Radar Plan

## Affiliation

Scylfings

The **Radar Plan** referred to an attempt by Wiz and Alec to use tools of questionable legality to gain a competitive advantage for Hammerlea Survivor during Dragonhollow's Seventh Era.

Retro personally intervened, leading directly to the invention of the Player Tracker.

# History

### Background

The advent of the Survivor event drastically changed everyday life in Dragonhollow. Suddenly the penalties for death were far greater than just lost XP and a trek to recover dropped inventories. The pressure to stay atop the leaderboard and be named Top Survivor led many to look for any way to gain an edge against their competitors.

At the end of the Fourth Era, HyperSilence and Zerg used subtle dark sorcery to circumvent rules and win Badlands Survivor.

Some residents began using cartography tools that could display the location of nearby monsters. Certain types, such as those carried by the killer Gabault, also had the ability to detect other humans. Because these tools originated from offworld, their legal status was unclear, though based upon long-standing precedent from Eris her Priesthood permitted them as long as they weren't used to gain unfair advantages.

By the early Seventh Era, Bagger and Sleekit had long dominated Survivor and were again leading Hammerlea Survivor by a wide margin. The Scylfings, a clan of bandit raiders, recognized that their only chance of winning the top prizes was to murder their rivals. However, the vast geographical distances of the Hammerlands made searching territory time-consuming and somewhat impractical.

Therefore they sought a way to greatly improve their odds.

### Headhunting

On 7E:20, Wiz discovered a method of remotely tracking residents and shared it with his Scylfing colleague Alec. Their position was plotted on a terrain map—denoted by a rendition of their head—and updated in real-time.

Using the faster-than-light communications network Discord and esoteric magics, de facto Archpriest of Eris Tox intercepted a conversation between them that implied this method could locate other humans at distances far greater than previously realized. He felt concerned enough to notify the Hegemon Retro, who began to monitor the situation personally.

Wiz and Alec performed a series of tests using this method using the Hammerlands Railway to find several random residents and, apparently satisfied with the results, made plans to deploy it against both Sleekit and Bagger.

Retro was unable to detect the exact method or tool they were using but decided it not only provided an unfair advantage in the Survivor competition but also violated the spirit of Dragonhollow itself. Aided by Tox, he moved moved quickly to develop a way to prevent its use altogether.

Alec, concerned about the legality of finding other residences in this manner, privately contacted Zen, a Priest of Eris. Zen cited the precedent of permitting the method itself but warned that using it to kill others was strictly prohibited. Alec then claimed to have disabled that function so as to abide by the law.

### Aftermath

On 7E:23, Retro announced that nearly all offworld tools would be subject to a widespread ban until further notice. Though reluctant to enact such draconian measures, he and Tox had failed in their numerous attempts to prevent only the method used by Wiz and Alec.

Sleekit and Tohbeh strongly endorsed the ban, while Terry and GhostlyPink were frustrated because they had legally used such tools for years. The results of the State of Dragonhollow Survey showed that there was community support for the ban until all abuse could reasonably be prevented.

Tox had been reluctant to go public with the reasoning behind the ban, since the ability to eavesdrop on hidden communications served an early-warning system for the Priesthood, but Retro felt strongly that transparent leadership was more important and that the lesson would serve as a powerful deterrent in the future. Later, while whispering to Alec, Wiz jokingly said “hi Tox” as he now realized their whispered conversations were not private.

No disciplinary action was taken against Wiz or Alec. While Retro suspected both men were fully aware that what they were doing was borderline exploitative and that's why they chose to speak clandestinely about it, Tox reminded him that the Hammerlea Survival Guide did not openly state the method was against the rules and suggested they spoke secretly about to prevent their rivals from reading it via Discord.

Even so, Tox was somewhat concerned about the appearance of favoritism, as Jrod had been permanently banished in the Sixth Era for trying to kill someone using exploits. Retro argued that Jrod's punishment was less about a single incident but instead reflective of a pattern of behavior for which he openly admitted he felt no remorse for and would continue if given the opportunity.

In an effort to provide factions like the Scylfings with the means to find pursue their targets and deter future incidents like the Radar Plan, Retro invented a Player Tracker that was sold in Tortuga and a nullifying Tracker Jammer for those wealthy enough to afford it. Unsurprisingly, Wiz was the first to successfully use it when he killed GhostlyPink and Chairty on 7E:28.

# Behind the Scenes

*The following is out-of-universe information about the real world Dragonhollow.*

Wiz and Alec used an unknown Minecraft minimap mod to locate other players.

Before the launch of the Hammerlea map, Retro and Tox had attempted to use the configuration settings on the most popular minimap mods to disable the ability to display players, but the Radar Plan demonstrated that they had failed.

After repeated attempts to fix the issue also failed, they reluctantly decided that the only workable solution was to disallow all Forge and Liteloader mods across the board until a better solution could be found.

No punishments were issued because the use of such mods was not prohibited and neither Wiz nor Alec had knowingly broken any rule. Their ingenuity lead Retro to develop the Player Tracker, a custom item purchased in Tortuga that allowed players to track a random target.

The incident was named after Radar, a system for detecting the direction, distance, and speed of objects through pulses of high-frequency radio waves that are reflected off of the object and back to the source.