I heard a rumor about a rumor feature

[Rias]

We now have a basic rumor system! Certain NPC-populated rooms will occasionally generate rumors that PCs can overhear. The chance to hear a rumor each minute is based on the Perception skill, with a reroll for those with the Awareness stat.

Because this can likely become distracting at times, one can use the RUMORS IGNORE command to ignore rumors, and RUMORS LISTEN to start listening for rumors again. The RUMORS command on its own will tell whether a room is a rumor room or not, as well as remind about the character's current rumor ignore status and give syntax for listening/ignoring.

This is currently a very limited release, with just a few spots in Shadgard (spoiler: inns and taverns) that pull from the general "shadgard area" pool of rumors. Some will be added to Mistral Lake and other outposts soon(tm), and the hope is that eventually we'll have enough juicy rumor selection to have different rooms within the same areas potentially serve up different types of rumors. You might overhear different rumors in a tavern than those in a town hall, for instance. For now though, just the one big pile of general Shadgard rumors.

I'm hoping this will not only be a little immersive flavor, but also help to keep people aware of various tidbits of information that might not be available otherwise, or might have fallen out of public awareness but we don't want the info/lore/trivia/etc. to be forgotten. And of course, the townsfolk might occasionally talk about some PCs that have gotten up to this or that and gotten themselves some notice - for good or ill! One more reason to think before acting. The NPCs may well take notice and start talking and spreading rumors about you or your actions!

[Karjus]

Very cool. Love this sort of stuff.

Enjoy all the flavour emotes both places have, but adding more to help spread information on ongoing events and possibly link up other systems to it would be neat.

[silly]

Very exciting! Thank you for adding this in.

[Volinn]

Love this!

[tulpa]

Also very pleased about this! It's been fun RPing in these spaces and having this background noise too, to riff off. I hope it brings more players into the taverns and encourages more PC interactions in the long term, as it seems to have been doing so far.

As a suggestion, I wonder if players with Storytelling might be able to suggest new rumours to GMs with a command similar to RITUAL.

[Prism]

Considering how recently I was gushing over how cool these were, I’m so super thrilled to see this.

Really looking forward to seeing it in action.

[Gorth]

Related to @tulpa, is their going to be any way for us to add rumors to circulation?

[Karjus]

I'd be all for more storytelling interaction with it, even if it allowed you to maybe pursue specific rumours via keywords with a chance to fail.

And suggest into a pool for GMs to approve, but definitely not open rumours. Don't trust people one jot.

[silly]

Somewhat related to this: could some room echoes be added in for Shadgard's commons? I see about three other rooms around town that have them, so it's understandable if this would be asking too much.