Shard of the Dead
Contents
2005
The Shard of the Dead was a special event shard created for Halloween in 2005. It featured magic pumpkins, costume gates and other Halloween-related content. It also allowed characters to alter their skills and stats at will.
It was followed the next year by a similar Shard of the Dead II in 2006.
2010
A pvp-centric shard was created with a special ruleset just before Halloween in 2010. It was announced as limited-time only, through December 2010.
Some of the special rules included:
- No guards or justice-zones, except the city of Britain
- Dark Towers of Death guarded by hordes of undead minions
- One in the Desert of Compassion
- Glass Swords of Shattering(one-hit kill)
- Accelerated skill and stat gain
- One Advanced Character Token per guest
- Permanent worldwide darkness
- Kill and death stat tracking
- No item insurance or blessed items, except spellbooks and runebooks
- Double gold on most monsters
To get a Glass Sword of Shattering, players have to stand atop a Dark Tower(found near Virtue Shrines) for 30 seconds without being killed.
Original announcement of Shard of the Dead 2010
November 3 Update
Vampire Wars
That's right! Vampire Wars is back! The gate near West Britain Bank now teleports you to moonglow where the battle is taking place. Here are the details:
It is a vampire verse slayer all out bash. Players can pick their team and fight the opposite in a Factions style battle taking place in Felucca Moonglow. Each team has a base located in Moonglow that players can signup at by double clicking the signup stone. Each base stone also acts as a ressurection Ankh. Each side has a scoreboard gravestone which tracks each side's kill count.
Rewards
- Killing a vampire NPC gives you a chance to get a cursed artifact
- Turning an NPC into a vampire gives you a chance to get a minor artifact
- Bringing 10 unique vampire heads or 10 unique vampire slayer souls to a faction stone gives you one of the following rewards randomly:
- Major Artifact (not cursed)
- Glass Weapon - Weapon that can be used once but does insane damage.
- Bombs - Each faction has a bomb that when used causes an area effect explosion similar to the ones at the faction stones. The explosion only affects members of the opposite faction.
Vampire
Vampires can not heal and take damage slowly. Luckily they can heal themselves by attacking other NPCs and players. They receive full health upon turning another mobile into a vampire. Vampires can turn vampire slayers into vampires by doing a certain amount of damage to them (the amount of damage is tweakable by me, right now its at 50%) Vampires can not attack other vampires. Turning a player vampire slayer into a vampire awards you with his soul which can be used for special rewards. The only way to rejoin the living is to die and ressurect. -- Supreem, UO Programmer
Slayer
Slayers get a bonus to damage against vampires. This makes up for the fact that vampires only need to get you to half health to turn you. (Currently Slayers do 175% damage to vampires) Killing a player vampire awards you with his bloody head which can be used for special rewards. The only way to leave the slayers is to die and ressurect. -- Supreem, UO Programmer
Non-participants do 50% damage to slayers and vampires
BTW We removed all of the glass sword towers and placed one in the middle of the fray.
Deactivation
The Shard of the Dead 2010 was shutdown November 30, 2010 with an announcement:
- The Shard of the Dead...is dead
- James Nichols 30 Nov 2010 12:36:21 EST
- Greetings!
- We will be closing the special event "Shard of the Dead" shortly due to waning participation. We hope you enjoyed your experiences there and we appreciate your feedback to help improve similar events in the future, thank you.