Help on: immortals

Immortals are players who have won the game and are interested in and able to give up the day-to-day cares of the mortal world in exchange for power to improve the game.

At the moment we are only looking for creators to expand the world. If you have ever enjoyed a creative writing class, you might also enjoy forging a new part of Ishar's world. More than just squares on a map that hold XP and money generators, each room of a zone helps to build an image of a real place in the mind of the player that makes them want to see more. We've tried to have each room in the game have detail, history, and life, and we'd be happy to see you add another zone that continues in that tradition.

If you think you might be interested in this, you need to get a character to level 20 -- even one promised to Thurvuun -- and submit a zone plan. A zone plan consists of:

- A map of a 10+ room zone, including mob placement and any unusual features. This can be drawn on paper and scanned, written in ASCII art, done in Visio, or whatever. As long as its legible, we don't care.

- A "help area" section describing the history of your zone, how it fits in to the rest of the world, and what players can expect there. Look through other "help area" entries for examples. Note that we take the history seriously; you need to do something that fits into the history of the existing world as seen at: http://www.ishar.com/creation/history.html

- Descriptions for 10 contiguous rooms from your zone along with 10 mobs and 10 objects that mostly load in those rooms. All should include exit descriptions and extras where appropriate. Read Yserbius's guide at http://www.ishar.com/creation/writing_rooms.html for what we are expecting here.

Feel free to bounce ideas off and get help from your friends and family. Working alone will take longer.

E-mail your plan to Vash@Ishar.com, and CC: Rohirrim@Ishar.com. Be prepared to answer detailed questions about parts of the zone you haven't yet written; if you don't have a detailed vision of the whole zone, you can't write coherently.

If there were problems with it, we'll offer some feedback, and you'll get a couple of chances to resubmit your zone plan. But if it doesn't work out, you'll have spent much less time at it than writing a full zone.

After that is accepted, you will gain the level of Immortal and be given the power to add your zone to the world. You should need only 3 months to learn the creation tools and add your world to the game. Writing descriptions is 80% of the work, so this should be fairly simple.

During that time, you will be required to break your ties with the mortal world, beginning with the Gods purging the kits of and rocking any other characters you might have played. This is to help you adjust to life above the fray, not obsessing over PKs and who has what piece of equipment. You will be allowed to play a mortal again after you've gotten a full zone opened to the world.

If you can't see yourself having fun adding to the game or helping people, remort instead. Really, it will be better for everyone.

And if you've already had and lost two Immortals, you won't be allowed to get another. We believe in second chances, but not thirds.