Feature: campfires

[snellers]

It'd be a skill, not a spell and everyone gets it at a low level. To make a campfire you need a buy a tinderbox and some wood chips, and it'll consume a unit of wood chips each time you light one. When created, a campfire will be an object in the room with your name e.g. "Belgarath's campfire" You can only have 1 campfire in a room, and a player can only have 1 active campfire in game. Lightning a new one will cause the old one to go away. There are at least 3 benefits to having a campfire: First, it's a light source for the room. A pretty minor point as most people will have a light source anyway. Second, if you rest or sleep in a room with a campfire (whether or not it's yours) you get a little bonus to regen rate. Third, each campfire object can act as a gate/portal beacon. Thus, the become really useful for explorers. If you find some area far away - even deep in a dungeon and you want to be able to get back to it easily you can gate or portal to it by name. If you want to be able to gate/portal to someone else's campfire they have to be in your group. And campfires will automatically go out after X minutes (thinking something like 30). One reason the beacon idea crossed my mind was due to how people use mobs as "gateposts", which I think has the potential to be detrimental, as you can take newbie zone named NPCs out of their natural habitat where newbie players expect to find them. So in tandem with the campfire concept, we can also have the mud periodically check for mobs that have been outside of their home area for more than a certain amount of time, and then send them home. Cheaply, just by teleporting them back to their origin, although for a more advanced form, they could walk their way back (and there won't always be a route, so teleporting would be reliable & simple).