Community:Quests/Welcome Quest

The Welcome Quest is a quest for all people to see many towns and establishments. It is created every 6 months as a way for people to visit many player-ran locations. It involves each town and establishment to give the quest person some information and then instructions to go to the next location (a town or establishment) to do something. The path may be sequential from place to place or in parallel to multiple places at the same time. The goal is for towns and establishments to showcase their places, educate the people, and work with other player-ran towns/establishments.

Quest Idea Origin
Duke Greagoir came up with this idea just before the Pre-alpha Release 7. Many people agreed with the idea and also said "why not give it a try in Release 7".

How the quest works
Basically, you visit one town (or establishment) and look for a specific place, person, or item. When you find what you are looking for, you will need to do something (talk to someone, craft something, receive something, read a book, observe something in a room). After doing something at that location, you are sent to see another town (or establishment) again looking for someone or something specific to do or see. This continues to different places until finishing at the end.

There are variations on how this works:
 * Sequential: Start at one place, sequentially go to different places, and end at a single place. This works best when instructions are given at each place to go to the next place.  However, the chain could be broken if the quester can not find the place or the person at the place is unavailable. In R7, we found the chain to be broken due to zoning and different instances (effect unknown when zoning).
 * Multiple: Start at any of several places and get instructions on what to do at many different places. This works best using a guide book of sorts.  There is no specific start or finish location, unless specified in the quest.
 * Virtue Question: Debuted in R9. Start at one starting place. Answer a question and you can then go to one of several places and get instructions on what to do next. This works best using a guide person.

Many of the Welcome Quests are implementing multiple of the above variations.

In the news

 * July 18, 2014 - Richard "Lord British" Garriott takes us deep into the world of Shroud of the Avatar, by Gordon Cameron, Plugged In, Yahoo blogs.
 * And so for example I was in on this last play session. There was a group -- two groups, two new towns were forming. One was the Celtic town -- I don't know if they're going to have a more formal name in the future, but they called themselves the Celtic town for this round -- and PaxLair, got together to run some quests. And what they did is they actually put player character quest-givers in each of these towns that demanded that you bring them things that you could find or make in the real world before you would get the clue to go on to someone else in this chain of real players they put together, and then they would require you to make or gather other things as they went around. And so you have this very long, very sophisticated quest, where, as we looked at it, we said wow, that was actually a lot of fun -- how hard would it be for us to give guilds the ability to craft objects that were truly unique to that guild? And so literally the only way to get that special quest item was to either be a member of that guild, or have visited, via a quest, that guild.

Release 9 Welcome Quest
Player towns and establishments may have a Welcome Quest in Release 9.

SCHEDULE AND PLAN IS TENTATIVE:


 * Saturday, August 23, 2014 at 3 PM CDT
 * --20:00 GMT -- 21:00 London -- Monday, 06:00 Australia/Sydney


 * Player Towns participating:
 * - PaxLair - Arrive at the Entrance to Valemark at 12:00 PM CDT to start the quest - Location: Valemark in R9 - Contact: Winfield
 * - "Dara Brae, The Celtic Holdfast" player-ran Holdfast occupying Northshire in R9 - contact: Duke Greagoir
 * - Vengeance player-ran PVP village occupying The Brave Coast in R9 - contact: Duke Violation
 * - Beran's Reach Home to The Bear Tavern occupying ... in R9. Contact: Kumakaze or Vallas via the forums.

Release 8 Welcome Quest
Player towns and establishments may have a Welcome Quest in Release 8. The discussion thread is here.

SCHEDULE AND PLAN IS TENTATIVE:


 * Saturday, July 26, 2014 at 12 PM (Noon) CDT
 * -- 17:00 GMT -- 18:00 London -- Monday, 03:00 Australia/Sydney


 * Player Towns participating:
 * - PaxLair - Arrive at the Entrance to Valemark at 12:00 PM CDT to start the quest - Location: Valemark in R8 - Contact: Winfield
 * - "Celtic Holdfast" player-ran Holdfast occupying Northshire in R8 - contact: Duke Greagoir
 * - Vengeance player-ran PVP village occupying ... in R8 - contact: Duke Violation

Release 7 Welcome Quest
Player towns and establishments had a successful Welcome Quest in Release 7. The discussion thread is here. Even Lord British arrived for part of the quest.


 * Sunday, June 29, 2014 at 12 PM (Noon) CDT
 * -- 17:00 GMT -- 18:00 London -- Monday, 03:00 Australia/Sydney


 * Player Towns participating:
 * - PaxLair - Arrive at the Entrance to Valemark between 12:00-12:30 PM CDT to start the quest - Location: Valemark in R7 - Contact: Winfield or Sean Silverfoot (PAX)
 * - "Celtic Holdfast" player-ran Holdfast occupying Northshire in R7 - contact: Duke Greagoir
 * - Beran's Reach Home to The Bear Tavern. Location: SW shore of The Brave Coast [Area: VillageIslandVariant2 Loc: (-147.3, 133.5, -188.4)] Contact: Kumakaze or Vallas via the forums.