So, what is the purpose of Zone Deeds?
Zone deeds mean prestigious bragging rights, but they also give certain benefits to the Clan that is holding them.
Once a Clan has claimed a deed, by putting it in the Deed box in their Clan hall, every Clan member will get an experience bonus when fighting in that zone. On top of that, a small percentage of all gold transactions made in that zone will go to the Treasury of the Clan that holds the deed.
Only one Clan can own the rights to a zone at the same time, so if another Clan manages to collect a deed that is already claimed, the ownership goes over to the new Clan.
At present the members of the Chaos Clan have been most successful in collecting deeds, with Table Round and Saints sharing second place. But this can change very quickly, once a dedicated deed hunter gets working.
The secrets to attain these deeds are a mystery but at the very least, one needs to spend some time in the zone.

Originally Avalon was just meant to be a part of the Druid Quest, so I first planned it to be one single rom, a place to hide the Sacred Sickle in. But I easily get carried away, so pretty soon it started to expand, and when I first released the new zone, it had grown to 65 rooms.

However, a couple of the playtesters complained that there wasn't enough content in Avalon, considering the extreme hassle of even getting there, and I had to admit they were right. A new zone deserves at least a couple of smaller Quests and some problems to solve.

So here it is: Another 35 rooms and three new Quests, all separate, but also tied together in a way to the original purpose of the zone. I might expand it even more in the future, since there's so much lore around Avalon. But for now, this will do. More details in Questcard 105. Enjoy!

Three of our oldest zones have been updated to our current building standards, (which means our special trademarks; listen, taste and smell descs, the option to look above , under and behind objects in the room, and also undisplayed portals and containers, all useful things for Quests). The three zones involved are:

• West Trade Road and Camelot
• The Elven Forest
• The Elven Metropolis

As usual when older zones get updated, we also added a number of new Quests. All the new Quests are very epic and complex. And one of them, the Druids and the Moon, also introduces a brand new zone – Avalon.
 
Avalon is the mythical land of the Fairies, and both the Fairies and the Pixies that populate it can be both entertaining and annoying. But you'll only be able to enter these new realms if you carry out the instruction of the Druid Ghost in the Cairn, southwest of Durmandle.
 
With this update we also introduce our newest features – Seasons and Moon phases.
This means that we now have fruit trees that blossom in spring and bear fruit in the fall.
And certain potion ingredients may have more strength if collected at the right moon phase, and the Druids are very picky about that. Also moon phases means the potential for vampires and werewolves – but we are not there yet.
 
You'll find more details about the Quests in the Questor's Office or on our Website, where the Questcards also have been updated. The new card numbers are:
70. Adventures in Punt
91. The Elven Bards
101. The Cardinal's sin
102. The Holy Grail
103. Rebellion against King Arthur!
104. The Druids and the Moon
 

Somehow the scientists hired by the Travel Agency have managed to put a stop to the disturbance that has been threatening the Time-Space continuum. We no longer need to fear a total cataclysm that would have wiped out large parts of the world as we know it. However, the scientists could not get rid of the timetraps that have been appearing for these last months, so the Time Travelers themselves still have to be cautious when they enter those strange appearing rifts.

Or, to put it OOCly:

Anubis, who was doing the coding for the new fighting code, has terminated the project and deleted the code he has worked on for these last several months. He also resigned as coder and deleted his imm.

During his stay with us, Anubis has not just been working on the big codechange, he's also made considerable improvements to our main code, and this of course will not be affected.

What he has decided to remove is the major change that he was working on in another Port; the new skills/spells system and the rewrite of the fight code. As much as I personally regret his decision, this new code belongs exclusively to him, and he had every right to withdraw it. For the improvements and bug-fixes that he's added to our main code we owe him gratitude and credit.

This is a great disappointment to me, and probably also to many players who have been looking forward to the new challenges. But on the flip side, since the announced codechange is off, consequently the pwipe will not happen either. Meaning that you get to keep whatever levels, equipment, tokens, houses etc. that you have gained during your stay in 4D - including the period between the announcement of the pwipe and now.

It also means that 4D's code will stay as it is, and that the remaining coders will still try to fix bugs as they appear. So don't hesitate to let them know about things that are broken or malfunctioning, using the bug-command or notes.

For over 600 years the Realms of the 4 Dimensions have been relatively stable, but lately there are some ominous signs of a severe disturbance in the Time-Space continuum. New Time traps suddenly appear in places where there have been none before, and unlike the old ones they don’t always lead to the same places. More worrying, it has been reported that several travelers that have entered these new traps seem to have disappeared totally. Whether this means that they got stuck in another Dimension, or that they got swallowed by a Black hole has not yet been determined.

However, the Travel Agency has done some research around these new Time traps, and the info we have collected so far has been displayed in a room downstairs from the Map Room, south of Recall Point.  Travelers are warned to enter the new Time traps at their own risk.

We are hoping that this is only a temporary instability, and that things will soon return to normal. But there is always the chance that this is just the first sign of a much bigger and more severe disruption. In that case the world, as we know it, might come to a sudden end.  But let’s keep our hopes up.  Man is a very adaptable creature, who has managed to survive many nature catastrophes in the past, not to mention three World Wars. They say that only rats and cockroaches are more resilient species.

So no doubt Man will find a way to handle this new threat, and to survive and face a new future, however uncertain and different it may be.  

The Builder of the Year Award for 2009 goes to Diandra, in recognition for her endless work on improving our game.
Diandra is not your average type of Builder, in the sense that she didn't start her Imm career in 4D by building a zone. In fact her main zone, Killer Klowns, which she took over after the tragically deceased Alabastor, is still unfinished in the Buildport. I am confident that it will be completed one day, but Diandra is not only a perfectionist, she also gets constantly diverted by other tasks, which I keep piling on her.
Diandra is different from other Builders in another sense too; she is a constant and diligent worker. Too many builders slip into inactivity or oblivion after having completed a zone, with the main goal of getting an imm. But Diandra never stops working.

She's taken part in updating several of the older zones to our present standards, and she has also been a major part in RP events and global quests that needed extensive building support.
She has designed several quests, and is one of our best and dependable scriptors. In fact, when I screw up one of my own scripts, it's usually Diandra I turn to for help, and she usually fixes it.
She has been the main responsible for the perzonalised equipment for many years, and is probably the only one who has a full grip of all those items.
She runs our website, and when it got lost in the server crash, Diandra was the one that hunted down and retrieved most of the pages that we thought were lost for ever.
She wrote many of the helpfiles and maintains them.
And above all, she is the one who does most of the boring everyday work that I have come to hate myself. She corrects typos, fixes buggy scripts, hunts down bad resets - in short, most of her time on line is spent fixing mistakes made by other Builders. I don't know what I'd do without her.

Probably not many players realise how much work Diandra is doing for the Mud. This BOTY Award will hopefully make it a bit clearer.

A number of the old zones have been updated lately by me and Diandra to fit our current standards, (i.e. Listen/Smell/Taste/Feel descs, look Behind/Above/Under descs, undisplayed portals and containers, etc.)

The zones we have been working on are:
- The Robber Baron Castle
- The Viking Ship
- The Pirate Galley Ship
- Lostlands
- Fenizia

Several Quests has been added to these zones during the update.
In connection with the Fenizian Lore, I've also added one Quest each to The High Mountains and the Citadel of Thandar.
In addition there is a very large Quest involving most of the Future Dimension, 'The Quest for the Best of the Best'.

The Questcards have been updated as well, so the cards from 87 onwards are new.
We have now reached the magic number of 100 Questcards.
(The number of actual quests of course is a lot higher).

The serial murder mystery has been solved, due to the efforts of the players, in particular Lionheart’s CIIA deputies, where Erwin and Kitolani did most of the sleuthing work. MadMax was tracked down and brought to justice by Erwin, while Kitolani was the first to figure out the identity of the Poet, and collect incriminating evidence against her. The Poet turned out to be Joanie, our own Imm secretary, who apparently got fed up with irritating players, and having to do a lot of work for the Imms without getting any salary, or even thanks. Joanie of course is an android, so she shouldn’t need either salary or thanks, but apparently she got her wires crossed in the nodule that controls the Three Robotic Laws *), which made her turn sinister.

Those who want more info about the event can check the logs on the Roleplay Forum, http://4dimensions.org/forum/index/topic,93.0.html

Or get the full explanation on http://4dimensions.org/forum/index/topic,117.0.html

*) The Three Laws of Robotics 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Who is killing off all the Trainers of 4Dimensions?

By now already 12 people and a dog have died. The last victims were all the Clan Trainers, and still the corpses are piling up. Who is The Poet? And what could be the motive behind these heinous crimes? Who is angry enough to hire the notorious serial killer MadMax from USA to do their dirty work? A group of CIIA agents has been sent over from USA to help in the search for MadMax. Unfortunately Lionheart, the leader of the group, doesn’t seem to get along very well with the local police. In fact, both parties seem to regard each other with the utmost distaste. The CIIA agents regard the local cops as backwater bums, while the locals resent the intrusion on their territory. Hardly a climate for constructive cooperation, but young Agent Erwin plods along diligently is his investigations, helped by the ESP powers that his Martian origin gives him. But so far everything seems to get more confusing for every day, as more tracks and red herrings plop up. Is the Olde Yorke Mayor really involved in the killings, or is he just one of those shady Politicians, who abused his position and got caught with the fingers in the jam pot? Could the entire plot be a Jester joke that went bad? There is some rather incriminating evidence against the top Jester, Thotter, who for sure is an anarchist and anti-capitalist too. But he is also a known pacifist and vegetarian, so is it really likely that he’d go on a killing spree? Or could The Poet be a woman like Kitolani, a young female CIIA agent in Lionheart’s group, seems to think? An angry woman, who wants to strike back at the male chauvinist pigs that dominate the world in 4D as in most places? Women’s lib at its peak... And what about the Sicilian connection? Everybody knows that the Sicilians run the poker game in the Recall area. And nobody believes that the current Godfather is just an innocent used cars salesman, like he claims. But is he also the twisted brain that concocted this plot? From another angle, the Sicilians seem just as worried about the situation as everyone else. After all, a serial killer running rampant in the Realms is very bad for business, and above all the Sicilians are businessmen. If you want to catch up on what happened in the RP event so far, check the logs on the Forum: http://4dimensions.org/forum/index/topic,93.msg763.html#new

It’s been some time since we last ran a global RP Event, but we are planning a pretty big one now. It will start on Friday April 25th and I scheduled to run for about 10 days, meaning that everyone should have a fair chance to participate in at least parts of it, since both weekends and weekdays are involved.

I cannot tell you much about the plot before the Event starts, except by publishing this initial warning that we’ve just received from CIIA in USA:

“Thanks to our advanced scanning equipment, our agents have succeeded in intercepting a number of messages, between a notorious professional hitman, known to the Police only as MadMax, and someone calling themselves 'The Poet'. The intercepted communication shows that 'The Poet' has contracted Madmax to carry out an unspecified number of murders. MadMax is already the main suspect in a number of serial killings in USA and other countries, but has so far never been apprehended. Apparently he sells his services to the highest bidder, but he also appears to take a personal pleasure in the killings. Although he uses different disguises and different weapons, there is one thing consistent in all the murders he is suspected of: The victim's left pinky finger is always cut off. (It is not clear whether he does this as a kind of signature, or whether he actually collects the fingers as souvenirs). As for The Poet, apparently he/she is residing in the 4 Dimensions, but the CIIA hasn't been able to secure any information about name, address or even gender. We have not yet any information about when MadMax is planning to leave USA, but since the deal seems to have already been closed, it will probably be within a week or two. You had better take all possible measures to warn the public and to stop these planned killings. Signed, Joe Goodbody, Foreign Affairs Director of CIIA (Central Intergalactic Intelligence Agency)"

What we expect from the players is of course to figure out who it is in 4D that could be angry or desperate enough to hire a hitman from USA for their dirty work. You can do this both by using your deductive skills, and by Roleplaying out the investigation, interview various suspects etc..

More specifically the task is this:

A: Find and neutralize MadMax.

B. Identify The Poet, and figure out the motive for the crimes.

There will be the usual rewards; Award Points and Tokens. You’ll get Award points for good RP Sessions, which should be logged, cleaned up from spam and posted on the Roleplayer Board in the Forum. There will also be a pretty substantial Token reward for the first player to figure out who The Poet is, and what the motive is for the killings. When you think that you know, you should send a note to Molly, but don’t be too hasty about it. Each player - (including alts) – only gets 2 guesses, so if you should change your mind later, you might have already wasted your chances.

More info about this Event later, on the Forum and in Game.