The Warp

Goal: The warp has been a place of danger for as long as anyone can tell, but it is greatly lacking in the departments of history and continuity. To greater tie Darke's rich history and one of a character's real rites of passage together, the warp should reflect its position as the space between realities - the reality the Demiurge neglected to mold, the thread weaving the fabrics of realities together - in short, the warp should be unbelieveable.

This is designed as a complete reexamination of the warp's foundations. Currently it exists as one room from which the only escape is through the death of a warp creature. This proposal would see it as an area in itself, one that is detrimental to exist in in keeping with the current version but also give alternate routes of survival and/or escape.

Premise: When the Demiurge turned away from his creation, he left some rules unwritten. The Realms are tied together by these nebulous remains, which contain nothing native but are instead populated by the twisted reflections of numerous worlds. Travelers and scholars alike have made The Warp the focus of their lives; innumerable lifetimes have been spent in vain learning its endless secrets.

Whenever an individual enters the warp, they are sent to a random place within it. Though it initially appears they've been flung to some location they are familiar with in their own world, it quickly becomes apparent that they are in no place they've ever known. The number and types of encounters one can have in this place are limitless. Travelers have stumbled across everything from indescribable beasts who seem to dabble in time itself to the realms of Gods as they survey their home plane.

Iconic Encounters: Every encounter is iconic in The Warp. Every mob programmed on the mud should be available to spawn, though with a special property set - warp monster, or the like. The property would be checked for by the real exciting part - the place itself.

Ideas: First off, each room that the mud has on it should be fair game to be reproduced in description only for The Warp. These would generally be the starting point for a person entering, so quite a few additional rooms would be required. In truth, any room could be added to the available list whether it was on theme, reachable from anywhere else on the mud ever, or anything else. In addition to every room having a strong chance of multiple warp creatures, they should all have some special feature.

With an area like this, so wide open in terms of what could be possible, it's hard to list all the ideas that spring to mind. Room features alone should include, but not be limited to:
  • Underwater rooms that drown only non-warp monsters only, warp monsters only, both, or neither.
  • Undeground rooms that cave-in, excavate themselves, completely encase and suffocate warp monsters/non/both/neither, are mineable for ingots or gems, or can fill with magma, steam, or other deep-ground phenomena.
  • Outer realms are more tenuously connected, and the further out they are the shorter the stay possible. In rooms like a God's realm, the player should walk from the previous room and into the realm and see the God (or an avatar) but be immediately whisked away such that only a description remains and no interactions are possible. Closer realms like those of a demigod might allow for a few seconds of stay, and have non-random spawns the same as a God's realm.
  • Rooms that modify how a player exists by distorting their age up or down (modification of skills/stats)
  • Replacing English words in descriptions with words of other languages
  • Color or WoRd curses
  • Rooms that lack breathable media and vacuum crit or suffocate warp monsters/non/both each tick
  • Rooms that afflict/effect warp/non/both with random spells periodically
  • Rooms that cease blink into/out of existance, only allowing movement to/from them while they do exist
  • Rooms that have no clear directional orientations so count as falling for the entire time a warp monster/non/both stays in (important for when a room is left)
  • Rooms that put holes in warp/non/both pockets, allowing money to fall out
  • Rooms that are entirely quicksand/quagmire/other sludge that slow all actions taken by warp/non/both
  • Rooms that are seated atop quicksand/mires/other sludge and absorb inanimate objects, flinging them to other places in the warp
  • Rooms that resemble junkyards and pile random useless items into the inventories of warp/non/both


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To be elaborated on later!
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Please mail your views on balance to:
cerberus@darkemud.com