Notes on the GEAS pages

January 12th 1996

There is now a picture for the Docks, a signpost on the main page (much requested), new text in the Wizard's House (although no new material unfortunatly), and the promise of a new notice board possibly in the offing. Unfortunatly the .map files for Hill Street has been acidentaly deleted, please use the text links and not the IMAGEMAP until I fix this, (hopefully Monday).

A new year and a new Page. The Docks is now starting to appear. The first Element is The Harbour the new repository for links to other web pages concerned with Roleplaying. This contains material taken from the Wizard's House, which will now only contain information actually held on the GEAS account, of which we need a lot more. Other stuff to come in the Docks is prob. another Notice Board, although we need suggestions for a topic (a new game would be good), homes for the Captains etc. from the Inn Board, a random link generator and any other stuff anyone suggests.

I have also corrected a few mistakes with Links to the Wizard's personal library from wizard.html and the NEWELOW stuff from the Shareware games list in the Harbour.

Well, stage one of the great Christmas'95 reworking is now underway, with the revamp of the Wizard's House. The list of links has now turned into an index of sub-files, each with its own list of links (Which will hopefully grow), listed by system, genre, and company, as well as the indices and misc. stuff you have come to love. The plan is currently like this.

1. Rework Wizard's House Links (and move to Docks?)
2. Add Docks with links and gaming material (poss. swap gaming links from Wizard to docks and put all gaming articles etc. into Wizard's house)
3. Complete Convention Page (We are waiting on James!)
4. Add signpost to front page for sites not on main image.
5. Get overall map of Village finished for direct links to all sites.
6. Get more actaull gaming and source material up, systems, characters, scenarios, rules, stories.... This depends on you the readers!

No sooner come than gone, the Daughter of Twilight pages, after some argument about validity etc. are now removed again. In their place there will be a link to the real DOT pages. However the very succesful Daughter of Twilight discussion boards in the Boar and Blade Tavern will remain. I have also removed a few other files and and fixed the problem of not having all the Notice Boards linked to each other.

Coming soon an updated Wizard's House with more links spread over more files, Kas's legendary Convention Page, and who knows what else?

After endless complaints I have finally given in and set this page back to plain grey. It seems that no one other than me was capable of reading it! Those of you who frequent this page will have noticed that there has been nothing here for some while, this is due to the Notice Board, which is so busy that it seems to use up half my time, all I can say is... great! Some life on the board is just what I wanted.

On the subject of boards I am going to place another one, the third and last, in the Inn. The exacxt use of this board has not yet been fixed, see the discussion on the board in the Town Hall, but I suspect that it will be used for silly posts and general character stuff, while the main board is left for discussion of systems, roleplaying, and GEAS business

Those of you waiting for the Convention page, be patient, Kas still hasn't done anything, but I'm sure that he will... eventually!

Added a new Notice Board for DOT in the Boar And Blade Tavern.

The Daughter of Twilight rules are now partly finished, and are partly connected, but the real DOT news is that someone, probably Steve will be taking over their running. I addition Kas will be setting up his own page for the convention, more news on that soon. Because of this it would be great if people mailing GEAS could put at the start of their subject line a code telling us which topic they are mailing about, GEN for general Village stuff (To go to me), DOT for Steve, and CON for Kas. If you are just sending us general mail then use GEN (simple isn't it).

I have also added today some new icons, which will be infiltrating the pages soon, look out for them.

Finally I was considoring adding more notice boards, since the first has been so popular, one in the Boar and Blade for Vampire discussions, and one in the Inn for general campaign boasting, leaving the one in the Town Hall for downright insanity, as it is now!

Daughter of Twilight Arrives The Daughter of Twilight Home pages have now moved to GEAS, and are located in the Assasin's Guild. The direct URL is http://www.eusa.ed.ac.uk/societies/geas/dot. The new pages may be shay for a little while, until they are fully sorted out, but then expect a proper HTMl version of the rules, and more information on characters and contact addresses.

The old home page is now no longer the default page at GEAS. The URL http://ww.ed.ac.uk/~geas/ now leads directly to the Village page. The old crest page is now at http://www.eusa.ed.ac.uk/societies/geas/crest.html.

Added some more links to the Wizard's House, including one for Arcane, the new Future Publishing Magazine. Would anyone care to volunteer to do a section on FTP sites?

Small modifications. I have added a new site to the Stalls in the temple, and at the same time decided to dump all the colour from the page until I come up with a better scheme, it was simply vile, and I wish someone had pointed that out earlier. (Thanks to the one who did). In the same vein the background to this page has got lighter AGAIN!

After some demand I have now reversed the order of this page to put the new stuff at the top, to make it faster to find. That is the good news, the bad news is that the daily news report has lapsed, it is now just weather. It was too much work just for me to handle. Hopefully however someone from the new crop of GEAS members will step in to help and it won't be so bad (I'll bet!).

Hopefully we will soon be hosting the Daughter of Twilight home page, which is loosing its current site. More on that if and when it happens.

Finally in new news I have finally written an About the Adventure page, feature background details and instructions for the adventure, as well as the list of level entry points that have previously appeared on this page. Coming soon will be a similar shortcut list for all the people that you can talk to in the village as part of the adventure. September 15th 1995

Added a new Free-for-all noticeboard in the Library. Please don't abuse the damm thing. I will go through and delete any messages which seem offensive or pointless.

Added yet more links to the Wizard's house.

The Town Hall now features a daily weather and news report, scribed by the hand of the sage (with the help of a perl script of course). Check this out for a day by day handle on important events in the Grand Empire. The script should generate a new report at midnight local time each day. A link to the report is here

I have finally managed to add the next section of the Adventure, so more progress is now possible. The section also introduced a new look for the adventure files, which I have applied to the others, but not yet to the conversation files [i.e. Scrodinger at the Bar, the stranger in the Inn, the Sage, etc.] In time I will colour code each section, but I haven't done so yet. This is a departure from my original conception, which had each section blending anonymously into one another, hence the fact that the window titles are all the same, but its more fun this way, and lets me make up names for each section.

• Section 7. The Tomb of Kings
  Entrance form the Skull Passage

Since we are already going for 'Netscape enhanced' I thought that I would add some colour. I have mixed feelings about this, colour can sometimes get in the way of legibility or elegance, but how could I resist? Feel free to mail and express disgust if you think some of my colour choices are bad.

The imporved Beneath the Village stuff is almost ready. I've made the Door with Four Locks much harder to get too, to force the players into actually going into some of the sections other than the first, now you must pass a script to get to the door, which requires information from elsewhere in the maze.

In the vein of trying to get more people to go to all of the Labyrinth the following list of links will enable those of you who wish too, to get directly to the start of each section of the maze, though not to the end!

• Section 1. The Serpent Tunnels
  Entrance from Temple

• Section 2. The Catacombs
  Entrance by the Serpent's Head

• Section 3. The Dark Elven Killing Ground [new]
  Entrance from the central chamber

• Section 4. Beneath the Wizard's House
  The hidden Doorway

• Section 5. In the Walls [Duel with the dark Elf]
  Down the corridor from section 4

• Section 6. The Door with Four Locks
  Before the Guardian Beast

I'm really getting going now, but I want more more more! News of projects in the works, expect lots of scripts, forms, etc, (you know the stuff), and a lot more information about the land in which the Village is actually situated, politics, maps and so forth.

• Added a link to the Inn to get random comments from the Sage. As yet there are few replies, but I will add more.
• Enhanced the front page, including links to some of the new stuff about the Grand Empire.
• Added an information stop to the Temple, denoted by the icon. There will one of these in each building.

Corrected yet more minor faults after consulting the server error logs. Please note that the 'Guide to being a Cthulu cultist' seems to have vanished, I'll tell you if I find it.

• Removed spurious link to 'index.html' from the killer file
• Removed out of date 'current games' from Town Hall
• Removed some bad links in the Wizard's House

• Added the 'noPlace.html' error file for clicking outside a building on the Village map
• Added some new links to the Wizard's House

• Fixed missing icons in the xmas add file
• Fixed bad links to AD&D Illusion rules and COC cultist rules in Wizard's House.
• Fixed bad link to Library from the Town Hall

Finally made the GEAS Village main image into a clickable-map. It is certainly nice to have it like that, but the line all the way round rather spoils the effect of having a transparent background it seems to me. (This applies if you are not in Netscape 1.1 only, since the image has its BORDER set to 0) Still, people kept asking for it, so I'll leave it like that unless they start asking me not to.

Also started to add some of the Wizard's personal Library finally.

Corrected all those 'non existant' faults with bad links caused by the reorganisations above. Added the GEAS library List and article about Role-Playing in Middle Earth from the Sign (See Town Hall Library).

Reorganised directory structure on the GEAS account, this should make no difference to the pages though. Added some new home pages, including my own (Shameless plug).

Took over the GEAS account and set up the home page. Sometime after Christmas began wotk on the Village, with the Front Page, Inn, Wizard's House, Temple and Town Hall, but no Adventure. Added the Adventure and other pages over the spring.

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