>Is there a way to call a special ONLY if the player casts a spell on the
>subject space?

Only with the spell Ritual of Sanctification.

>1. The largest city in my scenario, Sorren, is under quarantine. The
>only way you can get in or out is by being searched by the guards at the
>gates. The point is, if they let you in, I call a swap rectangle
>terrain, with 0, 0, 64, 64, so it will swap ALL the closed portculli
>with open ones. There are no other portculli in the town. This doesn't
>work. The text message for the special will showup in the talking dialog
>- but when I leave talk, the gates are still closed.

Not sure. There are other things you can try, though, like the Rectangle
Transform Terrain (of course, you'll need to set the Transform To field on
the relevant terrain types). The Opening Stone in Valley of Dying Things
does this sort of thing. Take a look at that.

>2. I have lots of cobblestone roads in my various towns, only to find
>that when the game automatically converts some of them to diagonals,
>they show up as diagonals on top of cave floor - in a town on the
>surface.

That's right. The game adjusts cobblestone roads ont he fly. If you don't
want this to happen, make a new terrain type with the cobblestone graphic.

>I have a town where once the leader of a bandit fort  has been killed,
>lots of characters change by disappearing or appearing (by the  advanced
>properties, dissapear and appear on event). The problem is, characters
>only appear, not disappear. This is a great problem as before event 1 the
>cmdr.  is ill and has a deputy in place, but after the new commander
>appears but the  deputy is still there. Is this a bug? (I'm using the
>latest version of the  scenario editor for the PC). Thanks.

Towns are remembered for a while. The character may be being remembered as
still being there because the town hasn't been reset yet. There is a way
around this.

Make the character that disappears its own monster type, like Deputy Fred.
Have a special encounter be called when the party enters the town, which,
if the point in the game where the deputy should be gone has been reached,
calls the town special node with rids the town of all creatures of type
Deputy Fred.

Awkward, but it'll work.

>However, there are
>problems.  Blades Editor gives the user no control over spells or
>alchemy.

And suppose you didn't let players cast spells? What about the half of
their parties that are primarily spell casters? What would those characters
be good for?

>I really don't want people to drag in their invincible parties
>and end the Pax Romana with Divine Thuds.  Is there a patch to disable
>spells and/or prevent people from importing their experienced parties?

No, and no. If a player wants to take in a really buffed party, that's the
player's right. Some people like to burn through the scenarios with really
powerful parties. It's just sort of one of the assumptions that comes with
the world.

>Also, a rewritten, quickly self terminating Quickfire would be very
>useful.  Can you help?

This can be simulated. There is a special encounter which cleans up
quickfire (and other such effects). Call this for the entire dungeon when
you want the quickfire everywhere to go away.

>Will any adjustments ever be made to the Editor? Like a spell editor, or
>objects that react to spells?

It's possible. However, updating this sort of system can cause lots of
problems. When I release Blades of Exile 2.0, everyone with 1.0 will be
unable to play all the new scenarios unless you upgrade, which would cause
a huge mess. Plus, many of the old scenarios wouldn't work right anymore.
It may happen someday, but it'll have to be for very good improvements.

>If I start a new scenario using lets say v1.0 of the scenario editer then
>upgrade my scenario edited to v1.0.3 will my scenario that I started with v1.0
>be upgraded???

Yep. At this point, all of the scenarios made with all editors work with
all other versions of BoE.

>Is there a way to make items stay where you put them, even if you leave
>town?

That's what the editor documentation is there for. In the Scenario Menu you
can find a option for making rectangles where items are remembers even when
the party leaves town.

>Just had a player report on a wierd thing. In ROS, I have a portal that
>moves the party to another point in the dungeon (a sealed room), than
>starts a general timer set to run out after 10 moves. The special called
>when the timer runs out moves the party back to the original portal.
>
>This works fine, unless you go into fight mode and stay in fight mode until
>after 10 turns have passed. If you do that, the special that should have
>been activated when the timer runs out is never called/never works.

That's right. The game can't teleport the party when it's in combat mode.
There is, however, a way around it. Use a Combat Block on your special
encounter ... you can have the game jump to a special node if the party is
in combat. Have that node start the timer over again (at 10 moves). Then,
as long as the party stayts in combat, the timer will keep restarting until
they leave.

>How does one clear the special ability when one changes an
>item to something that does not have one?  For example, I was trying to
>change the second "Torches" into "Fish" with a custom graphic.  I gave
>up and changed the Vahnatai Robes into my fish.

This is an unpleasant glitch, and I'm glad you called it to my attention.
The only way to do this is to change the item type to Weapon, go into
Abilities, press Weapon Abil, and choose No ability. Awkward and bad. I'll
fix this later.

>One last related question:
>What determines the amount of food an item is if it is food?

Set the item's Item Level.

>Hi!  I've been a fan of the Exile games ever since I played Exile II a
>year ago.  Blades is a great continuation of the series and I am very
>impressed with the Scenario Editor.  I'm working on a very large,
>complex scenario and I have a question.  In one part of the game, you
>step through a portal and are teleported to an entirely different town.
>The only special I can find that switches towns is the stairway
>special.

This node is how you do it. Look in the Editor Docs Appendices, describing
the Stairway node. Note that if you give the right value for type of
stairway (8, I think), no dialog is brought up and you automatically are
moved to the other level. There's a teleporter of this type in Morog's
Castle in Za-Khazi Run.

>I deeply sympathize with the needs that forced your posted change
>to scenario listing policy. However, you neglected to say how it
>will now be determined that a scenario _does_ get listed. Do you
>(Jeff) play it a little, and pitch all the obvious losers? You
>certainly can't play all of them all the way through, and if this
>catches on you won't be able to play even the beginnings of them all.
>
>Or have a peer review group? Maybe volunteers? Or make it a
>requirement of listing that the author review N other scenarios? Or
>let the submitter find his reviewers, and require submission of N
>email adresses of those who had played it through and vouched for it?
>
>The spur that prompted this note is Prazac's Quest. According to
>the README, the author is in 4th grade. On the one hand, it got
>a BoE error message (jump to non-existent town) in the startup
>town. On the other hand, all of it that could be seen was _very_
>impressive for a 10 year old and (depending on what the rest of
>it looked like) might even be enjoyable for an adult. How are we
>supposed to rate that?
>
>Ivan

I'm answering this instead of Jeff. I (Mariann Krizsan) handle the web
site, I can be reached at krizsan@spidweb.com.
Basically I look at all scenarios submitted to us with a master scenario
editor. Scenarios are then easily judged. If I can look at the entire
scenario on one screen, with the only dialogue being something like "hi my
name is Bob", we reject it as being trivial. If there is more meat to a
scenario, then we usually accept it. I check the dialogue randomly, we
check the towns and outdoor sections for quality of painting and
complexity. This is always what we have done before however we are more
strict now because we are getting more trivial stuff then ever before.

Prazac's Quest is an example of a borderline case. It is not very good in
terms of plot but for a 4th grader it's excellent, and he clearly put a lot
of time in painting towns etc. I think he deserves some "peer review" and
credit.

>As for Scenario building.  Is it possible that monsters can step on the one
>shot special give item buttons?  I put a special in the outdoors near the
>starter town, and three others elsewhere.  The other three mostly work, but
>unless I create a party and run them right out to the buttons, some of them
>disappear!  Buttons and all!  The only solutions I can think of is either the
>monsters are picking up the items or it's a bug?

Monsters never trip specials. Check to make sure that the Stuff Done Flag
tied to those one-shot specials isn't being used in a special encounter
somewhere else. This is the number one cause of disappearing one-shot
specials.

>Another problem I had was creating a special item.  I used the jump to on the
>menu and then changed my mind, and decided I didn't need it.  But now I can't
>delete the special.  I keep getting a message that I'm inserting the wrong
>number into the box.  I put -1, but when I open up the menu again the number
>is something like -19427  and the special slot is unusable.

This, one the other hand, may be a bug. I'll look into it.

*** Here is the link for a Blades of Exile mailing list. It seems worth a look.

>http://www.insidetheweb.com/messageboard/mbs.cgi/mb23194
>

>I have a few questions. First. I can't find the list for the Type of
>Dammage and the Type of Traps in the docs. Where is it?  It asks me what
>type of trap in 1a field.  What is  the difference between generic
>stairway and stairway when you edit nodes in town specs.

There is a list of all the different special node types in the appendices
of the editor docs. Run the editor and hit F1 (Windows 3.1/95) to see the
editor docs.

>How do I
>delete a area description rectangle.

The town and outdoor menus have an edit area rectangles option. You can do
this there.

>One more thing when I was working
>on my scenario and I loaded a town and there was a whole bunch of
>terrain types all messed up. Is this a bug?

Look on the Bugs page in the scenario workshop on our web site. Also, you
can get an upgrade there which will correct this problem.

In a message dated 4/18/98 11:08:36 AM, you wrote:
>Iām having trouble figuring something out.  Suppose I want to give the party
100
>gold as a reward for completing some task, but want to make sure they only
get
>that reward ONCE.  Whatās the best way to do that?

Assign a Stuff Done flag to the party getting the reward, and use a One-Shot
give item special node, with no item set and the amount of gold set to 100.

>I'm just now finishing up a scenario on my Mac.  What do I need to do, if
>anything, to modify or convert the .meg graphics file so it's usable by PC
>users?

Submit it to us. We'll do the conversion ourselves, making sure that the
palettes match up and everything like that. It's a service we're more than
happy to provide for hard working Mac and Windows scenario developers.

>In future updates of the scenario editor, could you add some if-then
>specials that check whether any of the members of the party are Nephilim or
>Slithzerikai (similar to the 'has cave lore?' and 'has woodsman?'
>specials)?  I remember that either Exile II or III could do this, but it's
>not currently a part of Blades.  Thanks.

This is a great idea for a 2.0 expansion. Thanks.


File this under things that are currently buggy:
	When I use the Orb of Foul Vapours in my Mac editor 1.0.3 it fires
a 4x4 sleep cloud!  When I change it to fire a sleep cloud, it fires a 2x2
sleep cloud, so the problem isn't swapping mislabelled abilities.
	When I give the ability Mass Charm to a special item, it pulls a
Mass Sleep on every monster within range.  This means I have to conceal the
item's ability or the player will notice that it is mislabelled.

>	2.
>	When I place too many varied monsters in a town, some of them show
>up as cave floor. It's because Blades doesn't have enough free memory. So,
>do I increase the memory in the Get Info box? If I put my scenario on the
>net, what garuntee do I have that the downloaders have a souped-up version
>of Blades? Is there some way around this? I really need to know because I'm
>making a scenario with plenty of monsters and people in each town.

Don't put too many monster types in any given town ... Blades of Exile can
only handle so many monsters at once before its memory gets overloaded. 

>     Just one quickie. Is it possible to make a shopkeeper that  sells
>things that aren't in sequential order? (A rock, a sword, and some
>arrows?)

No. Recreate the items ont he item list in sequential order to have the
shopkeeper sell them.


>Terrain types 246-251 (the special encounter spots with the white dots) are
>changeable because their number is above 90.  When I edit them, they seem to
>have just the regular attributes of their corresponding terrain types.  How
>then does the game remove the white dot when a one-shot special is triggered
>on them?

If memory serves, it looks at the terrain type's graphic to see if it's one
of the terrain types with a white dot, and adjusts it accordingly. At any
rate, I suggest just leaving any special white dot terrain you plan to use
alone.