Isle of Morrow

Version 1.6.0: The Trades Remember

Isle of Morrow was designed as an homage to the island games of 1985, and its design said five things the shipped game never quite did. 1.6.0 closes that gap. Every trade now plays the way its description always promised: the Martial Artist fights with their hands and feet, skills sharpen with use, Thaumaturges answer to their gods, the trades dress like themselves, and the Knighthood belongs to the Fighters who earned it. Your world, your characters and your gear all survive the upgrade; the island walks itself forward the first time anyone steps ashore.

The Martial Artist, finished

The unarmed trade shipped as a fighter without a spellbook. No longer.

• Fists that grow. A Martial Artist's bare hands harden with level and practice: a fresh one strikes 1 to 3, and at the summit they do two-hand-sword work (6 to 12), bare.
• Kick and jumpkick. Learned at levels 3 and 6, thrown with K and J. Both cost real wind (5 and 8 stamina) and hit far harder than a swing; a landed jumpkick can put a troll flat on the floor.
• The bare-armed block. An unarmored Martial Artist blocks the way a shield-carrier does, and better with level. Armor fouls the art, which is why the trade wears none (cloth is fine; the burial rag never hurt anyone).

Skills improve through use

The second axis of growth from the original design is in. Levels are still bought at the yard; the arm now sharpens itself.

• Weapon styles are skills. Slash, thrust, bash and the open hand each rank from 0 to 10. Every blow that lands teaches the style that landed it, and higher ranks land truer and bite deeper.
• The thief's crafts learn too. Every clean fold into shadow and every silent theft sharpens shadow-craft and light fingers.
• The yard sells shortcuts. A new SKILLS counter at the training yard drills ranks in for gold, but practice and purchase alike top out at your level plus one. Two axes, honestly separate.
• The sheet shows it. Press @ and your practiced crafts are named, with ranks.
• Veterans are not reset. On upgrade, the weapon in your hand and your trade's own crafts arrive already ranked at your level. What you have lived is presumed practiced.

Thaumaturges advance by killing with magic

The design always said it; the ledger now enforces it. A Thaumaturge's experience from a kill is paid for the working, not the mace: kill with lightning and be paid in full, kill with steel and the gods count nothing, mix the two and be paid for the magic's share. A summoned phantom's kills count as magic (the summons is the working), and a Thaum who drew no blood at all, the healer keeping the band alive, takes their full share untaxed. Every other trade is untouched.

The equipment law

Weapon and armor restrictions were flavor text; anyone could swing anything. The trades now dress like themselves, and the rules live in a data file any SysOp can retune.

Trade	Wields	Wears
Fighter	every weapon	every armor
Thaumaturge	every weapon	every armor
Thief	quick steel, to 4 lb	the leather tier, to 9 lb
Wizard	a staff or a knife, to 3 lb	cloth and quilting, to 6 lb
Martial Artist	sticks and knives, to 3 lb	nothing with an armor value

Rings are jewelry, never restricted. The quick-wield keys (w and W) pass over what your trade refuses and say why when nothing legal remains.

The Knighthood and the Ring of Vane

• Fighters only. The Knighthood quest is the Fighters' road, as the design said. Master Ochre turns every other trade away by name, and the yard no longer teases them with it.
• The ring paces itself. The Ring of Vane is no longer a 30-charge consumable. It never runs dry; instead it gathers itself for four turns between workings, and it answers a Knight of Vane's hand and nobody else's. The gods may still decline; the turn is spent either way.
• Enchant costs what it always should have. The ring's enchantment permanently improves an ordinary weapon by bleeding off the Knight's own vitality: 2 maximum hit points for the first edge, 3 for the second, 4 for the third and last. It ages you, forever, and the named blades of the island refuse it outright. A costly, memorable, entirely optional power.

For live worlds: what the upgrade does

Unzip 1.6.0 over the old folder, press nothing, and the world migrates itself on the next entry.

• Worn pieces the equipment law refuses slip off into the pack. Nothing is taken, only unbuckled.
• Every existing character is seeded with skill ranks for their wielded style and their trade's crafts, at their level.
• Knighthood quests in flight for non-Fighters are quietly closed; a ring already granted stays in the pack as a keepsake, though it answers only a Knight.
• Existing Rings of Vane switch to the new pacing and their old charge counts are retired.

Also in this release: the Islander's Manual gains a page on the learning arm and the open hand, the character sheet and training yard show the new skill axis, and the in-game help names the new keys.

Version 1.5.1

This one makes the island honest: the clock, recovery and fatigue all mean what they say now, the Chapel's pilgrim walk becomes winnable by mortals, steel gets its colors, and cleared hunting grounds refill while you can still remember clearing them.

Steel wears its colors

Weapons now read bright cyan and armor reads cyan, the same colors their marks wear on the ground, in the pack, the ON THE BODY rail, every shop counter, and the item card. Written pages moved to sky blue so every kind keeps a color of its own. No more gray wall of steel in a full pack.

The pilgrim walk, winnable

The Chapel's escort errand had four separate problems, and 1.5.1 fixes all of them.

• The pilgrim keeps up now. Through town it follows at your own walking pace, and out on the Downs it matches you stride for stride. It also walks at your side, one step away, instead of trailing at the edge of losing the errand.
• Other stairs no longer end the quest. Stepping down into the cellar, or anywhere else, used to silently unmake your charge. Now the pilgrim waits exactly where you left it, watching the way you went, and the errand survives the detour. "Go back for them" finally means what it says.
• It never picks fights. The charge no longer drifts toward hostiles it cannot fight. All heart, no claws, and now no bravado either.
• Directions with names in them. The Sister now says the route out loud, out the town gate, east across the Downs, through the tower door to the Stair-head, and asks you to keep the pilgrim beside you as you step through. Several of her lines were also wider than the message pane and were being cut off mid-sentence, destination and all. Every line of hers now fits the screen.

An honest clock

• One pace everywhere. The port used to stand nearly still, the gull and the dock cat hopping once in a long while, while the cellars ran at your keystroke. Now a step on town ground walks the world's clock at the same rate the round lock charges outside the walls, so the whole island moves close to realtime, uniformly. The dockside pair picked up their feet to match.
• Recovery runs on real time. Hit points, stamina and mana come back with true minutes, not with turns. Since fast play used to force turns faster, fast play used to refill its own tank; no more. The level-1 wizard's endless magic missiles are over. The well drains honestly and seeps back at about six mana a minute whether you mash or wait.

Wind that matters

The players' question was whether stamina should drain faster in melee. It should, and now it does, with the pool resized so the fatigue lands where it belongs.

• Every swing costs double. A blow now takes two stamina instead of one, and the drain reads plainly on the rail.
• The tank doubled its constitution share. A fresh fighter carries 40 wind instead of 25; every trade scales the same way, and existing characters get the raise automatically on upgrade.
• Empty is a real state. At zero wind you flail, half damage and no dodge, until you catch your breath (r, +2 a turn) or real time refills you at about nine a minute. Fatigue now decides the marathon fights, the Warden brawls and the long corridor crawls, instead of never mattering at all.
• The balance held. The acceptance grinder still proves the island fair: four rank-8s bring down the Ashen Warden, one rank-10 alone does not, and a fresh fighter still reaches rank 5 in a single honest session.

The island refills

• Respawns are six times faster. A cleared spawn point refills in about ten idle minutes instead of an hour, and faster still while people are playing, since the clock now moves with the action. Clear the cellar with a friend and it will be breathing again before you finish dividing the loot.
• Your knobs still rule. The console's respawn-rate switch (50 to 300 percent) scales the new pace the same as the old, and the daily cron still refills every cold spawn point overnight regardless.

For SysOps

Upgrading is a plain overwrite of the morrow/ folder in your board's doors directory. A live world migrates itself (schema 12) on the next call: spawn timers retune, stamina pools raise, and characters, items and history all survive. No wipe, ever.

Version 1.5.0

A polish-and-peril release: the screens grow color and clarity, your legend gets a page of its own, and the island itself grows teeth. The title screen now announces the build.

A new coat of paint

Every screen now speaks one visual language: titles in bright cyan, hotkeys in bright yellow so the eye finds them first, values bright, labels quiet, and gold the color of gold. The top bar wears classic door blue with the region name picked out. The main screen's right rail was reworked, with your class in color, gold in gold, and a new experience bar that fills toward your next rank and says "train!" when the yard would take you.

The ? help screen was the messiest page on the island; now every key is painted bright yellow apart from its description, section by section. The same treatment runs through the harbormaster's ledger, the pack, the shops, and the character sheet.

See yourself clearly: the character sheet

• Everything on one page. Attributes, hit points, mana, stamina, experience and the next rank, what you wield and wear with AC and dodge, your abilities (every working you can speak, or your trade's knacks), gold in hand and banked, marks, spirit chill, and your standing with the wardens.
• New lifetime numbers. The island now keeps your story: monsters slain, lifetime gold earned, and deaths. Existing characters start counting from the upgrade.

The harbormaster's ledger

A new key. Press L anywhere in the world for the ranked roll of every name on the island, by level then experience, with occupation, fortune (purse plus vault), monsters slain, and who is ashore right now. Names wear their karma color, so the lawful read green and the outlawed read like a warning. It is also listed in ? and in the manual.

A more dangerous island

The verdict was in: the cellars felt safe, and a rank-1 with a fisherman's dirk could beat a brigand. No longer. The whole bestiary was sharpened, with tougher hides, heavier blows and better aim, tuned fight by fight against the real combat code.

• The cellar stings again. Rats, dogs and kobolds land real hits; venom and packs make a careless trip expensive.
• Brigands are a rank-3 problem. A rank-1 with a starter blade who stands their ground will very likely die. Come back leveled, armored, or not alone.
• The cave troll is a wall. Its wounds knit as fast as a longsword opens them, so bring a bashing weapon or bring friends.
• Deeper halls hit deeper. Ghouls, shades, wraiths, hellhounds and the Ashen Warden all grew meaner; the toughest kills pay more experience for the trouble.

Armor genuinely matters now, and the smart first purchase is no longer optional. The four-rank-8s-versus-the-Warden math still holds.

The island provides: random drops

• Monsters drop more than coin. About one hostile kill in ten leaves an item in the corpse, matched to the creature's level: a torch off a rat's hoard, a chain shirt off a wraith.
• The ground renews itself. Hunting grounds now re-seed sparse finds over time, a scatter of coin and sometimes a piece of kit, sized to the ground's own creatures. Town streets stay swept, floors never silt up, and finds decay on the normal clock.
• Yours to tune. The tables live in content/drops.php as plain data, and the console gains a "random drops off" switch.

Quality of the counter

• PgUp and PgDn everywhere they were missing: the armory's long rack, the chandler's shelves, the fence's plank, the vault, the trainer's list, and your own pack all page a windowful at a time.
• The pack shows your body. A new ON THE BODY panel lists every slot (hand, head, body, shield, ring) and what rides in each, so "where does this go?" answers itself while you leaf through the bag.

Smaller strokes

• The prompt row earns its keep. The move hint is gone (the numpad walks, ? explains it) and the freed room now points at a attack, g get, i pack, t trade, @ sheet, L ledger, M manual, ? help, with the keys in yellow.
• American spellings throughout: the Harbormaster's Ledger, the Gray Chapel, the Vane Armory, armor, color, on every screen, in the manual, and in a live world's region names via migration.
• The manual keeps up. The L key is documented, and the panels chapter matches the new screens.

For SysOps

• Upgrading is a plain overwrite of the morrow/ folder in your board's doors directory. A live world migrates itself (schema 11) on the next call: characters, items and history all survive. No wipe, ever.
• New console switch: "random drops off" disables both the rare monster drops and the ground litter if you prefer the pre-1.5.0 economy.

Version 1.0.0

First release. A multi-player MMO-lite homage to the old CompuServe game Island of Kesmai: group up and fight monsters, fight other callers (PvP can be disabled by the SysOp), go on quests and discover secrets.