Asheron's Call, Update Notes

Update Notes – December 1999 – Sudden Season

By Ellen Ripley, December 1, 1999

Atop a hill overlooking Zaikhal, Asaina al-Arqis placed a crystal apparatus on the ground, aligning it to the setting sun. The light caught within its facets, held, and the delicate mechanism began to gently spin. She frowned and tapped the base of the device. Over the past three days, the portents had been clear. Portal runners from Hebian-To and Cragstone confirmed it: the temperature was slowly, steadily falling, and showed no signs of stopping …

Atop the dune, under the feeble sunset light, Asaina al-Arqis hugged her thick cloak around her, blew into her hands, and bent and replaced the gem at the apex of her sensing apparatus. Sunlight glinted from the facets, sank within, then struck a violent spark at the center. With a crack the light winked out, the supporting wires loosed their hold, and the suddenly gray stone fell beside the last two she’d tested. She could not calibrate the equipment any finer, but she knew enough. A week, perhaps, probably less, and even the desert would freeze. It was time to give a final report to the Council.

Murmurs and coughs faded from the Council chamber as the four-foot column of enchanted ice drained candlelight from the room. “Here is yet another image,” said Asaina al-Arqis to the assembly. “This is what the shard foresees for Qalaba’r.” The stolen light resolved into a view of the familiar desert town, but it could hardly be recognized: snow was in the air and lay thick on the ground. “It is time to prepare. Mark me — tomorrow, the view outside your own windows will be very much the same.”

Somewhere in the wastes, the exploration party of Sir Joffre Tremblant fell afoul of dark forces. The legendary Knight of the Golden Flame order had gone in search of a fabled lost city alluded to in certain Empyrean texts. At first, his party was presumed lost in the blinding snows. Intrepid bands followed his meandering path from Arwic to Stonehold, gathering clues to his final destination. Along the way, many assisted the aims of Lady Tallial of Neydisa Castle, or those of her rival MacDugal in the Bandit Castle. Others grappled with Hoary Mattekars, ferocious mountain creatures the size of a house. The hides of these creatures, when given to the skilled tradesmen of Dereth, were quickly turned into fine Mattekar Robes.

In the month known as Frostfell, the isle of Dereth was beset by a sudden freeze. As mages scrambled to explain the dropping temperatures, the snowline dipped down from the lofty peaks of the Lost Wish and Linvak mountain ranges, until the entire island was coated with several inches of snow. Even the Gharu’ndim, deep in the hot and barren A’mun desert, awoke one morn to find their stately brick courtyards blanketed with white. In Samsur, the Fountain of Musansayn froze solid.

With the assistance of the scholars of Zaikhal, the search parties discovered the path to the mysterious underground city of Frore. Here the fate of the Tremblant Party stood revealed; the group had been slain and then turned into undead slaves by an ancient cult of Empyrean necromancers calling themselves the Gelidites. In the depths of the frozen hell of Frore, adventurers struggled through legions of undead sorcerers, who were lead by a council of three dark priests. These three, Ferundi, Frisander, and Fenngar by name, were slain at the gates of the city. In the deepest caverns, parties were brought up short by a cadre of Gelidite Lords lead by the powerful sorcerer Frisirth. The Gelidite necromancer controlled Sir Tremblant, who pleaded for death even as he was magically forced to defend his evil master.

When Tremblant was released from his misery and Frisirth defeated, the parties confronted a greater mystery — a large, rotating crystal the Gelidites called the Great Work. This magical artifact had been discovered by Frisirth centuries before. Under the enchantments of the Gelidites, the Great Work sucked the heat from the earth, causing the snows that carpeted Dereth. When the explorers rushed to destroy it, the crystal defended itself with powerful magics. Many were slain, but in the end the Isparians prevailed. Abrim of Morningthaw chronicled the final battle against the Work in his tale “Return to Frore,” which became a bestseller at the capital towns of Cragstone, Hebian-To, and Zaikhal.

With the Great Work shattered, warmth began to seep back into the land. The exhausted and battered adventurers returned to their homes, to enjoy the blessings of the Solstice, Festival of Lights, and Night Feast holidays. During the celebrations, new culinary delights had been invented to delight the palate. Kakori of Thistledown made Carrot Cake, Dani the Crazed of Leafcull introduced Famous Pizza, Raszagal and Tassadar of Morningthaw created Hot Kimchi, and Firedemon of Thistledown baked the first Spiced Apple Pie. Bortin of Frostfell created Fruitcake, but he has since been forgiven, and is occasionally allowed back into town.

The remnants of the Gelidite cult were left in sorrow, their great hopes dashed. Departing adventurers even seized their ancient scriptures as spoils of war. Our Great Work, a memoir written by Ferundi, was given to the scholars of Hebian-To, and the ancient Book of Minesh, a history of the Gelidite cult, was seized by the Zaikhal Arcanum.

Event Changes:

Half the fun of the “Sudden Season” event is discovering for yourself what has been added or changed, so no details are listed here. There’s much more than just some snow on the ground! Ask around, read the news, and explore.


Monster AI Changes:

We’ve made a number of changes to how monster AI works, in the interests of making them behave a bit more intelligently. While there are limits to what we can do to improve AI in the short term, we will be watching the results of these changes carefully, to see how they fare.

  • Monsters will react more sensibly to occasional “issued attacks,” and will not break off their attacks as quickly.
  • Monsters who fail to hit you with projectile attacks will continue attacking with non-projectile “harm” spells, if they have them.
  • Monsters will tend to “stick” to their targets more consistently, and “waffle” less frequently between targets.
  • Monsters now are less fixated on getting extra-close to their target before making a melee attack.
  • Monsters were failing to cast spells on themselves, due to a bug. Argh! Monsters are less dumb now. (Our own mental faculties, on the other hand, remain unchanged.)


Monster Balance:

  • Banderlings and Black Drudges now cast more slowly.
  • Golems in general had Magic Defense that was too low for their level — making them easy sources of XP. This has been changed.
  • Skeletons have higher levels, to reflect their challenge. (We’ll probably do the same soon for Mountain Rats, but they kill us every time we mention the idea . . .)
  • Lugians can now throw boulders faster and farther than before. Duck!
  • There were small glitches in the data for some types of Gromnies, Drudges, Armoredillos, Golems, Olthoi, Mu-miyah and Virindi, which gave each of them inordinately low or high protection against a specific damage type. These have been fixed.
  • Magma Golems have been learning from the mages that attack them . . .


Vendor Changes:

  • Vendors can now buy back all expensive trade notes that they sell; this was a glitch.
  • Aqua Incanta and Neutral Balm are now available with many more vendors.
  • A number of bowyers should have sold fletching items, but didn’t. They do now.
  • You can now sell cooking items to grocers. Stop abandoning all those sides of beef, kids!
  • Vendors (particularly Kuro of Kara) were buying some inappropriate items. This has been fixed.


Magic Balance:

  • Imperil Other can now be defended using the Magic Defense skill. This was a glitch.
  • Players were using portal magic to provide “short-cuts” through quests. Now, critical portals within quests are set so that they cannot be “tied” using portal spells. This does not affect any other portals.
  • The Scroll for Acid Bane 6 no longer teaches Acid Bane 5.


Miscellaneous Changes:

  • In some rare cases, the client could freeze or crash when you were wielding items or otherwise manipulating your inventory. This should be fixed now.
  • Corpses now decay much more quickly when they are empty. This minimizes clutter on the landscape, which in extreme cases can cause slowdowns.
  • A glitch in the treasure system was found which caused nearly all treasure to have overly high requirements; in all future treasure, you should find that most treasure items have lower requirements for use than in the past. This change is slight for average treasure, but more significant for powerful treasure.
  • An additional character option lets you turn off most weather effects, to speed up your frame rate.
  • A handful of tweaks were made to rumors, quests, portals, object placement, and graphics.
  • Some chests or other places in the game would stop respawning their items under certain conditions. At least one of those conditions is now caught, and the spawn will now fail less often, if at all.
  • There was a bug in throwing weapons code that made them less likely to hit their targets. This is now fixed, so you may want to give thrown weapons another chance.
  • When you attacked monsters that were resistant to a basic type of damage (bludgeoning, slashing, etc), the chat log reported full damage, even though you were doing reduced damage. This is fixed. You are not doing any less damage due to this update; it is just reporting the damage accurately.
  • The portal from Mayoi to South Direlands has been removed.
  • Damage reports on creatures that are resistant to basic damage types (slash, bludgeon, etc) are now accurate. They used to report full damage, even if they were not doing full damage.
  • AIs don’t try to get as close to you before making a melee attack. Also, if they fail to reach their target, and their target has attacked them, they sometimes execute an attack anyway (just for fun).
  • Fixed an amazing one-line bug that caused all self-targeted AI-cast spells to fail!
  • AIs no longer consider their target resisting their spell a failure! I think this’ll make spell-casting AIs much tougher, as they won’t stop casting spells just because you resisted a handful of times (obviously they will stop whenever they run out of mana).
  • Adjusted the algorithm that AIs use to judge whether or not a missile attack was effective (i.e., close enough to its intended target). It’s a little random now and, on average, less pessimistic. AIs should continue to fire a couple more times before giving up.
  • AIs now use the same “effective missile” evaluation algorithm for projectile spells as they did for missile weapons. Previously, if a fireball landed a little off-target, the AI would consider it a failure — not anymore!
  • AIs have finer-grained magic error counting. They segregate projectile spells from other magic. So if they fail to cast a projectile spell at you because you’re hiding behind a door, they’ll try any direct damage or enchantments they have instead of just stopping spell-casting altogether.
  • When randomly choosing a target, AIs now are more likely to choose targets that are closer to them! This should help quite a bit for making AIs who haven’t been attacked or damaged yet (i.e., locked onto their target) behave more intelligently.
  • AIs have a chance of sticking with their current target (per attack) even if they’ve been attacked or damaged by someone else. Should create fewer waffling creatures.
  • Fixes made to a number of conditions that would cause inventory to go weird — invisible objects and such.
  • Forgot to update the value of the Sword of Lost Light. Now worth much more.
  • Fixed spots where players were getting stuck in Holtburg Dungeon.
  • Newbie Yari does piercing damage.
  • Players getting stuck in E. Lytlethorpe building — fixed.
  • Players getting stuck in Mountain Keep dungeon — fixed.
  • Players getting stuck in the Fort Witshire dungeon — fixed
  • Fixed Mei Dungeon directions.
  • Water Temple quest & dungeon updated — limiting access to the water bottle there.
  • Deleted an item generator in the Lugian Tower near Qalaba’r — objects were being placed on a couch and looking bad.
  • Scroll of Acid Bane 6 fixed — was teaching Acid Bane 5.
  • Vendors & Trade notes — all vendors who sell large-denomination trade notes should also accept them now.
  • Cliff near Armoredillo Lair allowed easy kills — exploit fixed and tested.
  • Grocers now accept base and intermediate food/tools used in cooking.
  • Old Drudge Grotto too close to North Yanshi — changed.
  • Checked in the update to Leadership spells — violet, not yellow, spell effect occurs when casting.
  • What vendors sell has been changed, and can change at any time (details withheld).
  • Once an empty corpse is closed, it rots immediately. This is to alleviate lag caused by lots of useless corpses hanging around.
  • Deleted a shield generator which was generating stuff on top of a roof.
  • Raised magic defense of Magma Golem.
  • Narrow ravine near Armoredillo lair fixed — exploit.
  • Holtburg quest updated so newbies can find the locations easier.
  • Set resistable flags in on the Imperil Other spells (whoops).
  • Magma Golems have level-5 harm spells and other nastiness.
  • Mosswart Muckers removed from the Folthid Cellar — exploit.
  • Skeletons are now level 7 — not tougher, just higher level.
  • Some portals are not summonable via magic spells
  • PortalColonial wrong color. Portal is now blue.
  • PortalRanch wrong color. Portal is now blue.
  • Leadership spells now have orange particles.
  • Fixed a small typo in the book “Lashanda’s Hand.”
  • Fixed a ridge Lugians were getting stuck on.
  • Lou Ka’s Yaoji now does 2-5 damage.
  • Collector in Nanto accepts tan rat tails.
  • Added the *snowangel* emote/substate.
  • The bowyer is now appearing at Neydisa Castle.
  • Fixed power of Rejuvenation Self 6. Was 10, now 250.
  • Most throwing weapons were failing in combat because they weren’t properly calculating how fast they could be thrown through the air.
  • Fixed a tiny typo in the Story of Ken-Gou.
  • Collectors give 50 pyreals for a rat tail, not 75. Two of the collectors were giving the wrong amount.
  • Healing Mastery spells have orange effects.
  • Drudges near house being camped — exploit fixed.
  • In Character Options panel, changed text “Vivid targeting indicator” to “Vivid Targeting Indicator”
  • Magic item difficulty ratings weren’t correctly compensating skill limits. Now behaving to spec. New items should not be as difficult to use.
  • Shreth is a thinner beast, which should fix any exploit locations somewhat.
  • Virindi Fort Dungeon — camping location fixed.
  • Fixes a problem with the appraisal panel where it would display garbage when assessing a creature.
  • Fixes a problem that would sometimes result in the Create Spell panel’s spell component list not displaying all of your components, or not being scrollable when it should be.
  • Button added which allows you to turn off rain and some other weather effects. Useful if these effects slow your frame rate.
  • Paintings moved in Desert Mine.
  • Bandit Castle dungeon note on alchemy fixed.
  • Projectiles will no longer collide with ethereal non-creatures. This will prevent them from hitting hotspots and portals.
  • Generators no longer shut down before their time.