Even more thoughts.

[master@cats.UCSC.EDU (Mark Wedel)]

 Another interesting spell to add might be knock.  Is basically
a destroy door spell (similiar to destroy earth wall spell).  Range
should probably be more limited.

 Alchmey spell:  Turning it to gold coins does not make a lot of
sense.  However, I don't know if having gold items would be a good
solution (would add a lot of items to the inventory and perhaps
the archetype file.)  Perhaps have them turn into gold nuggets, which
you then sell in shops similiar to diamonds and other gems.

 However, as I see it, the spell has to come at least reasonably
close to actual value of the items, or the spell becomes useless, and people
will continue to carry the items back to town to sell them.

 How about this for a way to work it:  The amount of nuggets you get
is based upon how much the item weighs, but the total value can never
be greater than the actual worth of the item.  The magic value
of the item has no influence on the amount of nuggets (except to
influence the total amount you could get from heavy items.)

 This would make it so that you can't go to the shops and buy all
the heavy items and make a profit.  Yet, at the same time, the
amount you get is based upon the weight of the item (which
makes more sense.)

 Also, a non-linear scale for nuggets recieved from the weight
might be good (ie, 1 kg item = 1 nugget, 3 kg=2, 5kg=3, 7kg=4, 10kg=5,
15kg=6, 25kg=7, 35kg=8, 50kg=9, 75kg=10, ...)  At least this way,
light items would get closer to their actual value.

 Since Frank asked what various people were working on, I might as well
put it here.

 I'm working on making the magic mapping spell actually useful.  Basically,
what I've done is made it so that the magic map colors represent
the color of the items on the map (for example, an area of water will
appear blue, a ruby will be a red area, etc..)

 It's actually works pretty well.  I need to try and get it so
walls are displayed properly.  This gets a little more complicated
because the yellow walls (which are used a lot), have yellow as
the background and not the foreground.  So its trying to find
a method to display walls decently, yet have items displayed correctly.)

 Unfortunately, if your on a black/white system, you porbably
won't see any improvement.

   Mark Wedel
master@cats.ucsc.edu