This one took a lot of work, and it's weird and new! Hope you enjoy!

It's a crate promotion! Airships have been flying overhead, and seem to have lost their cargo when they inevitably crashed for daring to challenge the natural order! OH NO! Bonus for you, because in Aetolia, it's finder's keeper's.

Crates will be everywhere. They might drop from mobiles, they'll be rewards from events when I get bored, I'll even bury them under the ground! Share with your friends! Sell them in shops!

Oh, you want to open them? Therein lies the rub, my friend. It takes a mighty version of your standard crowbar to handle these stout crates. These magical crowbars are, of course, available on the website in similar structure to crytpic chests. They'll also appear in events as prizes, and you can get one for 21 logindays this month! I'll put in other ways, too!

Inside each crate will be three relic pieces. What are they for? It's easier to list what they won't be... they won't be relics available as mob-drops or the crystal relics. Everything else is game. Everything except venom rags, really. Pieces to sets even I didn't know existed!

New relics this promotion:

A Talisman of Sapience
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HELP TALISMAN
1x Pockmarked Disc of Venantium
3x tiny etched gems in latticework

This talisman will give you boosts based upon what carvings it holds within. Where do carvings come from?

A small carving of ....
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3x miniscule fragments of ....

These fragments and carvings all mimic some environment in the world. These, combined with the TALISMAN command, will unlock the boosts you gain from your talisman. There are... well, there are a lot of them. 131 environments. This will not be the only time you see these little guys, but it will be the easiest way to get them.
(I have specifically been asked to not be a jerk by Antehe. So, there are less than 131. I removed all environments that are < 10 rooms in the game, are stupid, unavailable to mortals, or unreleased.)


Now, this is different. Normally we do not have a gate between money spent and reward gotten. We think that enough crates will appear and change hands that there shouldn't be a shortage. Please feel free to contact Me with your opinion, and we'll modify things as needed. More crates? Less crates? We also don't want to alienate the free-content seekers, so I've made sure with logindays you have at LEAST one crowbar to get. But we're considering other ways. Also, none of this is loyalty bound until you open the crate, so anyone can exchange with anyone.

-T

PS. The expected value (ev) of each crate is about 18 credits. That makes this a pretty good deal. Just so you know. We'll tweak odds as we go... but the most common drop is an environment fragment, worth 1 credit, and the second most common is the Talisman, worth 5 credits. In a perfect world, a crate's contents should be along the pattern:

Random relic piece
Random relic piece OR Talisman piece
Environment fragment

But that's not hard coded. Your crate could be all relic fragments, or all pieces worth 222 credits each.

We are playing with concepts like:
Hard coding the odds above
Letting you get a sneak peak of something in the crate before you open/sell
Selling crates on the webpage for cheap, so you can skip the gathering part, or open up a market

Please let us know what you think!

Penned by my hand on Falsday, the 16th of Slyphian, in the year 468 MA.