So maybe we should have new areas. Or at the very least, it might be useful for new wizards to have a heavy stock of ideas to pull from if they decide to program an area. To recap, this was the first area idea posted under the "Day-to-day, we're okay, but where are the events?" thread:
 Originally Posted By: Harold
Goal:
The unused troll area, if I recall, is 10 rooms long and contains between level 4 and 12 trolls, none of which fit current race schemes. A recode is in order!

Premise:
A solid society composed entirely rock-trolls is trapped deep in a cave, a massive lake being fed by an underground waterfall surrounds their "city" completely save for a single shaft that runs a long way before finally reaching the surface. At the top of the shaft is a deep, tangled jungle holding a coterie of forest-trolls with a single embattled, ancient seraph as surgeon-general. So entrenched and remote are these two warring factions that they have never had word reach them of the end of the Great War.

Iconic Encounters:
Light side...
1) Surgeon-General Seraph with elite band of Forest-Troll Nurse-Guards.
b) Three to five forest-troll commanders as heads of individual guard patrols, raiding bands, scouting parties, and/or rescue squads, engineers.
3) Forest-troll child ghost in hidden cave-in area
Dark Side...
1) Chained Demon Lord
b) Rock-troll Warrior-King (pre-Chaotic-Lord variant)
3) Warrens mother
4) Water faerie

Ideas:
The Great War is ancient history, so something has to have kept this tiny battle running for so long. Apart from seclusion, the seraph surgeon-general should have (as all seraphs do) immortal longevity and be able to resurrect the fallen. This could be accomplished by forest-troll hospitaleers pulling dead bodies of allies out of the shaft and back to the deep forest where they could be returned to life (on some delay, obviously). Similarly, their foes should be able to keep in the fight somehow, but in the case of evil it could be that the Rock-troll warrens mother is exceptionally fertile, or that an imprisoned demon lord keeps the souls of the dead recycling through new bodies.

The waters surrounding the underground city should have some magical properties too, perhaps repairing damaged weapons to former glory (an allusion toward another way of bringing the dead back, though it would be completely unused by rank-and-file warriors, a warren mother or the warrior-king himself could do the "dirty" work of going near the water). The whole city is probably completely agressive, in all likelihood.
I'll be using the same layout for this one. In light of this, let's get to the idea.

Goal: The enchanter guild is both irreplacable and integral to the mud as a whole. They have very undercelebrated spells in the fashion <golem> spells. This area is designed both as an origin for those spells, and an expansion of the use of enchanter runes. It's intended to be a low/mid level area that can support a single high-level player hunting it at a time. This is an extremely programming intensive area, requiring bot-level NPCs and planned routes of travel for different eventualities.

Premise: A massive city of clockwork golems run by the first dragon engine ever assembled. The city is suspended above an impossibly deep, incredibly wide, strip mine by four ornately arched boernerine struts. The city as seen from afar is an awe-inspiring bundle of ever-building spires, reaching earnestly toward the sky. Its fluted towers glint brilliantly in the light, being entirely made of locally mined ore. Nothing in the place is organic or even non-metal - water is unknown, as the powerful magics of the sentient dragon-engine ruler keep even the rains at bay. The average denizen of Ekem is a clockwork golem, splitting its time between work in the mine and building in the city. The city itself is enormous in proportion, but perpetually unfinished - every building is a thin needle made of a single mineral, reaching higher and higher. Straight lines pervade everything, and although spires tend to end abruptly with rooms unfinished as ingots of the spire's type become less available, the rooms are always habitable.

Iconic Encounters:
  • Pel-Mel: Magnus Officialis. Greets everyone to enter the city via a phasic transport rune in his chamber. Resides in the Mcgrail tower, offers to show new visitors around and speaks constantly, allowing players to use keywords to prompt him for more specific information.
  • Kel-Brussel: Prime Engineer.
  • Mahr Kathos: Sentient Dragon Engine. Only denizen of Ekem to do no building what-so-ever. The classic brooding dragon persona, seems above any living creature. Continually recites the prophecy that has led him to this end.
Ideas: This area is supposed to be filled with enchanters and enchanterish themes. As such, it contains elaborate runes such as a 'phasic transport rune', initially unavailable to enchanters in the guild proper. A hardcoded quest that would be solvable once for each enchanter could add phasic transport rune as a trainable spell for that enchanter. These runes allow one who steps on the rune to transport directly to any player in any of the rune's linked rooms. Enchanters who train this rune should be limited to some number of linked rooms for each rune, but this particular rune would have access to every room of the city.

Other uniquely Ekem items, runes, and effects:
  • Rune of Unstable Harmonics - Exploding rune using singing crits. Compounds with each activation, and activates repeatedly at intervals on a person who failed resistance and stays in, or returns to the room, until it is so strong as to destroy both the person and the rune itself.
  • Temperance Conduit - Weapon enchantment increasing item hardness at the cost of reducing the wielder's maximum mana while its wielded
  • Clockwork Creation Rune - Same style as a summoning rune, but contains a certain number of hit points it expels and absorbs in random combinations. If all cloned clockworks are destroyed, the rune evaporates, otherwise the remaining clockworks and corpses of clockworks are returned to the rune with flare! (The remaining clockwork <creatures> gather the battered bodies of their comrads, dragging them toward a Clockwork Creation Rune as they grow ever smaller...)
The Dragon Engine Mahr Kathos has ambitions of building a link between the earth and sky, eventually fufilling a prophecy that only when a conduit feeds the heart of the Shadowlands with nectar direct from the sun and each moon will the Etherals return to their full splendor. Mahr Kathos was at one point an Etheral that in standing aside during the Great War, rotted away until he needed his creations to build a body for him. His only goal is to bring this prophecy to fruition.

This sort of area doesn't lend itself much to hidden areas, but quests or other things to do abound. We haven't even begun to cover the mine portion, focusing mainly on the city proper. In the mine there could be a sudden shortage of some type of mineral - Mahr Kathos may need to be informed and brought to the mine. There could be a worker strike - each clockwork is alive in some very real way, but Pel-Mel may require players to find a source of something to placate the masses. A cave-in or agressive inhabitation by rampant creatures would be beneath Mahr Kathos' attention, but Kel-Brussel may not be able to take care of it on his own.
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