How to Destroy a Town Sure, towns can be changed by time, but often you may want a certain event to wreck a town or dungeon, or to bring a sleeping fort back to life. This is especially useful when you have quickfire ravage a town and then you return to explore its ruins. Such a case was sulfras's lair in Exile 2. However there is no command to make a player go to a different town when the step on a space if a certain flag is active. But there are several ways to make a copy of a town on the same space which you can then ruin or bring back to life. Each have their own advantages and disadvantages, and this is the subject of this paper. (Editor's note: While some of these solutions are interesting, the Set Variable Town Entry feature was included to do just this. This window is reached using the Scenario window. However, these methods are also intriguing and worth mentioning.) 1) Just move the town: the easiest way is to have the special hide the town and then reveal a second town right next to it. If you want, the second town to be exactly like the first, except it is ruined then just import the first town into the second and make the necessary changes. The great thing about this method is that the two towns can be exact duplicates and you can ruin one already knowing that what you haven't changed is a duplicate of the other. But it is hard to explain how your town moved on the outside map. I have had a cave dissipear, turn to rubble, and reveal a cave behind it. Then I say that the front of the second cave was blown away and make the party start much farther forward in the second cave then they noramlly would to account for the new entrance. This method is the easiest for creating a duplicate but you will have to think up of a good reason for the movement, else it will look wierd. 2) Use a special to change the town. This special would occur everytime a party entered the town and it could then change the landscape, activate other nodes, and then activate special town encounters. Thus instead of wandering monsters (unfortinitly specials can't affect the occurance of wandering mosnters) you could place several bucnhes of monsters in the town when the party entered each time. Or with a certain encounter all the town folk could come back to life. The problem with using a special is that it is very labor intensive to change the landscape since you must change the terrian one box at a time. However this way works well since it doesn't disrupt the outdoor location of a town. But the lack of wandering monsters might make a dungeon a bit too easy. This is a good way to change a town if you want a town destroyed, but not much terrian changed and not to many monsters, mostly just new specials and perhaps a entrance to a now revealed new town/dungeon. 3) Use the stairway command. Perhaps the best way to change a town is to use the stairway command. Using a special set on the party's entrance space you can have them activate a stairway (use stairway #8 which won't give them any dialog box) to another town which is an exact duplicate but is different. The only problem with this method (I haven't tested it yet) is that there is a noticable delay with the stairway command as the new town loads and there might be a visual notice. If you can get it to work well though, it could be the easiest of the three. Using these three methods, having the outdoor location moved, having a special make the changed, or using a stairway you can easily ruin a town (right after the party returns from a big quest, for example) or have the party bring a town back to life (sleeping beauty?). The former has many uses, a town could be destroyed, and tower pillaged, or a evil fort destroyed by the PCs who return to explore the ruins. Destroying a town gives a scenario many more possibilities and adds to the fun when the PCs find their main base not quite the way it used to be. I hope that my explination of different ways to destroy a town has made this process clearer and easier for the everyday scenario creator. -Asa Swain (eswain@tiac.net)