Description
The holiday season kicked off December 1st, though no official announcement was posted.
The Main Event
December 1st, 2009
- People started getting mysterious spam on their comms
December 5th, 2009
- University students start pestering the administration to have a snowman building contest
December 12th, 2009
- The Abominable Snowman Competition began on The Quad, and the annual distribution of fake Christmas trees began. There were a couple somewhat difficult or morally unChristmaslike ways to get one the first couple days, but pretty soon some friendly neighborhood suppliers showed up in the park to hand them out for free.
During the Abominable Snowman Competition, players could make snowmen, gather materials to make them scarier, or go etheric and attempt to destroy them (although unlike Halloween 2009 there was no direct player-player interaction with the content). Beginning with the most common lumps of coal (eyes) and gnarled branches (arms), as the holiday progressed people could find more snowmen to fight. These in turn dropped more items or even transformed some of the earlier ones, and certain of these new items could be used to make even scarier snowmen.
Some unknown enterprising students kept track of all the various snowman-related activity by projecting three leaderboards on to the side of the art museum: Most Built, Most Destroyed, and Scariest.
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Encounters
See Christmas 2009 Adventures for more details.
Opponents
The Etheric post-protest quad (in the order they appeared):
Miscellaneous bums, hipster students and guards appeared in special holiday choice encounters without being new enemies.
Techniques
Items
First, here's a list of items you could put on snowmen, in the rough order they appeared. "# to Scariness Ratio" indicates how many of that item you could put on a snowman in one encounter, and how much scariness that encounter would then add.
| Item | Source | Scariness to # Ratio |
|---|---|---|
| lump of coal | various | 2 : 1 |
| gnarled branch | various | 2 : 1 |
| icicle fang | fanged snowman | 2:3 |
| sharp stick | horned snowman | 1 : 3 |
And miscellaneous other stuff. Each section is organized by the rough order they appeared in, or else just thrown together (cough):
| Upgraded Snowman Drops | |
|---|---|
| Item | Source |
| frosty claw | getting a gnarled branch frozen by a snowman |
| bloody icicle | losing a fight with an icicle fang equipped |
| crackling branch | getting a sharp stick electrified by a horned snowman |
| Miscellaneous | |
| unmelting snowflakes | sampling snowmen, salvaging frigid scarves or icicles, or adventuring with a frigid scarf equipped |
| smoldering coal | horned snowman |
| silk top hat | choice encounter / evil snowman if he stole it |
| third hand pipe | evil snowman |
| carrot nose | evil snowman |
| frigid scarf | evil snowman |
| ordinary scarf | salvaging a frigid scarf |
| red glass ornament | staring snowman |
| green glass ornament | staring snowman |
| giant snowflake | towering snowman |
| Prezzies | |
| snowy cookie tin | christmas tree |
| tiny gift | christmas tree |
| festive candy cane | tiny gift |
| christmas tree cookie | tiny gift |
| bell cookie | tiny gift |
| star sugar cookie | tiny gift |
| gingerbread man | tiny gift |
Furnishings
- fake christmas tree, becomes Christmas tree