r/whowouldwin • u/TheAsianIsGamin • Jul 19 '25
Event Character Scramble Season 20 Round 0: Eden Prime
To determine Roster Seeding, Round 0 writeups will be ranked from 1-5 by our esteemed panel of judges. Seeding scores will be determined by the judges’ averaged ranks of your stories, with higher ranks receiving higher seeds. All three judges will read all Round 0s.
Your Judges are: /u/TheAsianIsGamin, /u/Proletlariet, and /u/Talvasha
When judge voting goes up for this round, we'll have a WWW moderator lock the thread, preventing anyone from posting more. Make sure to get all of your writing done on time!
The Character Scramble is a long-running writing prompt tournament in which participants submit characters from fiction to a specified tier and guideline. After the submission period ends, the submitted characters are "scrambled" and randomly distributed to each writer, forming their team for the season. Writers will then be entered into a single-elimination bracket, where they write a story that features their team fighting against their opponent's team. Victors are decided based on reader votes; in other words, if you want people to vote for you, write some good content. The winner by votes of each match-up moves on to the next round. The pattern continues until only one participant remains: the new Character Scramble champion, who gets to choose the theme, tier, and rules of the next Scramble!
The theme of Character Scramble 20 is Scramble Effect. Round prompts will be based on the many worlds, missions, and memorable moments found throughout the Mass Effect series.
Join the Character Scramble Discord!
Round 0: Eden Prime
Lightyears away from where any of its ancestors once roamed, a rooster crows. The sun turns the purple of dawn into a bright, beautiful azure, and from within the arcologies that dot the land, efficient with both energy and space, the people rise just as slowly. There’s much work to be done, out there on the fields, but mornings like this are worth enjoying. The skies are clear, the land is fertile, and all is quiet. It’s hardly the most exciting corner of the galaxy—and that’s just the way it’s supposed to be.
Until an unexpected discovery turns this once-sleepy idyll into a flashpoint. At first, your team thinks this is a simple mission: Recover whatever it is they found, and slip out to get it where it needs to be before anyone can make a fuss.
But the moment your team makes it onto the planet, a firefight breaks out with an unforeseen enemy. Soon, it becomes clear: Something important has been unearthed, and someone wants it. Badly enough to kill for it.
Round Rules:.
Galaxy Map: Hundreds of billions of stars, each with its own system of planets. Your round doesn’t have to take place on an agrarian colony—or even on a sci-fi planet at all. But a season like this is about discovery as much as anything else. Start to show your audience where you’ve brought us.
Find the Beacon: Whether by being ordered to investigate it, or by chance, your team stumbles upon an object revealing something rather sinister. This object can be an artifact showing you visions, a murder weapon, written logs, a witness, or anything your story needs. But it has to be threatening—something your team never would have expected.
Don’t Worry. I’ve Got it Under Control: A contact or ally that your team expects to help instead betrays you. This contact must come from one of the Class Role Adoption Pools other than the one you adopt from.
The Price of Revenge: The traitor acts swiftly to take or destroy the object—without care for any bystanders or collateral damage. They set bombs, or a computer virus, or something else that would have disastrous effects for everybody around you. You must choose one of the following prompts:
- Paragon: There are lives at stake, right here, right now—and besides, you’ve already seen the evidence yourself. The powers that be will just have to believe you. Let the traitor escape, lose the object, and save lives.
- Renegade: Your newfound mission is too important. Hunt the traitor down, defeat them, and take the object back.
We Could Use Your Help: Your team comes with two characters, but you must select your third from the unscrambled characters of the Class you do not currently have, listed in tables below the roster here.
Normal Rules:
Stand Fast, Stand Strong, Stand Together: Nobody can take on a mission like this alone. You’ve got a team of the brightest, toughest, and deadliest allies a Scrambler can find—use them. We’d love to see your characters make full use of their wide-ranging abilities, both on their own and as a team.
We Will Hold The Line: You know what’s at stake. Failure is not an option. Even if your characters have only a small chance of victory, write that small chance happening!
Special Tactics and Reconnaissance: Saving the galaxy will take more than the same old tricks. You are allowed and encouraged to mix and match powers, and to develop your characters in any way you wish, both on the battlefield and off. However, your opponents are not expected to keep track of these in-story changes, and vice-versa.
Every Life Is a Special Story of Its Own: Feel free to give a brief summary to introduce your characters at the start of your post. If you do, you should mention things like powers, personality, history, and anything else that the average reader should know before reading.
Legendary Edition: Sometimes, Spectres have to go a little outside the lines in service of their mission. You’ll have the same latitude—as long as you go with the broad strokes of the prompts and the rules, you'll be fine.
Round 0 will run from Saturday, July 19th to Saturday, August 9th, 11:59pm US Eastern Time.
The character limit for this round is 4 full length Reddit comments, or 40k characters.
While it is fine to go a little bit over, anything that far surpasses this limit will be disqualified. This limit does not include intro posts, or analysis of the matchup.
4
u/Joshiwawawa Aug 09 '25 edited 26d ago
When Sung’s world first changed ten years ago with the global appearances of dungeons, the method of transportation from one world to another was through an entrance called a Gate. From the level of magic emanating from a gate, the danger of the dungeon behind it could be determined and ranked- more magic meant more danger. The ranking system made tiering dungeon difficulty pretty cut and dry, with the rare exception of the Red Gate. These were special for a few reasons. Their exits seal after entry, with no escape until the boss was dead. The dungeons had harsh environments that are just as lethal as the enemies within, and the bosses were brutal. Time also passed rapidly- a day here was an hour on Earth.
So when the gate closed behind them, Sung made a mental plan to leave this group as soon as possible. Maintaining his stupid E-Rank facade while in one of these dungeons would be an ignominious suicide. Telling everyone here'd create a strange rift in group power, and he didn’t know any of these people. Couldn’t trust them.
But… no. He… he would never do that. He would never leave weaker hunters to die after the fate that befell him. What was coming over him that all of these calloused thoughts raced through his mind? He clutched at his head. It had been a while since he had felt stress. Was that it? Or some sort of despair-based status ailment?
“Alright!” An arrogant voice cut through his thoughts. “It might be several months before the boss of the dungeon is defeated, or this dungeon breaks into our world, so we’ll split into two teams! I, the great A-rank hunter Kim Chul, will take our highest ranking hunters to track down this dungeon’s boss.” A broad man in shiny silver armor announced. “The rest of you will stay here and await our return. This environment is likely incredibly dangerous, and wandering will get you killed.” Sung didn’t speak up and was assigned to the low-ranking group.
Once they were alone, Sung held a finger to his lips, and from his inventory produced food, water, tents, flint, as well as protective clothes. In this calm, as this low-ranking group quietly, without understanding nor questioning, accepted his resources, Sung got a good look at their surroundings. The sky was blood-red and caked with ash. A pop-up indicated that he was automatically detoxifying, meaning the air was noxious enough to trip the system. With dungeons typically being self-contained, there were usually caves or walls, some sort of edge, but the horizon stretched on endlessly. The curve of the horizon was fairly normal, so wherever they had ended up was huge. Handing out masks, his eyes scanned for any threats. Wolves roamed in the distance, which meant that not only were there prey animals, but likely no megafauna-level beasts. The area was wide and barren. If he took care of enough beasts fast enough to clear the area, he’d assure they were good for food and safety for a few days.
“Everyone, stay here.” Sung's voice came at nearly a sultry whisper, yet commanded the authority of a general. The low-rank hunters nodded in perfect unison. The boy walked into the horizon, towards a horde of wolves with names above their heads, colored in white. Easy EXP.
“Where are you going?” One of them asked.
“You’re familiar with the big-fish-little-pond effect, yes?” He waited for a nod, which he eventually received.
“I think I’m going to show some little fish a kingfisher’s eye view.” A wry grin crawled across his face and he cast Stealth, vanishing into thin air. Within seconds, he carved the pack of wolves into nothing.
“I applaud your tactics, rogue hunter.” A voice bellowed inside of Sung’s head. Who was that? The System? It felt as if it were coming from a direction, but he couldn’t tell where. Not that he had the time or space to play investigator, the others were waiting for him. Slaying a bear for good measure, Sung quickly pilfered the bones and meat from the slain animals and returned to the others, propping up the bones as a sort of makeshift fence, lined with animal skulls. That should communicate the picture to any would-be attacker. Everyone went to sleep, and awoke the next day to find their situation unchanged. Sung would retrieve more resources, they would sleep, and the world would remain the same. Eventually, after a few weeks, someone asked Sung if he could try to hunt down the dungeon boss. The thought had crossed his mind several times, but leaving everyone alone for so long…
Would that be right...?
After a few months, everyone insisted Sung had taken out all of the major enemies in the area, and they had more than enough resources in their little society to get by without him for a few days. Wandering to where he first heard that voice, he activated his Stealth and walked further and further into the endless horizon. Eventually, something rose in the distance. Lots of somethings. Were those… skyscrapers? In a dungeon…? Just how big was this place? He kept walking until he reached a part of the plain overlooking the city. The coastline stretched into forever. This dungeon wasn’t some isolated pocket dimension. The dilapidated sign for “Gateway City, CA” was enough to prove that. The boss could be anywhere. Sung dashed back to their makeshift home to find Kim Chul. And not a single other living soul.
Chul was coated in blood, gorging himself on wolf meat. His body looked emaciated, his eyes crazed. He looked up at Sung, his irradiated eyes squinting with recognition.
“You!” Chul screamed. “You hoarded all of the supp-” Within seconds, Chul’s head, still foaming at the mouth, was removed from his shoulders.
“Die.”
Sung sat, head in his hands, in a field of corpses and bones. At this moment, a notification pinged in the UI. “The job-change quest begins now. Protect your allies as long as possible to earn advancement points that are required to be assigned a higher class.”
God. How many years did Sung have left to regret his choices in this dungeon?