The Moonshaes server 009 is now open to the public and will be from 15 December to 15 Janurary.

Our land is beautiful, the life it gives us is good. How could it be otherwise? The land is the Goddess. But the Goddess serves the Balance, and as goodness grows in power, so must evil have its day. Wherefore all who live in the Moonshaes have felt the bite of evil as it rises again and again to threaten us.

What can vanquish it, for a time?  The forces of good.  And what are they?  They have a thousance faces and a thousand names.  We call them heroes.  -Andabbar Meihklann, Bard of the Snows

Welcome to the Moonshaes Isles, or the isleas as they are commonly called by their inhabitants, where light and dark struglle for dominance in a never ending conflict.  Here various human and demihuman cultures meet, sometimes warring, sometimes living in peace.

Existing ALFA members as well as the general NWN2 population are encouraged to log in and play with a shiny new PC. New players who enjoy the ALFA experience and wish to join our most excellent community can make the application through the side bar on our main page (the one you are reading right now). We are worth it!

Remember to remain in character at all time, and no running without reason. Feel free to register for the web site and join us in IRC chat (also found in the side bar on this page). It’s a great way to ask questions, or find a DM and other players to adventure with. We are a friendly bunch, so don't be shy.  we won't be.

To log in use the direct connect function in NWN2.  Type in ms.alandfaraway.org:5121 (then connect!)

FAQ for the open server can be found here.

http://www.alandfaraway.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=364&t=48617

The open server forum is here.

http://www.alandfaraway.org/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=364

Basic lore on the MS can be found here.

http://www.alandfaraway.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=364&t=44738

For current ALFA DM’s the password can be found in the ALFA DM forums.

http://www.alandfaraway.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=132&t=48761

For current ALFA players who wish to DM during open season please ask MS HDM Castano.

(Some links will not be usable be those who have not registered for the ALFA website/forums - so please do so)

Despite being international in scope, in scale ALFA is predominantly an american project. Hurricane Sandy has had a measurable impact on our own project - it has left some of our members without electricity, and it has knocked one of our servers off the grid.

Thus, as an example of our spirit of community as well as to encourage it, ALFA's Administration has unanimously decided to support the American Red Cross' efforts of disaster relief. Some of our Administrators have already donated, others still will. You will read here from all as we hope that this example can inspire more of our fellow community members to give something if they can, and talk about it on our forums.

Information about this is found here (member's only page currently): 
http://www.alandfaraway.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=48594

I've gone and proven myself a slacker with the last update.

So an interesting and outdated piece of news, ACR v1.87 was released back in July!

And in more-recent news, ACR v1.88 is officially released!

This update is primarily fixes, with attention given to many modules that have historically been thorns in our sides-- turn undead, combat expertise, trade scrolls, and invisibility have all gotten a little bit less painful to deal with, while (Greater) Magic Weapon is a little bit friendlier to archers and unarmed combatants. We've also added a few more spells, including Dimensional Anchor, to provide the most-available canonical way to prevent spells like Teleport or Dimension Door.

We've also seen ALFA's combat AI finally into a usable state-- though it hasn't yet entirely conquered the previous system, modules can now opt in with specific creatures to allow them to use the new combat logic, and we officially have monsters-- the zSpawn shadows-- who use it by default.

Happy gaming!

Today, we're rolling out the latest version of the ALFA Core Rules. This set of changes is pretty significant, so players can expect a sizable download the first time they log into an updated server. We have the full change log in our technical documentation, as always, here.

Major thanks to the tech team for helping us get this together: Basilica, Paazin, FoamBats, and Ronan.

A few highlights from this release:

Automated Crafting -- Players who have the Scribe Scroll, Brew Potion, and Craft Wand will be able to craft items according to the rules set down by ALFA's DM team. Similarly, players with other crafting feats will be able to run crafting projects for permanent items with DM oversight (but only with DM oversight). 

Swimming -- Players who enter water will find that some of them-- specified by builders-- will require the players to swim. It comes with animations and responds appropriately to the swim skill, and includes drowning: be careful, and don't swim until you've put your tower shield away and given your lunch a chance to settle.

Player Report -- DMs who open the player list (by pressing P) will notice that the old player-facing report has been replaced with something much more useful to DMs. On the report is easy access to the server's wealth, a rough glance at players' alignments, faiths, and character classes, and an idea of who is partied with who. The reports are fairly powerful, and DMs who wish to get the most out of them should read the release notes for details.

Today, we release the latest version of the ALFA Core Rules. This update includes the medley of updates and fixes we typically include in a rollout, and headlines significant improvements to our ability to have servers communicate with each other and for players to communicate across server and medium boundaries.

The ALFA IRC Bot (which maintains a presence in #alfa-players) now responds to a !page command, which allows one-way messages to be sent to players in game-- just in case you need to get a hold of someone who typically plays in full screen. It's limited to 256 characters, and not meant to hold any significant information, but can get a person's attention. The Bot now also responds to !seen, and will respond with the last time that a given player was logged in, and which server the player was on.

In addition, it is now possible to send tells to players on other ALFA servers. Players will notice a revised chat select GUI window, which now divides itself into two panes (one for DMs and one for players), which can expand to four panes (local players, local DMs, remote players, remote DMs) on demand. The expected interaction is the same as before: clicking on the person you wish to send a tell to will stage your chat entry box with the needed text, or you can type #t "Character Name" at the beginning of a message to send a tell to that character.

Thanks and accolades go to Basilica for building the structure that these systems use, and for getting our new ALFA IRC Bot more than up to snuff-- bringing in functionality that we've simply never seen before.

One with eyes on the horizon would note the coming implementation of automated pen-and-paper style consumable crafting, currently expected to be in ACR v1.86.

Recently, we’ve seen more activity and larger numbers on our servers, enough so that it has been the cause of speculation as to why, how, or how severe it all is. Fortunately, ALFA has always kept solid data on its activity, though it has until recently been relatively disorganized in its appearance. Roughly a year ago, Hialmar produced scripts that would read our database to determine overall player and DM activity, track application numbers, and try to keep up with ALFA’s overall health.

Most recently, those scripts have been bent toward looking at ALFA’s history, to see how active we’ve been in the past, and how things in our history have affected our progress and growth, and it has produced some interesting statistics: namely, ALFA today is more active than ALFA has ever been. There are simply more people logged on more often than before: even in those first bustling days of ALFA2.

And so I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who contributes effort and creativity to our shared project and makes it a more appealing place to play.

It’s super effective.