanish are only as fluent as google translate).
* Winners will be determined by the developers of Virtrium.
* Winning entries will be announced on the forums and published in electronic form using first electronic rights
* The decision of the winning entries will be final. Virtrium reserves all rights to decide to publish or not to publish all submitted works.
* Winners will receive an emblem to be displayed on a character of their choice in game.