(This is another old article that was posted to my personal blog. I wrote this one back in June of ‘07.)
Ok, it’s time for some more
Walraven ideas/plans/dreams/wishes.
Since it was introduced, mining has been one of the biggest and most popular activities in the game. It’s easy to get into, it’s relatively safe, it practices skills that are later useful in combat, it produces valuable resources for crafting, etc… Oh, and it’s fun too 
Mining is so popular that it is traditionally one of THE first activities a newbie engages in - usually at the advice of older players.
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allaryin idea, repost guilds, mining, quests
(This is another repost. This article was dredged up from my original notes on the idea of a ‘favor’ system for handling a player’s standing with the gods. It was originally imported into my personal blog in December of ‘06, but was probably written well before that. It is being preserved here for historical reasons.)
Favor starts at zero, is capped at 100, and is allowed to go arbitrarily negative.
Messages
96.. presence
76..95 very close
10..75
-1..9 brief rumble
-14..-2 loud rumble, displeased
-29..-15 bolt
..-30 death
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allaryin repost faith, gods, magic, prayers, priests, skills
(Wow. A repost with immediately useful application. This is my original writeup for an in-game forum interface… and it will likely be the springboard I use when actually implementing the communication upgrade ideas.)
The in-game forum system is long overdue. It should be very similar to the mudmail client, they should both use similar commands, etc…
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allaryin idea, repost forums, mail, plans
(This is a repost of some of my old notes on the move to using ‘recipes’ for the crafting system. It was originally imported into my personal blog in Dec of ‘06. I’ve not edited this from its original state, so odds are medium-high that these scribblings are entirely obsolete.)
Four categories of recipe difficulty: novice, apprentice, journeyman,
master. Each category corresponds to an equal 25% of the skill level range.
There should also be rare/unique type recipes that are only available to
high masters (like 90% or 95% skill). These recipes won’t be published in
the list here, but will wait for game implementation and will probably be
designed largely by the players.
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allaryin repost crafting, plans
(Wow. Of all of the old reposted posts… this is the only one to actually contain a disclaimer that it was already obsolete at the time it was originally posted. There are still a few shreds of ideas that I’d like to extract from here, but the whole notion that players would have to use “cook” and “chop” type verbs to prepare potions one step at a time has been completely replaced by the longstanding recipe system.)
Note: This document is old. The ideas herein have not yet been updated to bring them in sync with current plans for the game world.
The SIMud alchemy system will hopefully wind up being very interesting. It should allow players to experiment with a tremendous number of different ingredients and methods of preparing and combining the ingredients. There should probably be multiple combinations that result in similar potions.
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allaryin repost alchemy, crafting, magic, obsolete
(This is a repost of an article I originally wrote on my personal blog back in December of ‘06. It is being appropriately back-dated.)
I’ve recently given a lot of thought to the magic system in
Walraven. It is a mess of kludges and bandaids upon bandaids upon gaping wounds. Lots of systems in the game were written as temporary type measures just to get a feature into testing. Unfortunately, with the kind of time people tend to have for working on the mud these days, those temporary measures have just sort of stuck around and become permanent.
I therefore propose a list of new features and rewrites that will become version 2 of the game’s magic system.
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allaryin idea, repost interruption, magic, meditation, resistance
(This is a repost of my original writeup on the subject of integrating mud chat with jabber. It was posted on my personal blog back in November ‘06.)
Mud <-> outside world communication. It’s an idea that I’ve been throwing around for months (years now). I’ve given up on it several times. And today, it reared its ugly little head again when McKay (Sora) poked me about something vaguely related.
The incarnation of the idea this time around is simple enough that I’m willing to commit to producing it in the nearish future. It’s simpler than previous ideas but still adds a lot of value to the game - and by virtue of being simpler it has the added bonus of being more likely to see its way into implementation 
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allaryin idea, repost chat, jabber, plans
(This is a repost of the original announcement of the ‘warcry’ ability. The command still exists in the mud and has been almost unchanged since I originally wrote this in November of ‘05.)
I’ve just churned out the first nonmagical combat type ability to hit the mud in a while (the last one was damage soaking, which has been around for one or two years).
The idea for the warcry command had been floating around in my little brain for a bit now, but when Snarky went and wrote a completely social version of the command before skipping town for the holiday, my hand was forced and I had to actually implement the thing
The basic idea is that you can shout a warcry right before entering combat and generate a good bit of adrenaline for yourself. Sufficiently skilled fighting types will also be able to psych their enemies out.
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allaryin news, repost abilities, buff, combat, haste, interruption, stun, warcry
(Yet another repost from notes archived elsewhere. I originally put this on my personal blog in August of ‘05.)
The following is a continual survey that I am conducting of all magical effects that I have seen implemented in pen and paper rpg’s. The point here is to condense them into their barest forms and thus be able to categorize specific spells into individual categories - and to use the list as a sort of checklist when designing other magic systems.
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allaryin repost buff, magic, plans, skills