Dusk Valley, Vistells, T3 Hardcore, Other Changes

New Area and Goal – Dust Valley:

Early in its history, the Eldar race mistrusted outside races and sought the privacy of its own kind. A small group of Eldars had searched for quite some time and had happened upon Dusk Valley where they organized a town. The town featured the hallmarks of ancient Eldar architecture in its streets, buildings, and ornamentation. Central to the community itself was the Great Totem, a focal point of the great and secret powers of the Eldars.

Over time as the Eldars prospered, the community grew. Eventually, the community produced two powerful young mages, twins named Fahlyk and Fahlen. The twins studied magick intensively as they aged, each competing with one another as he achieved new heights of power and magickal understanding. Eventually both became Master Mages, made their individual marks on the Great Totem, and focused their considerable intellects upon the community that had reared them.

Fahlyk praised the community for its accomplishments and the quality of its people. He encouraged mingling and oversaw the establishment of Giant ambassadorships within the council of Eldars. Fahlen turned his eye elsewhere. He discovered that his magick granted him tremendous dominance over weaker minds. His heart grew dark and twisted. As Fahlen’s power multiplied exponentially he added Eldar thralls to his service. He despised what he could not pervert and sought to taint the Eldar alliances with the Giants.

Fahlyk grew increasingly worried as he saw his brother’s corrupting influence spread over the civilization. He began integrating the Giants, over whom Fahlen’s influence was weak. A new race, the Relyks, came into being as this alliance bore fruit. Seeing his twin brother undermining his plans enraged Fahlen and spurred him to action. Fahlen’s thralls set to fortifying their master’s position, setting up a great tower very near the ancient Great Totem that contained so much magical energy. Fahlyk grew terrified at losing access to the magical source that he had studied for so much of his career. Abandoning his efforts at peace and harmony, he gathered his allies to him and declared open war on his brother.

Both brothers share similar influence over the town. Open war reigns throughout the land. The brothers struggle for control of the Great Totem knowing that its gain will bring instant dominion over the land. The community suffers as this Great War rages on.

Welcome to Dusk Valley, adventurer.

Level Range         : 100 to 120
Goal Difficulty     : Medium
Goal Recommended at : Level 110
Goal Converter      : Trepid
Area Author         : Trepid

Game changes this reboot:

• Moved some more config items into ‘spamreduce’ where it makes sense. As before, if you had these set before the reboot they should have copied over. The new spamreduce options are:

     showdesc  : Hide description in whois. Replaces 'autodesc'.
     echodeaths: Hide death cries in adjacent rooms. Replaces 'echodeaths'.
     peek      : Do not automatically use peek skill. Replaces 'nopeek'.

• Removed the ‘quietsell’ command completely as it doesn’t really help selling items one at a time and no longer makes sense with the new ‘sell all’ that combines items.
• Where an old command maps to just a single spamreduce option (all of them except nospam), I have made entering that command just call spamreduce with the right option rather than giving an error message.
• There is a new command called ‘vistells’. When you have this on any player can send you a tell even if they can’t see you. This will need to be turned on for existing characters but will be the default for completely new characters. (Jethro). Sending a tell to a non-existant char is a pretty expensive operation in the MUD and I can see this getting scripted to build online lists so there is now a slight lag on a failed tell because the character does not exist.
• When you are fighting and get a mob immune to your damage type, the messages should now respect your ‘damage’ setting. So instead of seeing 4 lines of ‘X is unaffected by your bash!’ you will see instead:

       [4] a shadow is unaffected by your bash!
  

  Results get a little weird if you have two weapons, the mob is only immune to one of them and you have a damage output type set that is one line from the whole round. Not going to try to fix that. Several people have suggested this over the years but watching the last Icefall group was a good reminder to finally get this done.

• (Hardcore) mode can now be set at T3+ rather than T5+
• You can now request a campaign from any questor (Iceman). Considered making a whole separate upgrade flag for this but decided to just roll it in with questors.
• Recall moves cost is now capped at 5000. The ‘half of moves’ cost dates back to very old age when 1000 moves was a lot and 5000 is still a pretty significant cost.
• Necrotic Touch will now only cost 50 moves when used against a mob. Still costs 200 when used against a player.