Figured i’d start out with some of my own updates. Went to a player meet/event based on U7 last weekend. Long trip for me, lot of preparation the week prior along with other life stuff, and im just now getting caught back up somewhat!

I have some other projects I am diving into soon, but will be taking some time here and there to continue to send things your way. Hopefully before long ill be wrapping up several ongoing house projects and that will be freeing up more time as well!

Have another piece of news or two on the sidelines all written up, just needing to verify a few things before I share them with you. So in the meantime I thought id point out a few fun things.

Now obviously with E3 taking place gaming will be big in the news for a while and that includes Shroud of the Avatar.

First up we have an article at GAmezone called “5 Underrated games to keep an eye on”. Shroud of the Avatar makes #5. What makes me chuckle about this is im not sure how a game that is constantly making the top 10 lists EVERYWHERE year after year could be termed underrated. What rating do I not know about its not making? Except maybe in that the player base isn’t as big as we’d like, but what do you expect? It HASN’T LAUNCHED YET!

Regardless of the article title I am happy to see the press though!

http://www.mweb.co.za/games/ViewNewsArticle/tabid/2549/Article/20028/

What I like about this article i’m about to give you the link to, over at MMOGAMES is that its fair, honest, and overall a good review. I like that its fair and honest and still good, as that to me is what I see from the community as a majority and from Portalarium :). That said I think that you also have to take some of the article with a grain of salt and agree that personal opinions can differ, but that doesn’t make someone else’s wrong. With that viewpoint I enjoyed this piece!

http://www.mmogames.com/gamearticles/e3-2015-shroud-avatar-richard-garriott-starr-long/

RPGFAN posted a writeup that is not long but worth reading. http://www.rpgfan.com/news/2015/3389.html

You’ll want your translator on for this site for Berlin! Golem.De IT news for Professionals, has a video interview with Richard Garriott posted. A tad under 3 minutes long you can probally make time for this one.

http://video.golem.de/games/15543/shroud-of-the-avatar-interview-e3-2015.html

If you follow Vyrin at all then you know how avid of a writer and book lover he is. As well as genuinely interested in helping the community to product written works for the game of quality. Working in partnership with Womby you will have seen them featured in this weeks official update for the Unreliable Travel guide! If you are not familiar with Vyrin, he is a good friend of mine as well as a member of the Caverns Guild and he is an avid writer and book lover.

He also just started a writing collaboration for player written books in R19. A way for the community to create something together and keep that going until we can land it in game and make it something special. Not a contest, just a collaboration and suggestion. I personally think its pretty cool and heres what he has to say about it:

Many of us are extremely excited for book publishing to go live. A recent tweet from Lord British himself indicates this might be possible in R19, subject of course to the normal disclaimers.

Therefore it’s time for a community-wide and community-run writing project: The SotA Community First Series! We hope this will be counted as the first player created series of the game, and that it will start with the whole “community first”.

The idea is simple. We want as many members of the community to offer one piece of writing each. This can be a story, poem, character back story, song, etc. Post your submission in The SotA Community First Series submission thread. Everyone can contribute! It only makes sense that you do not publish a piece of writing that will already be published by Portalarium (from one of the contests). However, feel free to submit something you’ve already written.

This series will come at an important time when we can join our efforts to reflect the progress of the game and the strength of the community. It will hopefully honor Portalarium for the hard work of getting us to this point.

Submissions can be made until midnight CST before the public release date of June 25. (This would be the night of June 24/morning of June 25). There is a chance book publishing will not be in R19. In that case, we will simply extend the deadline.

Once the release goes live, every author remains the publisher of their own work. No one person or group “owns” the series. You are responsible for printing copies of your writing submission, or finding someone to do it. Then players will trade their books in game to try to collect them all. There will be book trading meetings and parties hopefully! It can become an R19 quest! That is the beauty of this effort, you will most likely want to encounter the other authors in game to collect all the volumes.

At midnight on the 24th, I will randomly assign volume numbers to help keep track of our entries and what we’ve created. When you publish your work in R19, please add “SotA Community First Series, Volume #” to whatever title (or lack of title) you have for your work.

Once there is a wipe, or finally when Episode 1 is released, each player can recreate their books, and make it a persistent part of the game world. In Episode 1 it will be a great retrospective of the active writing community at the time. Hopefully it will also be a great player-created collector’s item!

This thread will be for questions and discussing the series. Please submit your writing in the submission thread:

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f…mmunity-first-series-submission-thread.29891/

Let’s see what the community can do! Honor Portalarium! Encourage your friends!
-Vyrin

So if your interested in this hit the official forum thread and tell him Stile says hi when you put up a story!

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/join-the-community-to-honor-portalarium-and-book-publishing-the-sota-community-first-series-in-r19.29890/

Avatars Radio recently pointed me in the right direction to this cool map by Shrouded_Recluse.

https://twitter.com/avatarsradio/status/611224589293584384?refsrc=email&s=11