Halloween

[Kjartan]

What cool things are muds doing for Halloween?

I'll get the ball rolling: we have a "halloween mode", which changes the usual sunrise/sunset messages to something more ominous and makes all undead "hyper-aggressive", meaning that they will attack on sight and chase down any players they see in nearby rooms. We may have some sort of quest later - last year we had a quest that the players had to complete to get the undead to calm down (that is, turn off halloween mode).

[Drey]

We had a few things running for most of October.

1. Copyover messages were themed to discuss mist coming up from the ground to obscure the world, a scream in the distance, and then the mists mostly vanishing. (In place of the stock "ripple" messages).

2. All outdoor rooms had ground mists mentioned.

3. Mobs had a chance of loading with Halloween candy (which gave 2 random spells from a list).

4. A manor house area of the game has ghost dancers doing a pavane in the ballroom there. (Higher then normal chance of getting candy also).

5. Headless Horseman loaded in one higher level area in place of the normal dark rider present there.

6. Special 30 room pumpkin patch zone with gremlins that dropped pumpkin seeds with random stat buffs and spells, along with a boss-level jack-o-lantern mob hidden in the back of the patch. The boss had a decent item and a bootonly light item.

7. Questmaster (tasks players with simple quests, can redeem points gained for prizes) has 3 Halloween themed items; plush bat that turns into a real bat to fight for you (and turns back when killed or you log off), a spider ring that could shoot web at a foe or poison them, and a pumpkin grenade.

Most of this was coded last year and then I added a little new this year. I've got the code commented out with #ifdef statements and I plan to build a scheduler that can turn on the holiday content based on the current date. I've also got some minor Thanksgiving stuff done and a bunch of Christmas stuff.