Hence why the fires or what ever would go in northern serenwilde as the commune is in the southern part, Glomdoring well meh, probably the southern part, since most of the communes enterances are in the northern area.

The entire forest IS the commune. Important things are in both halves. Moondance Tower and Abeytu are in the northern half, as well as Moon Falls. So that would mean no weeviling, no getting to the guildhall, and no converting essence, if you couldn't handle nasty aggro critters. And if they're aggro gorgog strength, that's a LOT of people that can't use half their territory.

How about gorgogs spawn on the east half of Celest, and the west half of Magnagora? Whichever half doesn't have the nexus.

Yeah.

Pool's in the very middle And that wouldn't be too bad, there's almost always at lease one person around who could keep the population down.

In that case, call the pool and the top level one half, and the other tiers of Celest the "bottom" half!

EDIT: And make them seperate areas, so you can't scan or anything.

Its possible to go anywhere in Celest without going through a down exit. There aren't really any 'levels' to speak of.

Huh. Well...maybe there's slopes! There ARE down exits. I always had it tiered in my mind. Hmm. I'll have to check the map.

Yeah but I think you can go in circles and you won't have to go 'down'. Celest's weird.

We're nautilus shaped

Something like this was accepted in Aetolia. Firewhistles could be made from the bladder of a large corpse, a torus crystal and some rope. A certain mob in some place made them for 1000g plus comms. The fire would be a sealed pouch of air that heats up when a fire is in the room(maybe local area.. Not sure.) The heat would cause pressure on the inside of the bladder to increase, forcing air out of the whistle. One minute after the whistle was exposed to the fire, a whistle would be heard throughout the local area. After four minutes, it would be local area and surrounding areas, and those surroundings areas. (something like that) After 8 minutes, the firewhistle would explode which would be heard throughout Sapience(As coming from the place where the fire is), and the whistle would be destroyed.

I think fires should be implemented here in some fashion or another. Via a quest, the fires should have a slow drain or the nexus. Say, every IG day, 20 power is drained per room alight. A quest is available for the communes to instantly extinguish the flames. After that, a quest is available to block the fire-starting quest for a period of x months. The fires, however, should not hit novices, or do anything particularly serious to the actual physical environment. (Destroy totems, herbs, trees, stuff stuff.) Be more ethereal flamey or something. Or something.
Something like that.

Blah. No need to make it more painful than the gorgog quest.

Firstly, Quest.. not skill. not item.. just QUEST.

Secondly, quest alone causes firestorms. The firestorms can be seen across the Basin and the forest it occurs in.

The storms burn up forest rooms. If you're in the area you can occasionaly hear 'the sounds of burning wood' telling you it's there. From there looking shouldn't be too bad.

The fire takes two stages. First stage just leaves a room description. Second stage takes 10 minutes to occur. If it gets to second stage, the totem is burned away along with any saplings that are mature being burned back to 'young sapling'.

Now, the quasi-benifit: In either stage, the herbs are burned down to 1 in the room. When the fire is gone, though, the herbs grow at an expanded rate until they hit max (if the herb wasn't in the room it's added). Saplings that are in the room mature faster as well. The effect is such that overall, regular burnings will result in more wood/herbs availible than without.

So the benifit to cities would be more herbs and more mature trees for wood. The communes, meanwhile, would have to stop the fires quick to keep their totems around.

Why kill the totem after 10 minutes? It's to compare in destruct to the gorgog quest where:

1. The power gain from a city's nexus is removed.
2. The spikes/suppernals are disabled, along with the power gained from doing them.
3. a bunch of annoying gorgogs killing people who are in the sea (which we STILL have to go to due to the Sea battle)

So the drums/flame are unharmed in the firestorm quest BUT intsead the defenses/powergain of the commune is affected. Instead of more bashing spots, cities get more commodities (note that herb gathering is something cities can do and if they can't chop trees for wood they should be able to). Why leave a chance to preserve the totem? It takes a GOOD bit to recover that thing when you have to rebuild it.

The messages you get both along the world AND the area you're in should be enough (if it isn't we can add more messages to help. I say, if 3 people are actively searching the area then they should be able to find it in time), and as for the fact that some of the totems WILL get burned...well.. note that if the commune can keep active then NO penality will happen to them, unlike the cities.

And, of course, there's always keeping the quest that starts the storm from happening in the first place.

The one Greyda came up with as sort of a Firesense version of Alertness... She will prolly correct me when she reads this if I am wrong, but from my memory what it did was like if a fire was happening you would get a message similar to "You smell smoke drifting in the air, coming from insert forest name here"... it had an endurance drain and could be turned on and off.

Took me more than 20 game years to get this to happen, and in the end, it only happened because I not only roleplayed the inventing of them IC, I also did the coding OOC, so that the admins didn't have to do any work to let these go in. I've been back in Aetolia lately and it's really nice to see this bit of my handiwork still in place. One of Theragil's most visible impacts on the world. (Yes, I'm Theragil, if you hadn't heard.)

Just to clarify, the whistle only reacts to fire in the same room as it. It's not a primary means to detect fire, it's only a last-ditch way to note there's a fire if one is burning in some remote place people rarely go to (like Upper Scidve or Lower Azdun), before the entire forest is consumed. The time until the first whistle can be anywhere from one second to two minutes (the whistle "ticks" once per two minutes to check, so it's all in the luck of the timing); but after that, subsequent sounds are always two minutes apart, and the fourth one is the one where it blows up loud enough to hear world-wide, so that can be anywhere from 6.01 to 8 minutes after fire reaches the room.

They are nominally a product of Sentinel's Woodlore skill (and only Sentinels can make them) since they use the same kind of rope-tricks that make Alarm traps and such work. Sentinels buy a wooden "fire whistle base" from a mobile in the Sentinel guildhall, plus they're also available from another vendor in Eleusis; the base costs 1000gp, but no comms. They're essentially just a piece of wood in the right shape, with some hooks in them. You add a torus crystal, a piece of rope, and a corpse (for its bladder) to this base to make the completed whistle. They have to replaced every four or five years.