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So an interesting and outdated piece of news, ACR v1.87 was released back in July!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