Tapping the power of Grayskull

The empower command has been live for a few days now (long enough to spit out a crash bug which was fixed last night), along with inscriptions and read. As many of you have seen, empower is a bit of a reprise of the old grei/naj'k system (an awesome discarded feature from Nodeka's very early years).

With empower in place, players can currently raise a number of auras. These auras currently provide certain benefits in and of themselves, although the precise benefits will probably be tweaked a bit.

The first batch of obtainable scrolls will be released sometime near the end of this week. These scrolls will allow players to inscribe certain auras onto their abilities, allowing each person to customize their skills and spells in certain ways. For example (and this specific one may change, as it's obviously still in the test batch, but it'll do for an illustration): if a ninja reads an 'ancient scroll: antei of formation - jta', she will gain the jta inscription on her antei of formation. From then on, whenever she uses antei of formation while in a jta aura, her endurance and hit points are revitalized by 100%+ of the cost of the antei, depending on the strength of the aura.

Thus, each player can customize the abilities they choose in a variety of ways, limited only by their inscription points and their ability to obtain and use these special scrolls. The most basic idea behind it is "empower raises an aura, and abilities do cool things when linked to that aura". There's more to it, especially in terms of gear, aura benefits, and tactical decisions, but the details are for you to discover yourselves.

A lot of people have tried experimenting with abilities that have preventions corresponding to their aura, and that's a great guess, but there's no connection there. =) The benefits of possessing an aura aren't linked to those preventions. (Right now there's a set of global benefits regardless of which aura is active, but I plan to add slightly different benefits for each aura on the next pass.)

Anyway, just a touch of information for you blog devotees and those of you who are wondering where this is all going. =) More to come this week!