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Zen and the Art of Spiral-Carved Incense Burners

March 10, 2011

Stone Lantern — A stone lantern sits along the pathway, waiting to be sold to a Kadian merchant.

This essay originally appeared in the February 2001 issue of Imaginary Realities. The crafting system in Armageddon is something we worked towards for a long time. The implementation may not have been the most efficient (I still, vividly, remember making hundreds of arrow objects so we could have them with every possible color combination of fletching) but getting it into the game was a huge source of satisfaction.

One of the desires expressed at the very first Armageddon player-staff meeting I ever attended was a yen to move away from “a hack and slash economy,” where players made their income by selling the gear off NPCs (and the occasional PC) that they had killed. How, one immortal noted, could the world be realistic when there was no coded reflection of the material underpinnings of it? How to create this economic reflection was a question that remained in the air for several years, and it was not until discussion of implementing crafting code came up that such a move seemed possible.

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