Subject: MYSTARA-L Digest - 21 Aug 2003 to 22 Aug 2003 (#2003-206) From: Automatic digest processor Date: 23/08/2003, 17:00 To: Recipients of MYSTARA-L digests Reply-to: Mystara RPG Discussion There are 8 messages totalling 313 lines in this issue. Topics of the day: 1. A thief plotline for Helskir (2) 2. I don't want to seem like I'm flaking out on this, 3. Deceiving Virus 4. Trio to Australia and New Zealand 5. Virus 411: Please kill winppr32 and TrayX processes (3) ******************************************************************** The Other Worlds Homepage: http://www.wizards.com/dnd/OtherWorlds.asp The Mystara Homepage: http://www.dnd.starflung.com/ To unsubscribe, send email to LISTSERV@ORACLE.WIZARDS.COM with UNSUB MYSTARA-L in the body of the message. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2003 11:16:01 +0300 From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Ville_V_L=E4hde?= Subject: A thief plotline for Helskir If someone is interested in a thiefy plotline, here's on I recently drafted for the thief PC in our group. We haven't played it out yet, since after our X10 sub-campaign ended, I have so much stuff to write/decide about the world situation, plus I have to write "solo" plots for all the PCs for the next two years of Mystara-time. This plotline is closely tied to some developments IMC, but it might give someone some inspiration... Some background: our thief Yuri controls a thief guild that is situated in Wendar city and Freiburg. His guild smuggles drugs from Freiburg to Wendar (where Yuri is a duke of a borderland realm), and engages in burglary & prostitution in Wendar, and widespread racketeering, protection industry and drug traffic in Freiburg. During the Nomad war Your didn't have time to keep tabs on his guild too much, and most of the activity was left to his henchmen in Wendar and Freiburg. His main henchman is a trader-thief Ethrigan, who controls the merchants' guild in Freiburg and sits at the city free council. After the war ended, Yuri returned home and spied on his guilders for a week (easy stuff with elven boots and ring of invisibility - oh WHY did I let him have them! Idiot that I was then!). Well, to put the story short, Yuri exposed a small operation by two of his thieves who were cutting the cream of their burglary loot and selling it to a new fence. This fence was actually an operative of the Minrothad thieves guild, who was left without an employer after Oran Meditor was assassinated and the Guild had to once more retreat to the shadows. With Yuri being engaged in the war, this master thief tried to wrest control from Ethrigan. Now Yuri has realised that his guild is still too small to effectively control a city as big as Freiburg, and he is looking for new recruits. He deemed Helskir as the best choice, since the city was conquered by Alphatia a few months ago after a small period of colonial warfare between the Empires. Well now, there's a small contingent of Alphatian spies in Freiburg. These spies have made a deal with the local prostitutes, who have formed a sort of a trade union (bit like the old city in the Sin City stories), thus having no pimps over their shoulder. The Alphatians have provided the muscle to keep them independent, and the hookers help to hide their activities AND sell them valuable info gained in bedchambers. (Yuri's guild gets some protection money from the prostitute union in exchange for staying out of their territory.) Recently, when Yuri was hiding from his own cronies, he befriended two prostitutes and lived in their flat for a week. During this time the "girls" learned some valuable information about his guild activities, which they promptly sold to the Alphatians. Yuri has no clue of course. So, now the Alphatians know that Yuri is coming to Helskir, and they have prepared a nifty little trap. They want to use Yuri to get rid of the local thieve's guild, which is engaging in zzonga trade. 1) When Yuri starts to look for contacts, he will be contacted by an Alphatian intelligence operative, posing as a local guilder. 2) The operative promises to organise a meeting with the local thieves who might be interested in forming an alliance. 3) Instead of a meeting, the operative hires mercenaries to ambush Yuri - just enough to make it plausible, but not enough to kill him. The mercenaries are convinced that they are working for the local guild. 4) If things go as planned, Yuri will go on one of his murderous moods and try to excat revenge on the "traitorous" local thieves. (The Alphatians haven't been able to find their hideout, but they know Yuri might be able to do that: after all, he beat the former master thief of Freiburg - Danakhriss from "the Quest for the Heartstone".) The Alphatians send an invisible stalker or a similar monster to keep tabs on Yuri and to get them info on the hideout. 5) Presumably Yuri will storm the hideout and try to kill the leaders, looking of course the intelligence operative. Most likely he will succeed - the guy is very resourceful. Or he might stop and listen to the thieves as they explain their innocence. 6) At this time the Alphatian intelligence troops attack, trying to finish off the rest of the thieves. Depending on the situation, Yuri might try to flee, join them or join the thieves. 7) In any case, the Alphatians will try to capture Yuri alive. They say they will let him go, even supply his guild with cheap drugs (not zzonga of course), but will demand some form of allegiance. If Yuri whines they produce detailed information on his guild (see above). Ville ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2003 08:35:42 -0400 From: Geoff Gander Subject: Re: A thief plotline for Helskir Ville wrote: > If someone is interested in a thiefy plotline, here's on I recently > drafted for the thief PC in our group. We haven't played it out yet, since > after our X10 sub-campaign ended, I have so much stuff to write/decide > about the world situation, plus I have to write "solo" plots for all the > PCs for the next two years of Mystara-time. I like this! Remind me not to play in any of your campaigns - it seems that you blend Paranoia with D&D quite well! :-) I'd be intreested in seeing more... Geoff, who's always interested in ideas for keeping players off balance -- Geoff Gander, BA 97, MPA 02 Carnifex Loremaster/Mad Roleplayer Master of the Elemental Plane of Bureaucracy au998@freenet.carleton.ca : www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Realm/2091 ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2003 08:40:33 -0400 From: Geoff Gander Subject: Re: I don't want to seem like I'm flaking out on this, Daniel wrote: I'll send a note to Wizards to advise them of the situation. In the meantime, I think other members have said it best - delete all suspicious attachments. The MML has a "no attachments" policy anyway, so any emails on List topics containing them should probably be treated with caution. My apologies if I've been unavailable over the past week - the big blackout in the northeast shut me down for a few days, and we've been on various forms of power rationing since then, to reduce strains on th local power grid. Geoff -- Geoff Gander, BA 97, MPA 02 Carnifex Loremaster/Mad Roleplayer Master of the Elemental Plane of Bureaucracy au998@freenet.carleton.ca : www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Realm/2091 ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2003 13:11:21 +0000 From: Ricardo Matheus Subject: Deceiving Virus Hi all Just to add some information so we can figure out this virus flood I received the following message in my Hotmail inbox: *** mail 1 *** The mail message (file: application.pif) sent from your address to hihama@uta.fi contained the virus WORM_SOBIG.F. The virus has been removed and the message has reached its recipient. NOTICE! If the virus mentioned above is KLEZ, YAHA, BUGBEAR or SOBIG, this message was sent to you in error. The aforementioned email worms forge the sender's address, which causes these messages to be sent to random recipients. (InterScan on the network) *********** This one is more revealing since you found out about that adress: *** Mail 2 *** Returned mail: Service unavailable The original message was received at Thu, 21 Aug 2003 16:52:05 -0400 (EDT) from rrcs-sw-24-173-32-81.biz.rr.com [24.173.32.81] *********** I'm almost sure I never sent any mail to this adress and the returned message had a 1k attachment (wich of course I didn't open) I scanned my system with an up-to-date version of Norton Antivirus and nothing was found, I'm don't know very much about computers but maybe it means that hotmail is infected really.... Ricardo Matheus a.k.a. Darkblood Owner of the Mystara Map Navigator www.geocities.com/darkblood18 _________________________________________________________________ MSN Messenger: instale grĂ¡tis e converse com seus amigos. http://messenger.msn.com.br ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2003 07:30:48 -0700 From: "Ohad Shaham (Morphail)" Subject: Trio to Australia and New Zealand Hey all! just a quick note to say that I will be in australia and NZ starting septembre and probably for 6 months or so. I will be passing through a lot of towns so if any of you are in the region and fancy a game, a discussion about Mystara or anything else, mail me privately. Morphail (who being undead, is not afraid to fly on 9-11). --------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2003 07:42:59 -0700 From: Joaquin Menchaca Subject: Virus 411: Please kill winppr32 and TrayX processes Hi, If you are running a Windows operating system, please check your system and make sure you are not running virus, which spams people on the net with spoof'd addresses. This nasty one Sobig-F has its own mail (SMTP) server that is uses to attack other sites. If anyone programs with VisualBasic or OLE, they know it is all to easy to scarf email addresses, especially from the pourous Outlook. If you are running Windows NT, 2000, or XP, do CONTROL-ALT-DEL, and click the processor tab, and kill winppr32.exe and TrayX processes. For those running Windows 98, Me, or XP (maybe Win95, but cannot remember) run the msconfig.exe tool (Start menu->Run, type msconfig), and uncheck any winppr32 and TrayX programs. This stops them from loading at bootup. More information about removal can be found here: - http://admin.utep.edu/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabid=38 - http://us.mcafee.com/virusInfo/default.asp?id=description&virus_k=100561 I did a search for winppr32 on google, and found quite a bit of useful sites out there besides the ones mentioned. - Joaquin __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2003 13:35:41 -0400 From: SteelAngel Subject: Re: Virus 411: Please kill winppr32 and TrayX processes On Fri, 22 Aug 2003, Joaquin Menchaca wrote: > Windows 98, Me, or XP (maybe Win95, but cannot > remember) run the msconfig.exe tool (Start menu->Run, > type msconfig), and uncheck any winppr32 and TrayX > programs. This stops them from loading at bootup. If you can use Regedit, the offending keys should be in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\software\microsoft\windows\current version\run Deleting the keys that point to the execuables directly is a better solution, because the msconfig tool, only moves them into a different (not executing) directory. make sure you note the path names of the two programs, and after a clean reboot, find the files and junk them. Ethan -- Kinard 210 Linux Guru Webmaster www.steelangel.com ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2003 20:44:19 +0200 From: Daniel Mayer Subject: Re: Virus 411: Please kill winppr32 and TrayX processes Guys, please just use the tool from www.sophos.com, it does every step after another. it's only 140kb, even a slow modem should get it in reasonable time. greetings, Daniel ------------------------------ End of MYSTARA-L Digest - 21 Aug 2003 to 22 Aug 2003 (#2003-206) ****************************************************************