It's been a little quiet here on the Announce board, so I wanted to let
you know what's going on behind the scenes. We're not kidding when we
say Achaea is under constant development, and we've got several projects
in progress.

One major one is the implementation of a Dragon class, which Dragons
will take on while dragonformed. We've decided to add this due to combat
balance concerns when the Dragon advantages are combined with existing
classes. That means being a Dragon will come with its own set of
abilities, and you will not be able to access your normal class's
abilities while dragonformed, whether that be Magi, or Monk, or
Occultist.

A couple other large projects: the Seafaring skill continues to be in
development, and will feature an unusual learning paradigm that allows
for specialisations. You'll hear more on that when we get closer to
releasing Seafaring. We are also working on a system to give newbies out
of the Trial of Rebirth a set of orientation tasks they can complete, to
help ease the transition from the highly structured Trial to the
comparative utter chaos of Achaea. And of course, as always, we are
constantly preparing new areas and divinely guided RP events, as well as
training Celani to take on divine realms.

In addendum, in preparation for the Dragon class coding, we've found it
optimal to rework many outdated routines related to older skills. Simply
put, all the skills older than Riding or so were implemented according
to a redundant system that just doesn't make much sense, and to keep
them as they are would require adding more redundant code clutter that
we'd have to get rid of eventually anyway. Okay, that wasn't very simply
put! It wouldn't be much use to explain it further. It just means that
we've been having to bite the bullet and rework a lot of old code, which
is not glamorous and doesn't show immediate results, but it'll allow us
to lay the groundwork for easier skill implementation in the future.
Meanwhile, if you notice that you're suddenly not able to access
abilities that you should have, or able to access abilities you
shouldn't have, or unable to access AB help files you should be able to
see, please BUGfile. It will likely have to do with fallout from this
code conversion; the old code we're messing with is labyrinthine to say
the least, and unforeseen side effects can occur here and there.

Penned by My hand on the 2nd of Glacian, in the year 471 AF.