Realm of Shadows
Area Writing Requirements


If you are interested in writing an area for Realm of Shadows you will need to contact
Syriac and tell him what your area will be about. After you will need to e-mail Syriac some
samples of your writing, and if that's approved you will need to make a VNUM map of your
area. (Example) When all of this is done you can download ORB or Area Editor with the 
Realm of Shadows configuration and begin to write your area. When you write an area
please follow the guidelines as listed below.

*** Due to how RoS handles many different things, we do *not* use online area building. If
you would like a boring discussion on nuts and bolts and why it is a really bad idea feel free
to reach out to Syriac.  In short, many of the reasons people enjoy RoS (Randoms, gems and so
on) are not conducive to online area building. If you try to add a reset and a mob pops a random
object it will write the random template object into a reset and create problems.  Offline area
editing is not so awful I promise.

*Minimum amount of rooms: 50
*Minimum amount of different mobs: 10
*Minimum amount of different objects: 5
--- Please bare in mind these are _minimums_
*Don't use the same description for each room, unless you are writing a zone in which the player
 is supposed to get lost in. (Maze/Forest)
*Use proper spelling and grammar.
*Follow the theme of Realm of Shadows (Medieval/Fantasy)
*Have all mobs set in the proper rooms and all objects on the proper mob/room/container.
*Item quality must be proportional to the difficulty required to obtain them.
*You are not allowed to tell people where your zone is installed so we can do quests and have the 
players discover it.
*You must set mob levels, attacks, languages.
*Mobs HP/mana/move/gold/wis,int,etc do not need to be set - the MUD handles this.  Likewise you do not
need to duplicate mobs to get different levels, the MUD will also do that on it's own. Just set a level
and RoS will take care of the stats.
*Don't talk to the players, just describe what they would see if there were looking at the mob
object or room. - General rule of thumb: If you write "You" in a description, you're doing it wrong.
*Exit descriptions are mandatory, even if they are rather short.
*All mobs, objects and rooms should have very thoughtful and interesting descriptions - some players may
never read them; but others will appreciate the effort and thoughtfulness put into your work. Especially
new players.
*No super high Armor Class items.
*Metal objects need to have the metal flag set.