"We have a lower number of quests, but significantly more involved than even those in many single player modules" -- GrinningFool

  I think it sums up pretty well the idea.  Static quests are a well-knowns source of debates and argumentations in Persistant Worlds, and as I promised to explain how some of our custom systems work, what they add to gameplay and all that, I felt that was a good topic to start with. Plus, that makes a link with the Storytelling post I did before right ?

When I first came to Khali, I was pleased to discover that the key sentence about static quests writing was, and the formulation still sounds sweet : "NO FEDEX QUESTS" .

 FedEx ! I loved that term, because all of us get the meaning : brainless quests, leading you from point A to point B, and then get back after an event being basically murdering, buying, or whatever. Just what I disliked as a player. No rememberable NPC, just rewards and empty of motives actions. Adding conditionals (like npc requiring to go from B to C to get item required by A character) don't even make it better. The basic idea is wrong.

 So, Khalidine has a custom Quest System, allowing us to create quite interesting stories. Why ? Because people here are difficult with such matters. In fact, players should expect from Khalidine not much gold or items from "quests" (actually, that word would require a whole article to discuss its meaning within RPG stories, but anyway). 

Quests in Khalidine will mainly introduce players to the world of Rykil and be somehow related to local Lore and Factions. Boring, you think ? Wait. Actually, the writers team I see working look after very original and clever ways to deal with both our local constraints and the more general specifities of quests built within a PW: repeatibility conditions of a quest by one or many PCs for example. That requires lots of attention and other techniques compared with building quests for a solo module to be logically built and entertaining.

Technically, what's so different from other PWs ? I don't pretend to know how all the other PWs work ( I'm pretty sure we aren't the only ones around to look into that ) and I'm not the most technical guy around, but what we recently added is Random NPCs Spawning. That was required by ThaDwarf, one of our fine writer, who asked for the possibility... and got satisfied. Basically, when players start a quest, however they do that, be it by speech or action, we can ask to have one or many NPCs randomly chosen from pools (Thugs for example) to spawn when the PC enters a specified area. And these NPCs will carry dialogs, i    tems, scripts or whatever allows the player to complete the quest. Looks simple, but it brings a lot of fun possibilities, dynamic options and all that. I could keep going on about persistancy, factions, time limits, writing technics but it would be too long.

What is important to know now is that DM will have many occasions to use these quests as startups and run their own quests depending on which, for example, players will have accomplished. And also... If I was a player coming to Khalidine... I would be /really/ careful if a quest was looking too FedEx... since there would definitely more than meets the eye further down the path...

In conclusion, in addition to the static quests we'll be starting with, we have a backlog of drafts ready to get edited and scripted. Khalidine aims to be an open roleplay-action entertaining persistant server, and I think the static quests will fullfill their role delightfully in that direction.