To the PKer

Introduction

This is a guide designed to help the aspiring Prince of Killers (PKer) lead a productive and fulfilling life on Shartak by ending the unproductive and meaningless lives of his fellow islanders. I suppose it could also be of use for do-gooders and other meddlers to anticipate the tactics of PKers. The knowledge contained in this guide comes down to you through the benefit of my own life experiences as a revolutionary, as well as my extensive knowledge of lesser practitioners of the Art. Regardless of what romantic or bloodthirsty rationalizations you give yourself, if you are reading this, you are certainly a maladjusted killer. Therefore, the information contained herein will be of use to you, even if you choose not to align yourself in the glorious struggle against tyranny. Ahem.

Who PKs

Everyone. Do not assume that you need to be a soldier or warrior in order to effectively dispose of your targets. Indeed, some of the most successful PKers have been superstitious shamans (Armadox), scurvy pirates (Long Fin Killie) or women (Ziggyirked). One's class or access to skill trees is incomparable next to the advantage of sound tactics. Indeed, one might say that PKing is the only truly egalitarian way of life, since it is dependant solely on one's intelligence. Now that I have written this guide, you don't even need that.

Gearing Up

As I have already stated that one's class is of little concern, I won't bother with a detailed categorization for each type. If you are a soldier/warrior, bring along as much ammunition as you can.

Necessities

Every PKer should have the following items close at hand.

Machete or Cutlass (5-7): This is your main tool for carving your name into history. Since they are breakable, it is necessary to have a number of them for replacement. Seven is a high number, but once you become known as a practitioner of the Art, you will not want to spend much time in weapon huts resupplying. Do not use wooden clubs, even if you are a cannibal. They cannot chop jungle, nor can they behead one's victims, and more importantly, they do not benefit from the 'Balanced Stance' skill.

Knife or Dagger (2-3): This is your main tool for carving your name into walls or sand. Along with shovels, rifle butts, and your own malnourished fists, they are weapons of last resort. As with real weapons like those above, they break, so keep a few spares. They are also needed to start fires.

First Aid Kit or Healing Herb (20-30): After reading this guide, you should never again be caught asleep by do-gooders. Accidents happen, however, and you will need to be prepared for the occasional tiger or another PKer stumbling upon your campsite. Do not obsessively heal yourself. If someone or something finds you, you are probably as good as dead anyway, unless you are a cannibal who has learned the ways of the flesh (in which case your brain has evolved beyond the need for mere guides) and can therefore have as much as 109 HP at any one time.

GPS (1): Unless you are a hometown killer, you will need this to find places. It is also useful for coordinating gathering points if you find a few like-minded PKers or flunkies to do your bidding. Outsiders instinctively know how to use these machines; Natives require the skill 'Outsider Knowledge'. They have a limited energy capacity but they last for a long time, especially if you turn them off when you are done using them.

Driftwood (6-12): You need two to start a fire, as well as to make tinder, and I will explain that use later in the guide. Do not underestimate their value. They may also be used for signposts, which may be helpful if you decide to recruit flunkies to your cause.

Sharpening Stone (1): You will need this to keep your blades sharp, and they are also of use for starting fires. They never break, so don't worry about replacing them. They aren't sold individually, so if you have extras, why not give them away to someone in need? Like your soft-bellied prey, before you kill them.

Those of you who can count will notice that the total number of supplies is less than a hundred if using a backpack, or even seventy if not. Feel free to fill up your space with whatever knicknacks and cultural absurdities you collect along the way, custom items, bottles of juice or wine, etc. I am not concerned with your feeble grasp of aesthetics. The supplies listed above are all that a PKer needs. One thing a PKer does not need, however, is a backpack. Backpacks are used by the booboisie of Shartak, those overly enamoured with their materialistic and flabby civilization(s). Buy a backpack only if you plan to spend most of your time in the jungle, like a witless explorer.

Luxuries

The following are items that will increase the chance of getting away with murder but are not essential.

Heavy Sword: Found in swamps, heavy swords are both stronger and more accurate weapons than machetes or cutlasses. However, they tend to break easier and are very rare. Be glad if you manage to find or manipulate someone into giving you one, but don't depend on them.

Fungi Juice: Made from 3 raw fungi, fungi juice can be made by anyone without need for the 'Brewing' skill. They give a momentary AP gain in exchange for an immediate HP loss, and they increase AP loss later on. Fungi is a commodity rarely sold at the Trader hut, so buy them whenever you can, or pick them directly from certain caves. Raw fungi are poisonous and there is no advantage to ingesting them except to die at your own hand.

Poisonberry Juice or Poisonberry Wine: Like raw fungi, this can be used to help extinguish your own life. Wine is more deadly than juice, but also requires yeastweed to brew, or the cost to buy is higher. A few of these can be useful if you want to rob your enemies the chance to kill you by doing it yourself.

Gold: Gold takes up no inventory space. Since you can trade for what you need without it, gold is of little use to anyone. Some foolish islanders do think gold is valuable, however, and having a fat purse can be a useful bribe for any number of purposes. Some PKers will even kill for gold. I would be very pleased if readers of this guide conveyed their gratitude by exterminating these people.

Shovel: Unlike the other items listed here, shovels are fairly cheap to buy or trade for. They are not essential for the PKer and I plan to ridicule them later in this guide. The one advantage to including the lowly shovel with one's equipment is that it lessens the need to purchase the truly useless skill 'Digging' at some point. With a shovel, one can dig caches in various places according to one's desire, and mark them using GPS or on one's map, assuming the PKer learns the 'Exploration' skill. Aspiring PKers can dig these caches in advance of their career, burying FAKs and other useful items inside, to serve as emergency rations which will keep the PKer from having to return to a village resource hut to resupply, an activity both arduous and dangerous depending on how well-known the PKer has become.

Skills

The following are general skills every PKer should have. Some classes have specific skills which may also be valuable. Read up on those on your own time. Tiers are listed in order of utility, and the smart PKer will have all three, but any fool can get by on the first tier alone.

Tier one skills

• Close Quarter Combat and Advanced Close Quarter Combat: These improve the accuracy of your attacks.
• Balanced Stance: This skill gives the chance of turning a miss into a hit for one damage.
• Bodybuilding: This skill increases your melee damage.

Tier two skills

• Outsider Knowledge: Allows one to use GPS kits if Native. The equivalent skill for Outsiders allows you to recognize poison berry juice/wine from tasty berry juice/wine. There are other advantages but these are the only ones that matter.
• Exploration: Allows you to keep a map of up to five destinations. The Cartography skill can raise this to ten destinations, but most PKers rarely need to know ten places to find someone to kill.
• Trekking: Reduces AP cost for crossing jungle, beach and grasslands from 1 AP to 0.5 AP.
• Survival - Firecraft: This will allow you to create fires so long as you have the supplies listed above.
• Swimming: Reduces AP cost for crossing water from 2 AP to 1 AP and AP cost for crossing deep water or swamp from 3 AP to 2 AP.

Tier three skills

• First Aid and Natural Medicine: Increases HP gain from 5 HP to 10 HP for First Aid Kits and Healing Herbs for Outsiders and Natives, respectively. Do not use FAKs and Healing Herbs interchangeably, as the foreign one will always heal for the lesser value.
• Stamina: Increases HP to 20.
• Tracking and its successor skills: Allows you to pick up the trail of a target in your contact list for a set AP cost. further skills in the tree increase the ability and reduce the AP cost. Useful for the discriminating PKer.

Tier four skills

• ?

There are other general skills that may be of interest, like the language tree skills for taunting the foreigners, Clan Leadership for recruiting flunkies, or the spirit skills, but none of these are essential for PKing. Necromancers may of course disagree with the exclusion of the latter, but I care not for the croakings of hide-bound mystics. Wiping out these corpse-grasping pariahs would gratify me immensely. There is a good reason for stopping after the third tier. Once you have 1000 XP saved, you can trade it in for 25 AP, for those occasions that warrant the extra effort. So don't bother filling up the limited capacity in your brain with useless skills like 'Agriculture'. Save the XP for what matters. You can always pick up the other skills later, if you should have the urgent desire to trade in your machete for a shovel and plant trees. Hold that desire in check and drink several bottles of poisonberry wine while you make up your mind. On the other hand, a variety of skills not directly useful for practicing the Art can be useful as camouflage, especially for recent newcomers to the island.

Man and Methods

At this point in the guide, I need to make a distinction between two types of PKer, based on what he does, not on what he says he does. There is a fundamental difference in tactics between the PKer who kills in secret and the PKer who kills in public. Some of the more imaginative breeds have come up with fancy terms for their chosen type, but let's not bother with semantics. I have listed the characteristics of both types below:

• The Quiet PKer: This PKer tries not to draw attention to himself. It is the kill itself that satisfies him and the resulting statistic gain, not the effect it has on other people, and certainly not the victim. They tend to be mutes.

• The Noisy PKer: In stark opposition to the Quiet PKer, this type of PKer actively seeks to draw attention to himself. The kill is meaningless except for the effect the death has on other people or the frustration that the AP loss costs his victim. They tend to be talkative sorts.

There is some overlap between the two types, of course. One may be a mute because he simply doesn't have anything to say to his victim, but he may also be trying to psychologically terrorize his victim with silence. Or a PKer may attack his victims even if they're in a crowded resource hut because he doesn't care whether other people see him or not. The former is a calculating observer of human nature, the latter is an idiot. Now that I've established the two main types, let's consider the methods used by each. Whatever type one is, the smart PKer should study the tactics of both types for knowledge that is applicable to either.

Killing in Private

• Find a Victim: Ideally, the Quiet PKer's target should be outside the village, far enough away that the body will not be found for awhile, if at all. Road-kills also work, or kills in resource-plentiful areas like grasslands, though the chances of discovery are raised slightly. If the Quiet PKer has enough patience, looking inside unmarked huts can yield unexpected rewards, as do-gooders rarely check all or even most huts on a regular basis, but the AP cost is prohibitive. Killing in resource huts or popular hangouts like taverns can be dangerous, but if only low-level newcomers are inside, the danger is reduced somewhat. This leads to my next point--it is better to kill a low-level newcomer (under level 5) or if one is more discriminating, a character of any level who lacks a profile description, than a character who does have a description or even merely belongs to a clan. The threat of discovery for any PKer is dangerous solely because of village coordination efforts to curb PKing in the area. Characters who RP or at least have some kind of persona are more likely to report PKing then non-descript types, or newbies who don't know any better. Some characters will join clans to puff up their sense of persona, but they may also join clans to give the appearance of belonging to a group that may go after PKers if reported. The smart PKer will therefore check the clan listed to see how many of its members are active. If very few are listed, then it is probable that no one will miss this character or come after you, unless your victim develops a spine. Zomtard complains in his Act of War that PKers who attack newbies are making an easy kill. I agree completely. So what? The Quiet PKer doesn't care what level their victims are except for the practical considerations stated above.

• Set-up the Kill: This may require a day or two to set up if you're hunting in a village. What you need to do is start a fire in a certain part of the jungle close enough to the village that it will quickly hide your trail, but far enough away that there is less of a chance that someone will see it and put it out. In The Art of War, Zomtard recommends chopping jungle on either side to d0 to form columns; this has the advantage of keeping your fire from spreading and attracting attention. I would suggest, however, that the smart PKer chop jungle only on the nearer side to the village--do not leave a patch of bare jungle for your pursuers to pick up the trail. It is, in fact, a worthwhile investment to have several rows of fire columns to move through, for while the PKer will suffer intensive burns, it will lessen the chances of someone picking up his trail on the other side. Another thing Zomtard points out is the necessity of remembering one's walking trail. A PKer who has been raiding the same village for awhile will inevitably attract some attention; retreading your footsteps has a chance of confusing all but the most dedicated of pursuers. Also avoid entering resource huts or popular hangouts until the day of the kill. Many PKers have been slain because their curiosity overcame their sense and they took a peek inside to see who's who, and that left their trail behind. Even if your victims fail to report you or the do-gooders fail to notice your victims, once they realize you are in the village they will know how many kills you have and how recent they are. Smart do-gooders will even note the average time that your victims died and may attempt a sting to bring you down, or at least prevent your attack in real-time. One way to avoid this problem (if varying the time of day that you make your kill is impossible) is to set multiple fires on different sides of the village. While this increases the chance of their discovery, it also gives the PKer several options when making the escape. Having multiple options also means that your pursuers need to search every area you might go. Of course, if the Quiet PKer is hunting outside a village, then the use of fire is of lesser concern, but the pickings are also leaner the further away one is from a village.

• Make the Kill: The first and only pointer--don't dither. If you followed the first two methods, there should be little chance of surprises. If you didn't, make the best of it by attacking quickly. The only reason to delay would be if you want to add some style to your kill by using an unconventional (that is, impractical) murder weapon, and if you miss more than five times, the RNG is frowning upon you, so kill your victim with a real weapon and get out.

• The Getaway: If you set up wildfires, you now have a first-rate escape path, or possibly multiple paths. Once you head into the fire, you have the option of staying in. This can be the perfect sanctuary for any PKer since you don't necessarily need to go far and it harms your pursuer to attack you. One problem that exists with this method is that if your pursuer is a Native warrior, he can poison you with blowpipe darts which will weaken you once you get out. If you're at low health at the time, you're probably going to die. A determined pursuer with access to fungi juice and other amenities may also consider it worthwhile to kill you even if you are hiding in fire. If you were a Noisy PKer, this might almost be like a badge, but you're not, so the gesture is worthless. If the PKer didn't set up wildfires, follow the directive in The Art of War and randomize your escape path with zig-zags and cross-overs to confuse your pursuers. If you're near water or swamp, head in immediately. Don't stay in water, even deep water, because someone will probably find you before you can move out. Going in deep also means that you spend more AP coming out again. Instead, stick to the shallows and make for the shores somewhere far enough away from your entry point that a pursuer may not look for your track there. If you entered swamp terrain, just get out quickly, or depending on which swamp you're in, head for the river. Then head for deep jungle. By this I don't mean, as Zomtard apparently does, that standing in d9 jungle will be of any use to you. What you want to do is go far enough into the jungle that most pursuers will give up the search, but close enough that you can still get back quickly enough the next day to do it all over again. Since the happy medium may not exist here, one thing the smart PKer should do is find a hiding spot far from the village but close to d5 or under jungle, surrounded by d6-d10 jungle. If you have extra AP, you can chop this formation yourself before you go to sleep. Be careful about camping near roads or interesting geography--double-check to make sure you're far enough away to avoid detection by passing travellers. People who hide in the jungles are either inexperienced newbies or lurking PKers, and most people bet on the latter.

Killing in Public

• Find a Victim: Noisy PKers tend to devote more time to this activity than Quiet PKers, usually to fulfill some esoteric goal implicit to their persona, rather than to ensure actual success. If the PKer wants to kill a well-known character, make sure the victim is going to be sticking around for awhile. It would be unfortunate to put in sufficient preparation and then discover the person has left the day before. Looking inside the hut where the person will be is a violation of the rule of the Quiet PKer, but the Noisy PKer wants to attract attention to the fact that he is in the area. One way to minimize the danger, however, is to make a sweep of the village, so that one's trail is scattered everywhere. Remember to retread your path so as not to lead your pursuers to your campsite. One other thing to consider when selecting a target is not to get hung up on one in particular. Stupid PKers have wasted days camped near the place that the intended target was supposed to be in the hope that he/she comes back. On the one hand, the less the PKer moves around, the less chance he has of being discovered. On the other hand, this is a boring activity, and depending on your target, it may be weeks before he/she returns. Most Noisy PKers don't restrict themselves to one target anyway (griefing), but have a list of priority targets to choose from; the Noisy PKer determines the order by whatever ideological dogma he follows, but making the kill is ultimately based on the realist chances for success. There is, however, a more tangible advantage to waiting for that special someone. If the PKer is patient enough to wait a week, he will become eligible for the peaceful intentions status and therefore if he dies prematurely, his AP cost to revive is cut in half.

• Set-up the Kill: All PKers want to get away alive. Getting away alive means that they can spend less time and less AP to commit more murders, versus the cost of reviving with a recent murder to increase the toll. Noisy PKers don't care so much about getting away with it, which is why they're more likely to kill themselves rather than 'honor' their enemies with the task. If this is the plan, make sure you have enough poison berry juice or wine to do the job, or simply overdose on fungi juice. Even if the Noisy PKer doesn't plan on getting away, the smart PKer should still make wildfires. Unlike the method suggested above, there is no need to place the fires out of villager line of sight. In fact, creating fires as close as possible to the village, and on multiple sides, will convey the impression of being trapped, or that the village is in danger of burning down. Even if your target isn't so gullible, however, the sight of several wildfires are a dramatic thing to behold. They also cost a lot to put out and relatively little to start. If you time it correctly, this will deprive your pursuers of the AP needed to chase you down and kill you, if you should decide to live another day.

• Make the Kill: Depending on whether the Noisy PKer makes the kill in a crowded hut or alone with the victim will determine how much time is needed to do it properly. Regardless of where it is, all PKers should wait until after the victim has died before taunting the corpse. It may seem more realistic to mock and swagger while your victim is still breathing, but this gives him/her a chance to wake up and heal up, or even attack you. Your victim's spirit will hear you regardless, so slit his/her throat and get on with it. While not a requirement, Noisy PKers should emote their kills using '/me' as the prefix command in the chatbox. This allows room for props and other theatre, and it can give the impression that one's victim is actively participating in the sideshow. Some players go a bit overboard on the extent to which they perform these pantomimes, but this is consistant with the MO of a Noisy PKer. Don't spend more than an hour playing with the body; it merely gives your pursuers a better chance to catch you in the act. Don't try to kill more than one target if there is little chance of getting away with it, or simply of succeeding at all. PKers gain nothing by carving up half-dead targets who will just heal up and take their revenge.

• The Getaway: This has already been covered to a large extent. If you plan on getting away, follow the steps listed in the Quiet PKer aspect of this guide. If not, take the poison berry 'pill'. The smart PKer will realize pretty quickly if there's a high chance of being discovered even after getting away and bring along the proper death medication. If the PKer is smart enough to realize this but not smart enough to prepare for the worst possibility, find yourself a tiger and hope he's hungry. Deliberately weakening yourself beforehand with salt water or similar substances may be a useful possibility here. If you do manage to escape, you can always heal yourself up. Otherwise, at least the animals have a better chance of finishing you off before the vengeful do-gooders arrive. The obvious risk, of course, is that someone will attack you in real-time and foil your attack, but this happens only rarely.

Forbidden Practices

Most, though not all, islanders respect the PKer as a valid, if unsavoury, lifestyle choice.

There are certain practices that will cause the Spirits to curse you and the island community to reject you. I am speaking of the use of griefing and zerging as tactics in PKing. For the benefit of the do-gooders, I will say that the use of griefing, that is, repeatedly attacking the same player/character, and zerging, the use of multiple alts who act as a collective entity for the benefit of the player, is unconscionably evil and selfish, and has led our island to the brink of destruction at least once in the past. With my clear disdain and moral revulsion for these practices so expressed, let's consider how to use these tactics with a lessened chance of getting caught.

Some may object to my including a section in this guide for such heinous activities, but the do-gooders may refer to my earlier statement that the guide may be of great use to themselves as much as to the PKer this work is offered to, in terms of counter-tactics. This is the danger of releasing texts into the public domain, but I accept the risk as a necessity for reaching a wider audience. Therefore, let us not behave like the buffoons of past epochs, who decried the wise man who first revealed the locations of where to find heavy swords. Information is destined to be free from constraints, and while this may be a product of my anarchical upbringing, it is not, I think, a mere opinion.

As for the PKer himself, the use of these tactics is more variable. Hearken back to my section outlining the danger posed by village coordination. Fortunately, most villages lack even the most basic sense of coordination, my own village of Rakmogak being one of the better examples. For the villages that do have some sense of vigilance, a smart PKer, regardless of which type he belongs to, should actively work toward the destabilization of that village, all the better to prey on its inhabitants with greater ease. These activities, while unscrupulous at best, are very effective at destabilization.

This is not to imply that I have any first-hand experience, of course; this is the section of the guide that draws the most on the work of 'lesser practitioners of the Art.' I bet you thought I was just boasting earlier. That it is entirely theoretical should not dissuade my readers, for I suspect it may be the only guide of its kind to offer practical advice on the subject, if it makes it past the puritanical censors, of course. (Note: I admit that open discussion of these tactics brings the guide into the realm of OOC instruction)

On Griefing

You will get caught eventually. The advantage griefing has over its cousin, zerging, is that it is easy to evade the Spirits. The chief disadvantage posed by griefing is that everyone else will pick up on it, not least of all your target.

One way to avoid this problem is to attack groups rather than a specific individual. The griefer can kill the same person over and over again so long as there is evidence to support the claim that he/she also attacked other members of the group. Most griefers, however, prefer to restrict their target to individuals, in order to pursue motives that have no bearing on my purpose here. Indeed, I suspect many griefers desire for their victims to recognize them as griefers, rather than simply over-exuberant PKers, again, to pursue whatever petty motives they have.

A variation of griefing the same individual character is to grief the alts that belong to the target player. One might be able to convincingly plead ignorance for this, assuming that no prior record of griefing exists for the player. Most claims of ignorance will not work, now that the TOS has been clarified. With so many alts playing different sides of the game, I suspect that a subtle griefer could attack all the alts belonging to one player and persuasively claim it to be a consequence of RPing. While I have strenuously stated my whole-hearted opposition to this tactic, I can think of a few players who may have found themselves targets of such malicious behaviour, considering their tendency to use different alts on opposing sides and thus effectively paralyze gameplay.

In order to minimize detection without reliance on an ignorance plea, a griefer should do one of two things: set up a short-term time limit, or a long-term time limit. By this I mean that the griefer should either grief his target for, say, a period of no longer than one month, or for a much longer period of time, but doing so in cycles, idling out in the interim periods, or better yet, staying active but avoiding player interaction, especially with the target. IRL this would look rather suspicious, but on the island it might do.

On Zerging

Zerging can be easily discovered by the Spirits, and an automatic penalty called a curse will be imposed, with varying degrees of strength should the practice continue.

As Zomtard warns us in The Art of War, one should not consider one's 'stash' to be another alt to hold needed supplies, but a hole in the ground. If, however, an alt moves these items to a hole in the ground and then leaves the immediate area, the curse usually fails to register. I can see the value of a niche trader belonging to another player, whose sole use is to transfer items given to him by another player's alt to another of his alts, and be entirely legitimate. This would require the use of a flunky, and rather more of an ability to coordinate with and trust in another person to both move the items and keep the secret than most PKers possess, sadly. It's also peripheral to the actual killing.

Effective zergers require a proxy server to make new alts. The danger here is that the server might be perilously close to one's server in terms of identifiable location, which will cast suspicion on the player as a zerger if there is other circumstantial evidence available. What sort of other evidence do I mean? Many zergers have a bizarre Professor Moriarty-like obsession with creating zerg alts that share common characteristics, particularly in their names. As a tip, do not name alts after household furniture. Do not rearrange words or letters in a random order for your alts (unless you're iwashere) or similar things that make it perfectly obvious that your alts are connected. Give your alts wildly different names, as well as different profile descriptions. Just having profile descriptions can be an advantage, since most zergs don't bother with such 'trivial' matters as camouflage.

Unlike the griefer, most zergers don't want to be caught. The exception is a group like PH, who were, perhaps ironically, griefed out of the game. There's a greater risk of being caught if all your alts are from one village. It isn't that difficult to set a gathering point and meet in one place to do your nefarious activities; it tends to require at least one alt having the skill 'Exploration' and a GPS. If your alts are at different levels, and with varied skill-sets, this again provides valuable camouflage, as the smart PKer knows.

Finally, change the way your different zerg alts speak or interact with other characters. One suspected zerger was recently ousted by an analysis of his speech patterns combined with other evidence. The zerger might think that players don't care enough to police the game, but the power of zerging (and griefing) is that they create distrust and hate among other players. As I say, a smart PKer may be able to capitalize on these emotions either by going the route himself, or by recruiting flunkies to do the 'dirty work' for him, but eventually some players will hate the zerg/griefer enough to track him/her relentlessly.

Conclusion

It is my hope that this guide will be of use to PKers for many years to come. One thing that I have not been able to discuss in-depth is the psychology of the PKer. Perhaps I will compose a separate treatise on this subject after I return from my sojourn to Raktam. For now, let me simply point out the crucial difference between murder on the island and murder outside the island. In the land that the Outsiders come from, their lives are undoubtedly nasty, brutish and short. To kill one must simply kill the body, even if the soul yearns to continue the fight. In Shartak, the Spirits infuse our Elder Shamans with the power of life eternal. One can kill the body but the soul will simply return to a new vessel.

Therefore, if the PKer is to truly kill his targets, he must be willing to kill the soul of his targets rather than merely their weak physical shells. Consider the example of the Native who loves the land more than the sentient beings who live on the land. The smart PKer should therefore attempt to burn down the grasslands, or pass rumours to his victim that this is his purpose. Or consider an opposite example, that of the Outsider who loves the peace of his own settlement compared to the wild unknown. The smart PKer should try to infest this settlement with shargle eggs, or at least threaten to do so.

Readers will note that in both examples one could achieve similar levels of fear and panic by merely the forcible suggestion of such acts. Of all the tools that the PKer has at his disposal, none is more valuable nor lasting for the mastery of his Art than his command of Speech. The Noisy PKer, for all his apparent weaknesses in developing a pragmatic strategy of attack, has within him the chief weapon to destroy the souls of his fellow man and through that destruction, to conquer them.