Shattered Kingdoms

Read the latest Code Update announcement here.

Further elaboration on character creation changes:
- Valid newbie alignments are scrupulous (good), unprincipled (selfish), miscreant (evil)
- Valid newbie classes are barbarian, rogue, priest, sorcerer
- Newbie stats out of creation are as if questions had been answered optimally

Class choice comes first for newbies because you still always end up with race choices. The reverse could not be said if you picked a race such as giant first (barbarian only).

Further elaboration on login thieves for transferred items:

Items that have been transferred between two characters played by the same player are now automatically detected by the code and removed. The fact that this would ever happen is obviously a rules violation. But as it has been pointed out, it can sometimes be difficult to track what items you had months before on a previous character. So now we are just going to remove them from transfers between characters with the same registered email address and there will be no further rules penalty for the occasional mishap. However the staff will be notified every time this occurs. If it happens more than occasionally for a player or if the system is attempted to be evaded through the use of alternate email addresses and/or proxies (which is a separate rules violation), then we will go straight to the one-character-only plan as a punishment.

Further elaboration on monster races now have their own unique max stats:

In other words, races which are not available to players now each have their own unique stat caps and their stats will max out lower than they used to. This means it will be slightly easier to kill monsters across the board, although it will be most noticeable for gimpy races. (Note that this effectively lowers their saving throws.)

Also note that if you polymorphed into a non-player race, it used to be that your max stats were those of your real race. This is no longer the case, so sorcerers may have a lot of exploring ahead of them to determine what is the new best polymorph options.

Seems like a pretty good package. Hopefully this removes some of the effective invincibility of powerful races against spells and debuffs.

Question about REs. Was it not feasible to make REs spawn around the room you walk into vs just tweaking their spawn rates down? If traveling in a large (for example full) group, are we still likely to find places were 3+ of these are spawning at the same time?

That was one of the primary goals, but we wanted to do it in a more tweakable and strategic way.


It would have been a lot more work, so I opted to go with these changes first and see what might still be necessary in the future. The spawn chance is lowered now for each random encounter monster that is already in the room (including ones that just spawned based on another member of the group entering). So yes, 3+ should be less likely.

I will be curious to hear feedback about the change.

I like the idea of newbies having pre-rolled stats, but when I first started esskay, I thought that the halls of creation questions were a very fun way to build your character.
Perhaps it would better to have an opt-out option for the stat questions. But that's just splitting hairs.
Good changes, D. I'm glad to see that you're adapting the game to a new type of player base as well as adapting new technology. (Email update on phones and such)
Keep it comin!

Haven't noticed much a change with powerful races, but the weaker ones are indeed weaker, which should help leveling. Thanks, D.

p.s. You have to update the motd again.

Glad to hear it!


Done. I hereby dub thee: Official MOTD Reminderer.

It was my idea to add the questions to the game, so naturally I always liked them too. But the world of games has changed in two decades and we have to live in the present. I think people who have been inducted into what SK is about will still enjoy (or at least put up with) the questions. But it's important to get people to that state and that requires getting people into combat as quickly as possible.


The alerts were actually a fair amount of work but I have high hopes for them. While they got off to a slow start over the holidays, I think that over the long-run they will make a significant impact to both character interaction and gameplay. And it is an open-ended system that has a lot of room for further innovation in the future.

My life finally has meaning, thank you!