Writing Advice: Story Question

A few days ago, I posted about Jim Butcher's writing advice. Today's entry is my first experiment in following that advice.


One of the first things he suggests you come up with is a story question. The story question is a concise representation of your basic conflict, and the skeleton of your story. He defines the story question as a sentence with the following format:
*WHEN SOMETHING HAPPENS*, *YOUR PROTAGONIST* *PURSUES A GOAL*. But will he succeed when *ANTAGONIST PROVIDES OPPOSITION*?


pretty simple right? So I took the challenge, and tried to come up with some story questions of my own, for my trilogy in work.
So first, the overall trilogy sentence:
When a lost prophecy surfaces from beneath the sea, our heroes are drawn into a quest for a lost soul. But will they succeed when agents of Chaos call forth Daemons from the deeps?


I'm not sure about the antagonist line in this case, but it's a broad category so I can't really enumerate specific details. 


Dragonmage
For the first novel, I've trimmed down the story question a bit. 
When a hapless college student is thrown in the midst of a epic war, he sets out to find his way home. But will he succeed when faced with betrayal, a devil's bargain, and a race of Demons wielding blades of fire?


For anyone who's read the piece, the betrayal is obvious (though not as emotional as it could be). The devil's bargain is new from my reimagining of the story, now that I've gone through it, and he last is a rewriting of the ending, plus stealing some stuff from the sequel.


Phoenixfire
My story question for the 2nd novel is much weaker:
When a man fall ill to a mysterious illness, his ex is charged with finding the cure. But will she succeed when a dark mage steals an heirloom weapon and throws her into a battle for her life?

The hard part on this one is that I've got a few tendrils of thought that need to go through it. The Illness is one, and that made it into the story question, as did the heirloom weapon. I didn't get to talk about her lost memories, the trip to the daemon realm, or the search for Atlantis, all of which figure into the New and Improved (tm) plot. The 2nd two are also tied into the story question for the whole thing.

Chaosstorm
For the third book, I suffer from much the same issue as the second.
When a mysterious stranger arrives and turns the tide of the war, a band of strangers seek to right the ballance, but will they succeed when even their beneficiaries don't trust them?


At this point, I should be dealing more fully with that lost soul. The setting here is in the aftermath of a war, magic vs tech. The antagonist from the first 2 has come and altered the course of the war in the side of the Mages. However, the protags come in and try and rally support on the tech side. Since the protags are mages, they're untrusted. This sentence also doesn't support the lost soul, nor the daemons from the previous two.

Conclusions
The exercise has helped me focus on the plot, and draw out some of the conflicts. The thing that I'm still mulling over is how to drill down the conflicts into a nice succinct  sentence that details it. However, progress.