Winter Creative Competition 2025: Icebound

[Jubal]

Creative Competition: Icebound
 

It's time for another of our winter creative competitions! Moving on from last year's HIBERNATION, this year we're back out in the cold with our new theme, ICEBOUND. Whether you're heading bound for the ice or stuck bound within it, this hard-frozen stillness will require creativity, will and wit to overcome. Whatever your response to the hard cold of winter, we hope to see your creative endeavours for this year's competitions!


The rules are as follows:
1. Produce your entry. It can be a game, artwork, story, poem, recipe,  rules supplement, sculpture, dance piece, music, whatever - any sort of creative response to the theme.
2. PM your entry (or a link thereto) to Jubal, or send it by email to exilian@exilian.co.uk, and post in this thread to say you've put your entry in. Entries that don't have both the post and PM in will not be considered, and you must not post your entry publicly during the contest (so as to ensure judging is name-blind).
3. Each person is allowed up to two entries.
4. Entries must be in by 23:59 GMT, February 9th, 2025.
5. The judges will score each work out of ten on two grounds: how good a response to the prompt it was, and how well executed the result was.
6. Winners will be announced by or before February 29. All entries will then be posted in a public showcase.

PRIZES

Main Prize:
An ebook copy of BOOKS AND BONE by the wonderful Veo Corva, a tale of a librarian in a town of the dead featuring an out-of-place historian, unexpected underground paths, Wandering Larry, unexpected career paths, ancient evils, and what it means to call a place home.

If you'd like to donate an additional prize and thereby sponsor the competition, please get in touch

THE JUDGES

Clio Em is a weaver of imaginary worlds through many media including as a game producer, multi-instrumentalist, writer and vocalist. Her projects include being the author and performer of the cross-medium sci-fi work Gravity Wing, writing and presenting on building fantasy worlds through music including at our own Coding Medieval Worlds workshop in 2023, vocal credits on a range of major projects and titles, and being the game producer of the acclaimed Austrian modern-SFF dungeon crawler, Dungeons of Hinterberg. You can find more of her work at her website.

GoldKarat is a Twitch variety streamer with over seven years of playing through, reviewing, and discovering a wide range of games. His channel boasts over 8500 followers watching him play his way through titles from Undertale to God of War to The Exile Princes - so the full range from AAA titans they show statues of at conventions through to titles so indie their name is passed along on yellowed scraps of paper in underground taverns may crop up in his explorations of fictional worlds. You can find him on a wide array of social media, including of course on his Twitch channel itself and on Bluesky @GoldKaratTV.