One time event. Spiders!

[midrien]

A poor hobbit was on his way home from a successful fishing trip out near Atherton when he got caught in the middle of a torrential downpour. Just his luck thought the hobbit, his catch would be ruined, he would be drenched and probably catch a cold from all of this. Just the way to ruin what peviously seemed like a good day.

After a few minutes of trudging through near blackness, and comforted only by the treadfalls of his naked, hairy little feet in the puddles, he blidnly stumlbed across a cave.

Huddling inside for warmth, he had no idea how long the storm was going to last, it seemed almost unnatural. After managing to finally build himself a fire from scattered timbers left by previous adventurers, he decided to pass the time by snagging a torch from the blaze and heading deeper into the cave.

He returned home a happy hobbit, clutching a strange golden oval. He thought it was simply some bauble that had gotten left behind, unbeknownst to him though, it was an egg.

He hadn't told anyone about his "Wonderful" discovery, instantly growing greedy and keeping to himself as he thought out ways to sell his new found treasure. But one night he awoke to the strangest sound, the last thing he saw was a gleaming pair of mandibles, and 8 gruesome eyes.

It took a few weeks before the eggs the queen had laid inside the habbit came to bear. But there were hundreds of them by that time, not nearly satisfied by the grim portion of flesh they were given.

They quickly overran the poor quarter and moved on to swarm the rest of the city.

Again, constructive criticism and the like is welcome. Just think it would be fun to guard the city against something other than the Shadowdancers for once. Maybe even opposing cities could help or hinder.

Spider shifters might even be able to stop it all altogether, perhaps communicating with the queen, or simply showing dominance over the hoard of the little beasties and ordering them elsewhere.

[allanon]

So...wait, what was the point of this 'golden bauble'? It was a giant egg that hatched into enormous queen spider in a single night? Well, either that's a quite large egg, or very fast growing spider...or puny Hobbit.

Also if the spiders have already swarmed the city, you're probably not going to be 'guarding' it; most likely all Vaerlonians (I'm assuming that's the Hobbit's hometown, since it has a 'poor quarter') would be evacuating or fighting in the streets. This includes NPC's, too: we don't want Ereldon, Vilbor, Vizra, Dwydran, and all them folks being killed by venomous spiders...

Nitpick: Technically nobody's been guarding against the Shadowdancers for quite long time now, nor epriests or sorcerers, for that matter...they can walk right through the city if they want to.

This could cause problems for players who log in, walk out of the inn and bam! killed by spiders. This event should get some advance notice if it's going to take place, so anyone who doesn't want to take part can go to another city.

Lastly, if you really do have 'hundreds' of spiders, that means hundreds of NPC mobiles, correct? Well, that's...abusable...and might cause some lagging. Abuse means, you have invisible mages going to room full of 60 spiders, cast large tornado of ice, and all the little baby spiders die. We don't want that, now do we? (Unless they drop no coins and worth 100exp...)

These details aside, if it's going to be a one-time event then there should be some interesting/unique reward for participants and/or the 'winner' of the event (I'm guessing whoever kills most spiders and/or slays/coerces Queen).

Oh yes, and you're going to be the one coding this...right?

[artic]

Seems we have a storyteller in our midst. Storytelling itself is a nice talent, however it is a bit hard to relate a story to the players with just an event. You cant just have some event announcer tell the story, that just lame and the story is too long to just boast it out there. So from a player point of view this event will look just like the warehouse infestation event gone horribly bad, with a number of monsters swarming the Vaerlon streets with apparently no reason.

However, if u would make an area out of it... with maybe a regularly repeating swarming event and a hobbits diary that tells the story... 'Dear diary, a fantastic thing happened to me today: I got soaked by a thunderstorm. Yes that doesnt sounds so good, but thanks to that storm i found this fantastic golden egg. Its soo beautiful i fear if someone finds out i have it, they will try to steal it from me. So i have hidden it.' etc etc. So he hid the egg, it hatched, spiders infested his house and killed him. Every so often the spiders become too many and swarm the streets, but in the meantime the hobbits house is a nice (small) explorable area with newbie'ish spiders. Players can kill the queen, claim a treasureÂ… and maybe some eggs are left hidden somewhere and the event can repeat itself again.

[solar]

I've coded an area with a spider theme, but it hasn't gone through the QC yet.

[artic]

Yeah, spiders seem to be all over the place anyway. Theres a lot of spiders in game. Huge spiders with slime dripping from their mandibles are scary yeah, but this is a magic world, theres soo much more that could be lurking out there.