Voting on Workshop, Week 2

This should have been done yesterday evening, but yesterday became a sort of spontaneous holiday as the govt, after ten weeks, finally decided that Patreon was not a sufficient reason to suspend my employment insurance.  How nice of them.  And not in any way inconvenient.  I applaud them for making a sound decision.

So, let's get to this.  We're not on any crucial schedule, so we'll say that voting for this ends midnight Sunday.  I'll still try to get the third workshop class up Monday.

Here are the seconded concepts, each tagged with a single word.

Engravings: The walls are covered with engravings depicting Orcish warfare. In the center of the room is an altar dedicated to the Orcish god of war.

Urns: In the southern wall is carved a series of stone shelves, upon which once stood a series of clay urns. These now lie on the floor in front of the shelves, smashed, revealing the funerary ashes inside.

Webs: This room was once a guard room; table, a couple chairs, some weapon racks. It is currently filled with the thick spiderwebs of a giant spider. Though the spider isn't here, if one hacks through the webs, one will find both the northern and eastern doors open, allowing the spider easy access.

Statues: Inside the room we find 5 more orc statues, shorter than the initial one. One of the statue's head has been smashed; the pieces lie on the floor. These are statues of Bashag's most loyal servants.

Spike: The N door has been spiked shut.

Skeletons: The left-hand door is closed, but near the right-hand door (which is ajar and hangs crookedly on its hinges), there are several small skeletons of varying sizes, which could be rats or foxes. The skeletons are bare, but whole; the bones have not been scattered.

Scars: The stone floor around them appears scarred and eroded, as do the walls around the right-hand door.  The scarring seems to reach out from the door towards the bones.

Paintings: The north, east and south walls are covered in plaster painted with depictions of warfare, stylistic, with orcish warriors, led by an increasingly powerful looking figure, having the upper hands on goblins (north wall), hobgoblins (east) and humans (south), in this order of progression, and each time the army grows with the fallen race's warriors.

Rubble: While those walls don't show any defacing, the western wall has its plaster in a shattered mass on the ground, clearly removed by tools and blunt damage. The rubble contains some pieces where elven warriors are still visible. On the wall, the raw stones show, with dryed blood spattered everywhere.

Please let me know if I missed something.

I just want to say that, once reduced to one word, we are somewhat in cliche territory, though the descriptions themselves are creative and NOT cliched.  But I would encourage the readers to consider: when being creative, we humans tend to fall into thinking habits.  The first thought that leaps into our head often does so because it is the most obvious thought.  When creating a dungeon, we often leap to "orcs" rather than "butterflies," because long association with D&D produces this idea front and center ~ and while the second room was forced in some degree by the first room, the orc statue that was voted on in the first room could well have be anything else.

Not that this is wrong.  The argument for why an orc statue was sound: because it tells the party what to expect.  This does not change our self-awareness that "immediate" ideas are often immediate because they are cliches.  I say it only to make the reader take an extra moment to second guess their instincts.  A great part of creativity is recognizing that an instinct often "sounds" like a really good idea ... but then too late we find it's really not.  That's how Jar-Jar happens.

Voting

Let's try for three motifs, though if the reader would prefer just two, then write "blank" as one of your choices.  Give your first, second and third choice.  I'll count the votes as 3 pts. for 1st choice, 2 pts. for 2nd choice and 1 pt. for 3rd choice.  If "blank" gets enough votes to get into the top three, we'll go with two motifs.

The image is not to adjust your vote.  I just needed a nice pic.  Please vote your conscience.