Citizens of Egypt,

The greatest challenge in A Tale in the Desert is to complete the construction of your Discipline's Monument. In our first Tale in the Desert, all seven monuments were (barely!) completed. In A Tale in the Desert II, four of the seven Monuments were completed, and last week, the first of the "Legacy Tests," designed by the Oracles leading construction of ATITD II's monuments, was released. Unlocking The Test of True Leadership for all of Egypt will require three Lawmakers to petition a University of Leadership, all at one time.

We'll have a special chat event with the ATITD II Oracle of Leadership,Kaayru, and Test designer Balthazarr:

Saturday, 2:00PM EST (GMT-0500)

Also this weekend will be the release of the next of our Legacy Tests, the Test of the Oyster Catcher, in the discipline of The Human Body. When you sign up for this Test you will learn to swim! On Sunday, we'll have Oyster Diving demonstrations throughout the day.

Finally, we'll have the release of our next Test of Art and Music: The Test of the Prismatic Opticon. In this Test, Artists are challenged to arrange mirrors, gems, and gears to build a beautiful, moving sculpture of light.

We'll make this a "Welcome Back Weekend" in celebration - any closed account can join the fun, free, no credit card needed, no strings attached.

I can't wait to show off all the new stuff!

On the Nile,
Teppy (Pharaoh)

With the new Tale 3 in action, there's also a huge player meet going on as well. It'll be held in Pittsburgh on 22-24 September. Wow!

The newsletter is after the jump :

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I have something to admit. I've hardly been in game at all lately. Due to work obligations (most of which happily ended today...yay!), I just haven't had gaming time. But, like I said, all of that has changed, so you should be seeing a lot more from me in the near future.

I'm currently running to try to get into the first Demi-Pharoah election before it starts. DP is a test in the leadership discipline, in which an election is held to elect a DP. The elected DP has the ability to ban, permanently 7 players of his or her choice from the game. I sometimes think that this test is in the game more for the 'freak out the newbies' factor than anything. Just like last telling, all of the players who have never been through a DP election before are alternately railing against it and trying to put themselves forward as candidates. The irony is, of course, that I've yet to see anyone who announced their 'candidacy' from the beginning win. There is a great deal of distrust, in Egypt as in the real world, of those who desire power.

I've been wondering lately whether any of the players who joined this telling have a chance at winning. I think that, regardless of the population spike, we still have a majority of older players, many of whom probably won't vote for someone new. MissBarbara was the newest player who won last telling and I think that she was in-game for about 6 months before she actually won. On the one hand, this doesn't seem fair; we are, after all, supposed to be starting fresh. On the other hand, this is a test about trust. And, like it or not, each of us will trust someone we've known for a year more than someone we've known for 6 weeks. We all talk a good game about separating the character from the player behind that character, but in the end, the player is important. And, in Egypt more than in any other game I've known, we are all intrinsically meshed with the avatar on the screen. There is not character and player; there is only an amalgamation of the two.

Starting over as a peasant is great. Today was the first day of Tale 2, and it went really well. The IRC channel had about 350 people in it, which must be a record.

My guild, the House of Bes, has been working on plans for live for a few days now. Our most contentious debate was about where to put our camp and our guild hall. I wanted to try North VoK (Pharaoh's Bay), which is gorgeous but out of the way. Pretty much everyone else wanted to stay in VoK near the chariot stop. We would have played a few rounds of witagog to decide, but they wouldn't let me pick Ajars as my conflict champion. ;) I was overruled, so we are camped in the same spot we used in Beta. It is a really convenient location, and I'm sure we'll become close friends with the hundreds of new people that move in right next to us.

The rest of the day was spent building up camp and working on Agriculture research. Flax, clay, slate, straw, more flax, more slate, some wood, etc. Navigation wasn't available to learn at the school of art yet, so we added on a storage annex for our roughly 7000 thorns.

I'm still figuring out this blog thing, but I promise I'll take some pictures tomorrow.