Building with Mirrors of the Wheel Building is, I believe a very important part of a Mud. The room descriptions create an important atmosphere for a Mud. Therefore our building style guidelines maybe be more enforced then in other Muds you have played/built for. There are a lot of people that turn on the brief mode, including myself, but usually not until they have a good knowledge of their playing area and the atmosphere of it has been burned into their mind. If style guidelines are not followed according to these pages, and mistakes are repeated throughout a zone you will be asked to do extensive rewrites. We want to make this the best Mud out there and really need your help and patience to do that.

Timeline Zones and Area Assignments Formatting Guidelines Description Guidelines Room Types Completing your Area

Timeline of Mirrors

The timeline we are dealing with, as of the opening of the Mud, is the year leading up to the Aiel war. 975 NE to be specific. We will gradually move the years forward to Rand’s time which will mean that some zones will have to be altered in the future, though they will not be total rewrites of course

Zones and Area Assignment

When you become a builder on Mirrors of the Wheel you will be assigned an Area, of your choosing, usually. There is a page where available zones are posted as well as maps to help narrow down what belongs in your zone and what doesn't and it is updated frequently. When you are assigned an Area, depending on whether is town, city, capital, road, forest, plain, etc...you will be assigned a minimum number of zones. Each zone contains 100 rooms. An Area will have at minimum 2 zones or 200 rooms. At the moment there is no real maximum to an Area but  as a general guideline a town has 200 rooms, city 400, capital 600 - 900, roads, forest and plains are about 200-600.

Mirrors Formatting Guidelines

Descriptions should be of at least 4 lines, not 4 sentences but 4 lines. Don’t go over 10 lines however and only use that many for very special rooms. The average I would say is 6 lines a description. Also, please use only one paragraph in a room description. Lines should be around 78 characters, but if you use /f in the editor you should be OK. Don’t leave hanging lines. i.e. last line has only one or two words in it. (Perfect example is the beginning of this line) All words in a title should be capitalized accept for articles. i.e. The Rushing River or Over the Bridge. Also, try to vary your titles, if you find your self using the same title over and over try to add things to it. i.e. The River could be The Rushing River or Through the River or Over the Rapids etc... Do not indent any descriptions. Use only one period between sentences as our editor adds one automatically. Use the proper measures and weights from the books, i.e. leagues and spans and stones, I will try to put up a list of all the measures and equivalents at a later time. Please write out numbers rather then using them. i.e. two = 2 Do not connect your zone or add mobs or items to the zone unless they have been evaluated by the appropriate person.

Mirrors Description Guidelines

In order to write a good room description you want to close your eyes and imagine yourself standing in that room, be it a shop or a field or on a road. Close your imagination eyes orientate your self, feel the atmosphere then open the imaginary eyes and look around yourself. What do you see? what qualities does that place have? If I was standing on the edge of a river I would see the river (is it wide or narrow? is it calm or rushing? what color is it? does it smell? does it make noise?), the ground beneath me, (what type is it? mud or hard or grass or weedy?) what else is in the area? a path? a road? any trees around? or what is seen vaguely in the distance? ect...  In each and every room ask yourself questions. Then take the answers you get and write them into a description.  Another way to generate ideas is take a few sheets of paper and think about your planned zone. i.e.. I'm doing the brown ajah area, it has AS rooms, hallways, meeting rooms, courtyards. On one sheet write AS rooms at the top, then start to think about what things are in a room and do a bullet list. a bed a hard chair a cushioned chair a desk tapestries on the wall flower scenes, battle, pic of horse etc rug on the floor wood on the floor white stone walls paneled walls vases flowers statues chests etc Then move onto the next list Hallways and repeat the process. Another tip is to use a thesaurus to look up one of the words i.e. statue and see what else comes up near that term. When done the lists start writing descripts taking a few points from the lists for each room. This will help vary the descriptions and give them more life. Even a plain simple road can come alive using tactics such as this esp. if you use the thesaurus to expand the vocabulary.

Some Common Problems

1) Please do not make reference to mobs in your descriptions.  2) Please do not make references to actions by the player, most commonly found in sentences that have the word _you_ in them. i.e. you slip and fall as the stones crumble beneath your feet.  3) Don’t tell the player how to feel or what conclusions to come to, leave the clues for them and let them come to a conclusion. i.e. This room makes you feel scared and you want to run out. Instead try something like this, Shadows dance eerily on the walls and faint screams echo around the room, though there is no evidence of life here. As an addendum here, never make reference to how dreary and  boring something is.  4) Please do not make exact copies of rooms i.e. 10 rooms in a row on a road are the same... similar is fine, a line or so the same is fine, but not the whole description please. 5)  Don’t give out info that could not be known by looking at the room. i.e. The oak tree that fell across the road here must have been from that bad lightning storm two years ago.  6) If you want to build a confusing maze or zone please put up an ANSI map and an explanation of why you want it and let the appropriate person know, and they will tell you if it is OK to go ahead with it or not.  7) Death traps are OK though limit their use to one per zone and make sure it is necessary, not just there to be there.

Room Types

There are basically three types of rooms in your zone. The Area itself, then two different types of godrooms. The first one, located in ##00 is for zone info, the name of the zone. the map of the zone. special code in the zone. shops used in it and a short description of the zone itself. The particulars such as the map and shops should be added using the extra desc menu The second, is your own personal rooms which can be 1-5 rooms per Area, not per zone. These are usually placed at the end of a zone i.e. ##95 and up. These are yours to describe as you wish.

Completing the Area

The steps done in order for an area to be evaluated and added to the mud are as follows.  a) Create Mobs for your zone. At the beginning all mobs must be created from scratch. Once we’ve been up for while you will be able to choose from available mobs and the creation of new mobs will be limited.  b) Create Objects for your zone. Same as above. c) Add the necessary shops to your area. d) Create any mob/obj or room triggers you wish to see in your zone. e) Go over your zone doing proof reading on the rooms, flags, objects mobs etc. Make a list of question you want to ask the evaluator ie if your not sure of something somewhere. You can also ask other gods to do a proof of your zone first. f) When your zone is perfect in your eyes. Make arrangements with Shawnyve, to have your zone evaluated. They will go through it room by room mob by mob etc. and point out any errors. Have a pen handy to make quick notes on problems, don’t attempt to fix them as you go through the Area. Once the evaluator has given his seal of approval the area will be added to the World.  Note: This is not strictly followed while in Beta.

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