Cricket is going to tell you a story tonight, so gather around the camp fire. This is a true story that many of our newer players may not know.


It is called The Silence of the Fawns.

Once upon a time, many moons ago, a gamer on the Internet discovered The Endless Forest. "A new game!" he thought. "I shall master it and become the best there ever was." And so the gamer named his deer and entered the Forest. But he could not find a way to level his deer, which remained a fawn no matter what he did. When he tried to attack other deer, he did no damage to them, and found that his fawn walked right through them uninhibited. He could not obtain any items, or even keep the spells that, for some strange reason, other deer kept casting upon him. He could not even figure out how to cast spells on himself!

"What kind of game is this?" he wondered aloud. "I can't even figure out how to win!" Frustrated, the gamer asked his gamer friends for help. They, too, created deer, and named them with the most phallic of pictograms. But still the gamer's friends could not discover how to win the game. They could not do damage, gain levels, save the princess, or do any of the things they normally did in games. In an angry rage, the gamer called out to his fellows, "Hey! If we can't win this game, we need to make sure nobody can! Let's ruin it!"

So they gathered to figure out how to end The Endless Forest. "I know!" said one gamer. "We could prevent them from casting spells on each other."
"How could we do that?" asked another.
"Well ..." she responded, scratching her head, "I guess we can't stop deer from sitting next to sleeping deer, and if we stand in the way of the toadstools, they'll just walk right through us ... but the pine cones! Deer need pine cones to cast antler spells! Let's steal all the pine cones!"

So the gamers entered the Forest once more to steal all the pine cones. As fawns, they patrolled the evergreens, ready to pounce on any pine cones that might drop. Many exhausted themselves trying to knock every pine cone from every tree--only to discover that the supply of pine cones, like the forest, was endless. Finally, a stag happened upon one of these guarded evergreens, and rubbed against it as one gamer's little fawn watched eagerly. When the pine cone dropped, the fawn rushed in to intercept the pine cone--only to find that it was invisible! Frantically, the fawn tried to find it and eat it before the stag could, but the stag just lowered his head right through the fawn and ate a pine cone that only he could see. Then, he cast an antler spell upon the furious little fawn. Disheartened, the fawn's player met with the other gamers again.

"It seems we can't steal the pine cones," they sighed.
"But those are the only items in the game! How are we supposed to grief other players if we can't take their items?"
"Maybe we can just harass them!" one gamer suggested. They agreed that this was the best solution, and their fawns all reentered the forest to torment the other deer.

In the forest, the phallicly named fawns sought out deer that looked especially emotionally vulnerable. They ran at their targets, rearing and shaking their heads, pawing at the ground with their tiny hooves in aggression. But the stags they encountered just toppled backwards and laughed, as though they found them comical or even adorable! When the gamers searched their interfaces for a chat bar, they found none, and so could not even curse at their quarry. There was not even a drop-down menu, and therefore no way to spam other players with anything but angry faces--which other deer maddeningly interpreted as "cute!" Unable to damage the other players physically or mentally, the fawns retreated from the Forest and regrouped.

"This sucks," they moaned.
"Oh my god, you guys," said the first gamer, horrified. "I think this game might be impossible to grief. There's just no way to do it. Maybe we should give up." All around the chat room, gamers nodded their heads sadly. Just then, a latecomer rushed in.
"Everyone! I've figured it out! I've figured out how to annoy other players in this game!"
"How?!" they cried desperately.
"I wrote a script that will make your fawn moo incessantly. Here, take a copy," he said, handing them out. And so, confident that they had the key to success, the gamers' fawns galloped back into the Forest to moo endlessly.

And moo they did. All night and all day, the Forest was filled with a chorus of fawns mooing to an unchanging beat. At first, other deer tilted their heads in bemusement, but eventually, it became annoying. Players all over the forest turned down their speakers to quiet the din. For a time, this was satisfactory. But soon, many deer missed the sound of hooves, the croak of frogs, the music of the stream, and the ominous noise that big oak tree makes when you get close to it. Finally, they gathered outside the Forest in the forums.

"Has anyone noticed those weird fawns in the forest lately?" asked one deer's player. Other players responded in agreement: they, too, had been forced to turn down their speakers. "What should we do?" many wondered. "We can't just ban them. The Endless Forest doesn't work that way."
"But they're sooooooo annoying!" said others. "Banning them is clearly the only way to get rid of them! And besides, they deserve it!"
"No, no, no," said one wise old deer's player. "They'll simply come back as other fawns. Besides, there are no rules in The Endless Forest. This may simply be their way of playing, and we cannot punish them for that. We must find our own way of playing that deals with them. I propose we turn them all into frogs, that way at least we will be able to hear ourselves think over their mooing."

So they did. Tremendous magical effort was exerted as spells erupted all over the forest until finally, every fawn was a frog or a squirrel or, at the very least, wearing the whistling butterfly mask. That is, until the fawns' players returned to jump in the water or sneeze off the spell. Which, unfortunately for the rest of the forest, happened all too often, leading a few deer to rather immature outbursts. In desperation, the deer of the Forest cried out to the gods for help. "Michael! Auriea! Please help us! These fawns have a terribly annoying script!"

"Not to worry," said the gods. "We, too, can make scripts." And so the gods altered the Forest. And that is why a deer's voice becomes hoarse after too much bellowing, and ever since then, the Forest has been a quieter place.