**>> SPYNET BULLETIN **>> EARTHDATE 93.10.10 **>> AN H-by-A SERVICE **>> Compiled by Hazed plus a team of specialist newsdroids **>> your news and gossip and get paid good groats! **>> GUEST NEWSDROID(S) Thanks to Destiny, our Guest NewsDroid last week. It was adequate, Destiny... Next week's news will be a collaborative effort, because Hazed is flying to the States for the weekend to visit Freya, They will be joined by a number of other Fedders that they will coerce into helping write the news. Goodness knows what they will come up with! **>> MAINTENANCE OUTAGE Advance warning: due to maintenance at GEnie's operations centre, Fed will be unavailable on Wednesday morning from around 6.00am eastern, and may not come back until late afternoon. **>> WHERE WERE YOU ON THE NIGHT OF...? Once again, we must remind you that if you are on the game when it crashes, PLEASE mail us and tell us what you were doing. It makes it impossible for Bella to track down the cause of the problems if she doesn't have feedback from you. If you have a capture file, that is very useful. **>> LIFE AFTER DEATH Have you ever wondered what life after death will be like? Fed is running a joint promotion with the Religion and Philosophy RT, giving you the chance to experience a selection of afterlives. The planet Heaven has been designed for us by Glurg and Tellurian, who are also assistants in R&P. You can experience their humerous vision of what may follow after death next weekend. Heaven will be linked into the game from 6.00pm eastern on Friday October 15 to 8.00am on Monday October 18. The planet Heaven could change your way of life - or death! The following Wednesday, October 20, Bella will be the guest at an RTC in the R&P area, talking about the moral and philosophical implications of writing a multi-player game. Watch the Fed main page for details of the time. **>> FUTURE SPECIAL EVENTS At the end of October is Halloween, and GEnie is running a promotion to celebrate. As always, we'll be taking part by linking in a special planet. Oxcart is writing us a gothic horror planet that will be in for the Halloween weekend. Mid-November, we will finally (finally!) get to see Krell's planet depicting the Fed UnCon get-together earlier this year in May. Find out what we all did and where we all went. The planet (which so far is nameless) will be linked in for the weekend of November 12-15. Freya is writing us a Thanksgiving planet for the end of November, giving you the chance to experience the traditional family holiday - and what can go wrong! This will be in the game from November 25-29. More news about these special events nearer the time. **>> EAT YOUR GREENS There's one more special planet that you will get the chance to explore over the next few weeks. As you know, those jolly nice H-by-A people are working hard to update the printed version of the Idiot's Guide. They've almost finished; apart from minor tweaks to the main text, there is one appendix still to be written. This appendix is to assist would-be planet builders. It will be the workbench files of a sample planet, together with a capture of a walkthrough of the planet. Both will have notes explaining exactly how the effects are achieved. Hazed is in the middle of writing the planet at the moment. Her original intention was that it should be a small sample, maybe ten locations... but as she thought about it, she came up with more and more things that she needed to have examples of on the planet. And so it grew. It's currently over 50 locations, and it's not finished yet! The planet Cabbage will be linked into the game, for one night only, at some point over the next few weeks, to give Hazed the chance to capture the walkthrough. You will also get the chance to see this planet, and find out why it has such a silly name. **>> BELLA NEWS There's actually very little to report from the Green one. She's working hard doing background work on the game, as she has been for several weeks. The end result of all this work will make more memory available to the game - so that when we put special planets in for promotional events, we can leave all the player-planets in too! That's certainly something to look forward to. **>> DAWN COMES TO FED Maxwell's new planet, Dawn, was linked into the game at the end of the week. Our special correspondent had this to say: With the coming of Dawn to Fedspace we sent our trusty newsdroids to investigate this new planet. We sent in five. Only three came back, and one of those had its circuits fried. The other two reported that Dawn is a terraforming world. Maxwell is going to extreme lengths to make a frozen rock in space a nice place to live. It appears that Dawn was found by some explorers deep in interstellar space about a year ago. It was useless to anyone except planetary geologists, and perhaps some exo-archaeologist. But it was cheap from a real estate perspective. Enter explorer Maxwell, looking for a cheap place to build. Max gets the idea that he should bring life to this frozen wasteland. Max bought the planet and has constructed a huge domed city in which to live while the rest of the planet is slowly improved. Its unclear exactly how long this is going to take. Newsdroids report that the city isn't quite finished but sports several interesting bars and restaurants with more under construction. Maxwell has categorically denied that his planet is infested with vampires, but we wonder what the missing newsdroids might have to say about that. As a side note, Maxwell tells us that there's a 20 meg reward for the first player to solve his puzzle, and 2 meg will go to each of the next 10 runners up. That's surely incentive to explore the planet, if any more was needed! Well done Maxwell, this is a very good example of how to write an interesting planet. Actually, there was a problem with Dawn when it first went in... people were getting trapped in space! An error in the movement table meant that if you went UP from the orbit, you couldn't go back down again. Bella fixed this as soon as she spotted the problem, but it serves as a gentle reminder to prospective Squires: you must check your workbench listings carefully, and you MUST MUST MUST run your planet through the Checker to pick up any potential problems. **>> TOO MANY COOKS Poor Hypatia - she's been trying to do the GM puzzle, but has been listening to too much conflicting advice from too many helpers. Result: she's ended up completely confused, and keeps getting it wrong and dying! Maybe she'd better just pick one advisor she knows she can trust... **>> REGISTRY REWARD When Bochiman became a Duke and his planet went nova, he promised to pay rewards to people who had ships registered on Hell. The first reward has now been paid to Ohm. **>> THE DEMON DRINK We have long been aware that there is a lot of drunkenness and licentious behaviour in Fed Data Space. And long may it continue! It certainly makes our lives as NewsDroids much easier... The latest victim of the demon drink was Gemini. She had quite a lot too much to drink last week, and became extremely inebriated. While she was in a drunken stupor, a nameless man took advantage of her! Tellurian, her lover, was not terribly amused by this (as you can imagine). He wanted to have serious words with her but she kept avoiding him, no doubt from shame at her wanton behaviour. Finally, he managed to corner her and persuade her to speak to him, and the two had a long, drawn out and very painful conversation about the event. They are now back together again, but still feeling very confused and upset by the incident. Now what we all want to know, don't we, is the identity of the nameless man! There's actually only a small number of men in Fed Data Space who are dastardly enough to take advantage of a hapless maiden in such a way, so we have a pretty shrewd idea who this menace to society might have been. However, we shall refrain from printing our guess... if we receive a large enough bribe... **>> LOVE IN AN ELEVATOR Semaphore and Azure have been spotted smooching in the elevator on Source. Cue the Aerosmith song... Meanwhile, Blackadder declared his undying love for Gypsyrose and asked her to marry him. He said he would swear off all other women for good if she agreed. How romantic! He also said that if she turned him down, he would have no choice but to chase down and nail every available woman in Fed so that he could forget her! What a lucky escape for Fed's womanhood - Gypsyrose said yes, and Tellurian married them. Phew! **>> FAMILY BREAKUP? Following last week's tentative reports about Sean and Freya dancing together, we've been hearing more reports about her behaviour. Her name has been linked with a number of men over the last week, including Occy and Tellurian... and it leads us to speculate that her relationship with the Godfather might be over. We'll despatch a NewsDroid to see if we can find out more details. **>> PLANETS AND DUCHIES There are several other new planets waiting to be linked into the game. Nautilus, owned by Chainsaw will go in tomorrow or Tuesday. Nightstalker's Nightfall will go in at the end of the week. Then early the week after Rand's planet Aiel will be linked. As a prelude to his planet, Chainsaw has uploaded some information about his world to the Fed library in the MPGames BBS. NAUTINFO.TXT is file number 3289, and contains a press release from the Nautilian Government. Meanwhile, there's been a fair bit of movement between the duchies, following the new Duke (Menace) and Senator (Glurg) last week. Canna, Paradigm and Nemesis have all joined up with Niun's Ocean, while Insanity and Paradise have signed treaties with Jim's Crime - yes, at last Jim has some serfs he can boss around. Elsewhere has left Bochiman's Hell and joined up with Menace's new duchy of Xhit, and Xixax has joined Gotham. It will be interesting to see which duchy manages to snare the new planets over the next few weeks! **>> SPYNET REVIEW This week, we bring you a bumper crop of two-weeks' worth of promotions, since the Guest NewsDroid last week didn't have access to the SpyNet Review files. The fortnight's new Captains were Gorg, Daraine, Cabbot, Murasaki, Gladior, Lucan, Kiyote, Ford, Fritz, Traque, Dynop, Nimble, Dominator, Tom, Dokto, Mazie, Alexander, Tarus, Motormouth, Majorhavoc, Taliesin, Astromike, Zenka, Ragnarok, Emirikol and Hoplite. The new Adventurers and -euses are Murasaki, Flick, Wapa, Kedar, Ford, Juno, Mcbain, Scott, Dominator, Harnaz, Tom, Gorg, Killer, Ragnarok and Lemans. The Traders' Guild has new members: Melchior, Staff, Semaphore, Gooseman, Lawson, Kedar, Warrl, Juno, Mcbain, Flick and Tom. Blackadder, Redwin, Semaphore and Capt all reached Merchant. Skurge and Tabby solved the awesome JP puzzle, and Icepirate, Phaedrus, Amber, Chainsaw and Amigan cracked the fiendish GM puzzle. Icepirate, Chainsaw, Amigan and Phaedrus went on to become Explorers. We look forward to seeing their new planets soon. Neuromancer became a Squire when his new planet was linked to the game. Noe has been promoted to Thane, and Plantking is a Technocrat. There were five new companies formed over the period: Blackadder formed EbonSnake Ltd, Semaphore started Visual Signals, Chainsaw formed 1st National Bank of Nautilus, Redwing started Redwing's Flight and Capt became CEO of Brutal Delux. There were a number of dead-deaths - Merchant Lurana, Adventurer Edge and Trader Mcbain all died. We have no idea of the cause of any of these. **>> CONTACTS The following information will appear at the end of every News Bulletin, so you don't have to read it if you already know it. In the event of a problem or question, you can: * talk to Hazed or Bella in the game * a message to Hazed or Bella * send GEnie mail with the Mail about Federation option from the main menu A front-end terminal program is available for Federation, for the PC. You can download a copy of FedTerm from the Federation libraries (option 3 on the main Fed page). The Amiga version is in beta-test. You can order a copy of the unexpurgated printed Idiot's Guide to Federation by typing ORDER at any GEnie menu. Cost - a mere $12.95. (New edition will be available shortly - and this time we really mean it!) Federation has several categories in the new MPGames RT. To get there, type M1045,1 from any menu prompt and SET category 13 (for information, instructions, questions and answers) or 14 (for general chat and discussions). The Federation Leader in the bulletin board is Oxcart (Mail ID: J.LONG29). There are also private categories for Explorers and the Sentate, run by Krell (Mail ID: K.HILLYER). The MPGames RT also has a Federation library in the files area, Library 5. Library 18 holds the Federation News Archives. **>> BULLETIN ENDS