Volume Two Issue Two
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............./ / THE LEGENDARY TIMES
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..../ /_/..\______/./_____/./__/.../__/./_______/ MUD
.../________________/ running on bashful.cc.utexas.edu 9999
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VOLUME TWO, ISSUE TWO Happy Twelfth Night! Jan. 5th, 1995
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...:/:[ CONTENTS ]:\:...
CODE UPDATES
- wary/agg shakedowns -
- many other bug fixes -
- the 'name' command -
ARTICLES
- LegendMUD t-shirts! -
- a brief history of LegendMUD -
SOCIAL ITEMS
- Rusalka and Bart: wedding bells? -
- uh oh, Dusty's back, with a new Champion -
- Mercenary refuses treaty with Knights! -
- ...and attacks a group of them! -
- Sir Sansaria dies of friendly fire... -
- and an appeal to YOU. -
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LOTS OF WARY/AGG SHAKEDOWNS
Wary and agg settings now only affect blows when the victim is standing up.
You don't get the bonus when you hit someone stunned. Also, when fighting
groups, mobs will retarget to the enemy with the highest agg setting.
Also,a MAJOR bug was found with agg and wary in that players setting high
agg were getting a bonus to hit but opponents were getting a matching
PENALTY to hit. This is no doubt why everyone is walking around with high
agg and finding it so darn useful. Likewise, wary was utterly deadly, at
max giving you a -5 to hit and giving the opponent a +5 to hit you. :P But
this should be fixed in the newest code update.
This means that those of you walking around at max agg are now MUCH more
likely to get hit than you were yesterday! Be warned!
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MANY OTHER BUG FIXES
Bug with weapons profs and doing only 1 point of damage is fixed.
Bug with channel use and player descriptions is fixed.
Auction delay before item can be sold has been extended to two ticks. Also
some odd bugs here and there were fixed as well, some of them crashing bugs.
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THE "NAME" COMMAND
Name now turns your long description on and off as well as your short
description. So if you turn it off, people will see "Goober is standing
here" as they used to before player descriptions went in.
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.' '.
.: FEATURE :.
'. ARTICLES! .'
' '
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T-SHIRTS
There's been a desire floating around for some time now to have a LegendMUD
t-shirt made. Well, a design now exists for said shirt, concept by Ptah and
execution by Kaige. A basic description of the shirt: on the front, the
Legend logo located where the pocket goes; on the back, a large four color
outline of the logo through which can be seen a world map. Marked on the map
are little drawings indicating the various areas--the djinn and palace in
Arabia, a Roman legionary in Britain, etc.
To get these shirts done we will need to be PREPAID as it'll cost between
$500 and $1000 to do a run of the shirts. We won't be making any profit off
of these shirts as the cost of getting them made and sent off to those who
order will just be covered by the asking price. Details will follow once
we have the exact artwork settled and have done the color separations.
We HOPE to have the t-shirts done in time for the first anniversary of
LegendMUD's opening to the Net, which is February 14th.
':':':':':':':':':':':':':':':':':':':':':':':':':':':':':':':':':':':'
A BRIEF HISTORY OF LEGEND MUD
by Ptah
People are always asking about the origins of Legend, so I thought I'd try
to give a shot at recollecting how exactly we got started. Note that my
memories may disagree just LOTS with those of other people! :)
The origins of Legend are almost certainly on the mud Worlds of Carnage,
where Kaige, Charity, and I met Sadist and Flagg. Charity and Kaige and I
had gone to college together, and Sadist and Flagg were roommates. We were
all proceeding at a rapid pace towards immorting on that mud, and Flagg had
actually immorted, when Carnage went down for an extended period of time.
Even before it went down Sadist and Charity had been talking about starting
up a mud. Sadist wanted to try it as a coding challenge. During a Spring
Break visit in early 1993, Charity came to visit us from college in Maryland
and we spent a great deal of time with her discussing the possibility for
a classless mud with groups of skills. The world design for that mud was
going to be a fantasy one, based around the idea of an enormous city, a
never-ending one. Areas of wilderness would simply be parks gone to seed or
zoos or parts of the city left to crumble.
It was Charity, a history major, and Elessar, another friend from Carnage,
who were the ones who finally came up with the idea of a historical mud.
Carnage went down around May of '93 and stayed down until August or so, and
during that time Sadist began coding work on what would become Legend.
Kaige and I however joined a couple of other friends from Carnage and
became beginner immorts at a mud called eXile, which was composed of 'exiles.'
This was also a straight fantasy mud. We had a few area designs that we
had begun intending to use for Carnage, including a large area Kaige had
begun to map out with an Arabian Nights theme, but we started work on new
areas for them. We did an ocean with lots of underwater coral reef, and
a Bremen Town, and found that nobody else was building anything, making
progress on the code, or keeping the mud alive at all. The areas we REALLY
wanted to build couldn't be done with the plain vanilla Merc or Diku code
they were using.
What was to become Legend was up and running by around August, on our first
site, stimpy.washcoll.edu. This was a Mac SE/30 with a dying hard drive.
We began to do work with Legend when eXile stopped going anywhere. Arabia
was the first area to go in--all 200 rooms at once. The lamp quest took
six further months of development to get the bugs out though. :) Roman
Britain was the next part to go in. The acts system was developed by Sadist
as we went; each time we wanted to put in an effect, he extended the code.
He's always had the policy of 'I'll make it possible' as far as coding goes.
Back in those days the immort staff was mostly people we knew from Carnage.
Elessar ended up not following us over, and eventually quit Carnage as well.
He's now an Implementor at Renegade Outpost. Early on Catalyst worked doing
spells for us, but they were in a typical Diku format (lots of glowing
colored auras) and we eventually ripped them out. Chocorua was with us as
well, but eventually went on to immort at Medievia. None of you guys know
any of these people.
Around October or November the sysadmin at the site began asking for some
sort of results. We were school-sponsored as a history/computer project
with some sort of academic justification. (You can get away with stuff like
that at small liberal arts schools!) So in November we opened the mud to
players located at washcoll.edu. Lirra is one of the player who dates back
this far. We also invited a gang of players from Medievia (this was the early
Medievia, average player load of 12, not yet infamous on the newsgroups).
And So has been with us ever since, as one of the original gang that visited
then.
For a long time the way to get between areas was to teleport. Every innkeeper
and bartender in the mud would transfer you to any area just for the asking.
It was only gradually that enough connective areas were added to permit
walking between locations. Over the Christmas holiday I sat down and did
London and the South Seas in about two weeks in order to try to provide a
'hub' for the mud. Even now it probably offers the best way to get anywhere
else in a hurry, as I had to extend little bits of map everywhere to try
to get in as many connections as possible.
By the end of January we were getting around 5-10 people playing the mud,
gaining players purely by word of mouth. We decided on February 14th,
Valentine's Day, as the day we'd open to the full net. Many things were done
in a last minute rush at this point. Skills. A few areas. Help files. But
we managed to get something open that actually worked and didn't crash all
the time. And thus we had Legend's last playerwipe, and opened to the
full net.
Stimpy was an unreliable site. We were always losing netlink, the lag was
pretty bad, and the hard drive threatened to blow up at any moment. But
we had it all to ourselves. When we opened we immediately generated a storm
of controversy because a florid ad I wrote mentioned our "intelligent"
mobs... we became the subject of a long-running thread on the newsgroups
and by the end of the first week of being open had 6000 playerfiles to
deal with.
Some of our older players still recall those days fondly. There was no
auction house. There was no OOC lounge. There were no spells at all. The
fight messages were much simpler and boring. Fionn's "vorpal squirrels"
killed literally hundreds of newbies on the road between Tara and the coast.
Players STARTED with 2000 XP and when they died as a newbie they found
themselves 3K in the hole. That's right. 4K was level 2... The mud was
MUCH harder than it is now. There were only a fraction of the current
skills available. No explore XP, no quest XP, few quests, far fewer areas.
Back in those days, it was Arabia, Ireland, Roman Britain (and no way to walk
from Roman Britain to Arabia), Nazca, Lima, Sherwood, the Abbey, Klein,
the forest outside of Hell, Casablanca, and the London/South Seas skeleton.
And many of these areas were smaller than they are now. No Andes. Bengal
was only the docks. There wasn't a proper Norman castle of course; there
was no rooftop on the Abbey; there were no moors in Ireland.
Personally, I like the way the mud is now, and better yet, I like what the
mud will be as it keep growing and developing... Certainly this Valentine's
Day we're going to have to have a party on LegendMUD, to celebrate one
full year of being a place where all of you can come and meet the ghost
of dead Frankish kings and Picts and German soldiers and Incas and Aztecs
and of course, each other. Not just escape from the real world, but also
learn something about it at the same time.
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o O | Wonder what folks are |
`\|||/ | doing over at LegendMud? |
(o o) \________________________/
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...Looks like wedding bells may be in the offing... Bart, that huge scarred
fellow, seems to be assiduously pursuing the hand of Rusalka, the pale
wistful guildmistress of the Hermetic Order. She set him a few tasks: to
find out what became of her tribe, to obtain tokens of approval from
the Knights of Legend, and to obtain verses from the bards of the Order of
the Scroll. He was also required to, er, climb the highest mountain. It
took him awhile, but atop Kilimanjaro he did find a token from her and
proceeded to try to fulfill the rest of the whimsical desires. Reportedly
the Knights promptly did what he desired, but the bards seem to be dawdling,
saying that they need time to compose deathless art...
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...One bard didn't seem to take much time--here's the first of the songs to
be given to Bart by the bards, written by a certain bardette who is already
causing her usual trouble among the quiet folk (!) here at Legend. Word is
that now that Greyscot is Leileth's Champion, Dusty has already fastened
onto Byron, fellow bard... does he know what he is getting into?
She walks like a ghost, gliding translucent,
Hair swirling madly in fingers of wind.
Where are the hands to cup her cold cheeks?
To warm her pale skin with blushes and sin?
She is the rusalka, the spirit, the Gypsy;
She is the lonely, the lovelorn, the lost...
Yet even the shades that walk in the shadows
Must feel love--and must know its cost.
-Dusty the Fox-Tailed Flautist
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...In deadlier news, rumor has it that peace is not to be found between the
Knights of Legend and the Mercenary. Although the details of the proposed
treaty and settlement are confidential, word has it that Mercenary's price
for peace was far too high. So now it's war... everybody hide! This one could
get quite bloody. No word on what settlement, if any, has been reached with
(in this humble editor's opinion) the far more dangerous Revenant...
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...The first battle in the war against the Knights has already been fought,
with Mercenary attacking Khelleck, Sansaria, and Tigger (yes, all at ONCE).
He used his knowledge of magic to blind everyone, but was eventually beaten
back and forced to flee, thanks to Sansaria's ability to cure blindness...
Here is the full tale told in Tigger's own words recently to a group of avid
listeners...
"I have not the bard's gift of the tongue, but I shall try...
Tis the Knight's sworn duty to rid the world of evil. The evil
Revenant and his companion, the shiftless Mercenary...
"I myself had done battle with both, but the shiftless Mercenary
questioned my tactics. I killed him, as he was grouped with
Revenant and would have defended him, then I removed his
equipment. Although not for my personal use, he called it
looting. it was my intention not to gain from this, but to
make him powerless...
"My clan, in the interests of harmony, offered a cease fire
and truce settlement. A most generous one. It was refused.
The cowardly Mercenary laid in wait and ambushed me as I
adventured. He faded himself and blinded me. It was only
through the grace of the Goddess and my clanmates that I survived.
"He of course ran right for the innkeeper. The Knights wish only
peace, but we must defend ourselves. He has sworn vengeance on me
personally..."
Let's not leave out the fact that the original attack on Mercenary came
not only from Tigger but also from Obmig, the co-guildmaster and Knight
Protector of the Hermetic Order... one wonders when the Hermetics will
get involved...
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...The redoubtable Eretz is back, having returned from whatever far-off land
he traveled to. He promptly accidentally killed Sir Sansaria... however, a
figure familiar to many of our older players, Maele, will not be back to
adventure with us again. We hope to see him in the Hall of Legends someday...
\|/ \|/ \\||// \!/
Obviously, not much else has had the chance to happen since three days ago
when the last issue came out! Send in any fun items you want to see included
to the address below. We accept character biographies, gossip, unsubstantiated
rumors, scurrilous slander, and of course lengthy feature articles. We'd
love to see things like 'A Tour Guide to Hell' or 'How to Play a Mage' here.
This is YOUR newsletter, and if you don't want to read only bug reports,
please do contribute. :)
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Legendary Times is put out by the gods of LegendMUD. Please send all
replies/additions to [email protected] for inclusion in the next
edition. We, however, reserve the right to moderate this discussion,
and may object to some submissions. If you feel we have wrongly omitted
one of your messages, please talk to either Kaige or Ptah online or
through EMail and see if we did indeed receive it in the first place.
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