Hello, Everyone!

I recently had announced that The Caverns Guild had upgraded the Player Owned Town of Neath, In Shroud of the Avatar, to a Village. That was the first of several things that were taking place needing some announcing to be done for. It is with a lot of excitement I get to announce the rest of this stuff!

I am going to start with a few quick summaries, and then few a say additional words. I realize this is a bit on the large side as such posts go, but am hoping that with such cool announcements and the support we are showing to Shroud of the Avatar as part of the community, you will take the time to consider them.

-First, In addition to becoming a Village, Neath is slated to become a Mountain Biome on Release 32. The name is not changing.

-Then we have an additional biome that has been purchased which will be an Underground Biomed, connected to Neath! This PoT has been bought as a Hamlet. The name is “The Caverns Under Neath”.

-Finally, we ARE recruiting! We are looking for both Guild Members and Residents. The two do not have to be connected in any way, and I will say more on that in a moment.

In a moment I will share with you a piece that my Guild wrote regarding looking for people to join the guild. Before I do so though on behalf of The Caverns Guild and myself, I want to say thank you to Time Lord. After all of that I also have some specific community establishments we will be creating in Neath and Under Neath, I wish to share.

Time Lord is very much behind this addition to the Caverns Guild and Neath. Without him contacting us as well as his contributions neither the addition of another PoT nor the upgrade would have happened. Thank you Time Lord for your belief in us! I would say more but cannot find the words.

This was written by members of the guild with input from all. I will say a few words of my own after that, and on some additional, but related topics after these words from The Caverns Guild!

To all ‘n sundry:

The Caverns guild is currently looking for a few new members. We are a small group of active and creative players that tend to think outside the box. We are loosely organized, and enjoy hanging out and helping each other.

Many of our guild members have been involved in innovative and creative endeavors in SOTA. These include (as just a sampling) the NBTT (New Brittania Theatre Troupe headed by Lord Baldrith), Vyrin & Womby’s “Writers of the Round Table” and their “Unreliable Travel Guide” series, Womby’s film company, “Acting Out” and his Isle of Ghosts story-quest island POT (located off the north end of Spindrift Isle) and various events and contests such as ‘The Shape of Things To Come“. Just recently our Lady Kate wrote a ‘New Player Handbook‘ that Portalarium will include in all starting players’ inventories!

This is just a small sampling… there are many more endeavors currently underway by various members of The Caverns.

The people we are looking for would be creative, non-traditional, self-motivated, easy-going and have a good sense of humor. If you tend toward mild insanity, don’t mind a bit of rowdy drunkenness, and have a suicidal desire to leap off any high place — this may indeed be the guild for you!

Here are a few additional items of interest:
Our guild leader, Sir Stile Teckel has been around since the kickstarter and before. He is an Ultima Dragon! He has created an AWESOME website “Caverns, Dungeon’s & Beyond” at thecaverns.net (which is full of great stuff like the weekly podcast, Echoes from the Caverns and also The Caverns Store). Stile is well-respected in the SOTA community for all his hard work and his commitment to making the game a success. The Caverns, Dungeon’s & Beyond website also hosts our guild’s forums, and we have a teamspeak channel available to guild members.

As a guild we encourage diplomacy and tolerance and will not be engaging in PvP or guild warfare. (Although we certainly want individual members to follow their own consciences. )

Our guild now has two POT’s! A mountain biome called ‘Neath’ and a nested underground biome, ‘The Caverns Under Neath’. We will have several lots available, and our guild members will get first pick of lot placements. Neath & The Caverns Under Neath are located on the south coast of Spindrift Bay, between Brittany and PaxLair.

If this sounds like your sort of place, then please come visit us at thecaverns.net/Discussion and introduce yourself.

My turn!

We have an LOT to offer members and residents, and I am going to share that with you. It’s a long post because we have THAT MUCH to share. We will be EXTREMELY careful with whom we share with, and I will never risk any of my personal property. Thanks to a growing permissions list, though, the game is giving us the tools to share what we have, without risk.

Neath is going to have some establishments available to the community that has never been announced until now! Let’s talk about the planned layout first, though, so you can visualize things a wee bit.

Picture where you enter on the Mountain Biome. Right at the starting point is a little sort of path up which opens into a large plateau area, right at the entrance. This will be our town center and where all public/community buildings will be placed.

Alternatively, you can zap into The Caverns Under Neath, and you will be in the underground biome. The town center will be directly in front of that, where you are accustom to seeing us set things up.

Residents of the PoT’s will, for the most part, be free to choose where they place in the biome. We currently have an excess of lots and so can accommodate most reasonable requests if we are adding someone to our clan.

Current plans for the town center in Neath include (and being announced for the first time in some instances!):

LIBRARY!

The Great Library of Neath! I am using a Tax-Free lot in Neath, which will be a public library. It will include either a 5-story or arena basement, whichever is decided will work better. The library will be run by Womby, Vyrin, and Myself primarily with additional help from the guild where and when needed, and as people want and are willing.

We hope this library will contain every book every published in the game, although I realize that may not even be possible. It will also run events to trade, sell, and buy books, such as book fairs! We will gladly accept all book donations, and we hope to establish trade with other community libraries in the game.

I do not know what all we will accomplish in the way of a website for this project, but there have been talks of wanting a website which would work something along the lines of RPOTA, in being an extensive database. The idea being that an author can submit various form categories of their work, which can then be queried by users. This could include trade lists, needs, haves, etc., so as to affiliate trade for the collectors, bookstores, and libraries.

PLEASE if you are willing to work with us on setting up such a website contact me. We are a small guild, and we all carry a lot of project loads. The website is very iffy at this time without more people that can setup and code such a site.

We will have vendors at the Library.

TAVERN

The Stone Mug is a Village tax-free lot, basement (5 stories or arena), and a house I am supplying, to be a Tavern in Neath. Womby will be the Head manager of the establishment with myself (owner) and willing guild members helping out and filling in wherever needed.

We will have vendors at the Tavern.

THE HEART

I am putting a taxed row house in Neath for myself to live in. This will be a combination of the Neath caretakers office, guild headquarters, personal home, and so forth. It will go in the town center and most likely get a five-story basement. I will live in the five-story basement as my home in Neath, as will the Neath caretaker “Oddjob”, which is one of my alts and manager/owner of bother towns for purposes of permissions.

The main and above ground levels of the house will be used to host guild meetings, a place to meet up, formally join new recruits or take care of other business, talk with other players and guilds, store supplies and decorations being shared by the town and or guild, and any number of other things. Obviously, with a row house not being very large it will serve for those purposes only when large enough and when not another location will serve instead.

For instance The Caverns Guild also has a City sized lot that will be being placed outside of Neath in one of the larger world towns which will serve as a combination of those same sort of purposes outside of Neath, but will be limited to the use of Guild members only rather then a combination of guild members and Neath residents.

I will be using the vendor at the row house but if I have room on it will share as available.

In time it is our hope to have the town center being a large market. We plan on eventually offering a full set of crafting stations for public use as well as other tools bound to properties that can be shared with the public.

Sundries from Beneath is a town lot I will be placing, if possible, in one of the major world cities in the game. This will be a combination Inn and vendor shop. I will be sharing vendor space with guild members in exchange for help with advertising and running the place. I am not sure how much space everyone that wants some will be able to have, or even if we will have to put in some sort of waiting list system or what have you. However, I will be sharing what I am able.

The majority of the interior and basement I plan to turn into an inn and rent rooms to players for gold if this is something that is worthwhile to do and there is a market.

I am placing a full set of Royal Found crafting tables at this establishment right away for public use. I have multiple other items that will be placed here for public use. These are a combination of services being offered to our customers and furnishings for the renters to use. In time when I can acquire the top level in game crafting stations, I will update the place with them.

I’ll also take a room or a basement level or some such at this establishment to use for myself.

Stonedeep is our City sized lot which I am providing for guild use. This will be placed in one of the large world NPC towns, and I am also providing a house and basement to go with it. Five stories or arena as far as the basement goes, whichever works better, we will retain both.

Guild members will have permissions based on their time and roles in the guild for different things. I will be donating a lot of crafting stations to the building right off the bat, if not a full set. In time I hope to have a complete set there. I also hope to have multiple different chests set-up for things from donations to sharing items, to lottery stuff, or even for emergency equip, meant for guild events raised from guild funds.

The city lot IS taxed, but I will be reducing it by 50% each month. I hope that guild funds, just raised from doing things like guild events where maybe we put a small percentage into the funds or something like that, would handle the tax without actually making a dent in the coffers at that point.

I’ll try to take a small room somewhere at this location as my office. Big enough to meet in the game with a couple of people about guild topics, but anything larger than that we would use the meeting hall. The place will serve all the functions a typical guild hall normally would.

We have many more shared resources, but I have spent enough time on them at this point to give prospective people an idea of what we offer as benefits. Obviously, those benefits will have restricted access which goes away over time as we get to know and trust each other. We have to be careful of bad apples, though.

As far as Guild vs. Resident.

Obviously, we prefer people who are all in and want to be a part of both, but that’s not a requirement. Guild members will have the first choice of lots, but we have a LOT of them, and we are willing to consider people that only want to be a resident. Note though that if you’re going to be a resident we would want someone that is willing to contribute in some way, even if it is just helping with an event now and then and that sort of thing.

If you are looking to just join the guild and not reside in the town, that is fine also. We have members that will not be doing so and those that do not own a house. There is no housing requirement to be in our guild in any shape or form.

One benefit of the Guild House in the City will be, I hope to offer private rooms to guild members that need a place to store some things and sleep at night!

So you can sign up for one, the other, or both and that is ok! Just understand that the more someone is offering, willing to contribute, the more priority they will get in turn. That does NOT mean we do not want the casual player o those not offering a lot.

We have members that are not even playing yet, may not for a while, and that will be casual players. We are open minded and easy to live with!

I could say and share a lot more but would like to wrap this post up as I have a guild meeting in 20 minutes. I would just finish with saying, do not be intimidated in looking to join us because we have a lot of members that have a lot of community recognition. That is really just a partial representation of who we are and while we enjoy it, we do not do what we do for those things. We do it out of enjoyment!

We just want mature people, that want to enjoy things like we do and that won’t cause trouble. I see us as a bunch of cave mushroom group of peace loving and creative hippies!

We do not want to make joining hard, who does? If you go to a guild though and ask about joining, unless they would have reason to be already familiar with you, if they just say sure without even wanting to get to know you, then you need to be asking yourself if you are joining the right guild.

Let’s face it; there are evil people in this world. You don’t want them in a guild you are joining, and if the guild has no protection in place, then you are going to have them fo sure. No matter what the protection you will get them, but its important to do all you can to limit the pain.

When I recruit a person in the guild, I just ask that someone in the guild knows them and vouches for them. More is better. What this means is just get to know one of us. Me, or someone else. Make sure you like what you see and vice versa.

Personally, if you drop me, a note I’ll meet you in the game and well adventure a bit together. Maybe also have a Teamspeak conversation for a bit. I’ll ask you what movies you watch, what books you read, and what you had for breakfast and invite you to do the same. A little conversation and a little gameplay together is the best way to tell if someone is a MUTUAL good fit for a guild. An individual can be an excellent person but may not fit into a particular group well. We just want to weed out the creeps, make sure you’ll be able to survive our quirks, and be happy with us.

Ok, all, lots of love and peace from Stile Teckel and The Caverns Guild!