Sonjaya Tandon

The Hunt for Neutron-7

April 28th, 2006

Back in my days of playing Star Wars Galaxies, I was Ichiir, the wookie — renegade mayor of Tusken’s Bane.  We had organized quite a community of players in those days and through that organization we were able to do some unique and innovative events.  One of those events was called “The Hunt for Neutron-7″ — think of it as an improv play with 30 actors and the entire audience (in this case 100-200 players) as characters in that play.

It was annouced as follows (click to see the full post):

The sound of blaster fire finishes echoing off of the mountains surrounding Juganoth Valley.  Ravage looks at the corpse at his feet.  He is not a fan of failure.  For three weeks now he has heard about some new brand of Neutron Pixie being developed and it was happening without HIS permission.  The fool of a smuggler at his feet was the third such one to come back empty handed, the third such one to gain the same reward.  Ravage holstered his blaster. Let the body stay bit, he thought, as a reminder.

The problem is that due to the recent confrontations with Baldric and his crew in Kraytia, he was without his best operatives.  Yes, he would have to recruit some scoundrels outside of his dominion for this.  It would attract some unwanted attention, but at least it wouldn’t be his people paying the price.  Yes, that would work well.

Rumors are circulating throughout the cantinas and back alleys of Tatooine.  Someone has modified the chemical structure of neutron pixie, ramping up the drug’s performance while at the same time decreasing the downer dramatically.  Whoever possesses the recipe for this drug holds a monopoly over the galaxy’s spice trade and whoever is producing this so-called “neutron-7” is a threat to the criminal underworld as a whole.  Ravage of Juganoth Valley, not wishing to divert his best agents from their struggle with Baldric Sinistar of Kraytia, has sent feelers out into the underworld to attract freelance smugglers to help him.  Their mission is to find out who is responsible for this new concoction and to bring a sample to Ravage so it can be analyzed.  The stakes are high and the reward matches; Ravage has offered a holocron to the first smuggler to bring in both the sample and the name.

The mission is not without its risks, however.  Goda, Chief of the Tusken’s Bane Militia, has received news of Ravage’s plans through his spy networks and has accelerated his investigation into this mysterious new drug.  He knows that once the recipe falls into Ravage’s hands he will have no chance of stopping its mass production.  Goda, therefore, has sent out his spies, disguised as smugglers, to find the producer of this drug before Ravage can.  He also plans to hunt down and stop any smuggler doing Ravage’s dirty work.

Event Rules:

1. ANY PROFESSION can compete, however, there are parts in the hunt that REQUIRE a smuggler.  Be careful when you hunt however, as you are being hunted too.
2. If a member of the TBSF (Tusken’s Bane Security Force) comes up to you and says, “You are wanted by Goda for questioning regarding Neutron-7”, you MUST accept the challenge they will give you or be considered ‘captured’. This is a one-on-one fight, to incap only. Stims and buffs are allowed. If you win, you are considered to have evaded “captured”.  If you are captured, the TBSF member will email me and you will be out of the race.  Once you are on that captured list, I will email you to let you know (I will probably also post a list of all “captured” players).  You are welcome to keep playing the game by working as an informant for Goda – its just that you will no longer be eligible for the prize.  If you want to validate that someone is on the TBSF, ask to see their badge.  Open a trade window with the person ‘arresting’ you.  They will show you a token items called TBSF Badge. CHECK THE MANUFACTURER, if it wasn’t made by Ichiir, it is not a legitimate bagde.
3. SMUGGLERS, there are parts of the hunt that can only be done by you.  You have the option to compete for the holocron OR hire out your services to players that are competing.  No matter how you decide to participate, you can still be captured.  In good faith, I would ask that once you are captured, you no longer help anyone competing for the holo (I can’t enforce this, so I need to rely on your OOC sense of fair play).
4. To win, you must hand over to Ravage (or one of his designated henchman) in Juganoth Valley a sample of neutron-7 and tell him the name of the producer.  There is also one other thing you will need to do, but you will have to find out about that on the way   Ravage will then send me an email telling me what you gave and told him.  If everything checks out, I will then email the winner explaining how to contact me and collect their prize!
5. You may start hunting Friday, December 19th, at 6pm PDT.  Expect it to take through the weekend to complete.  It will NOT take 24-7 play, but we have built in delays to give various time zones a fair shot at playing.

To start just pick up the first mission – where is that you might ask?  Good question and I don’t know – though I think if you read this post a few times, you might get an idea (since this is the first event, I left a pretty bold clue).  And, um, Ravage isn’t particularity know for his good temper, so I wouldn’t recommend talking to him (or sending him a tell or email) unless you can show him a sample of Neutron-7.

If no one wins this event, then we WILL use the same holocron as a prize for the next event (the focus will be on a different profession for that one).  I want to thank Potnik of Tusken’s Bane for his donation of the prize.

The event went off better than we had hoped and to me really showed that the entertainment platforms were ushering in a new form of entertainment — that of shared storytelling.  I loved the choices the players made and how each made it their own story.  Some of the best moments:

• One of the towns was populated with drug addicts.  Upon encountering them, instead of proceeding with the adventure, the player prompty called in their entire guild and started holding interventions with the towns people.
• Another part of the adventure required the players to get information from this one smuggler (whose code name was Hotwire) in order to proceed.  The only problem is that Hotwire would only talk to smugglers.  This player figured this out and hired a smuggler to ask Hotwire some questions.  The smuggler was just some random player they found.  That player wasn’t even aware of the Neutron-7 event.  The smuggler asked the questions required and found out the location and contact of the next city in the adventure and then asked Hotwire what it was all about.  Once he found out, he turned to the player who was waiting expectantly and said that Hotwire didn’t know any thing about ‘Neutron-7′.  The smuggler then proceeded to the next checkpoint.  It took five minutes for the player to figure out they had just been shafted by a smuggler.

If you are interested in what it takes to organize and plan an event like this the event planning document can be downloaded here.

Entry Filed under: Games