Forget Second Life, Twinity or even Facebook! If you want a proper online community, then you should be building a village on Wurm.

Wurm has always been about community. From the very earliest days Wurm Online has offered the functionality of creating and managing villages where a group of players could band together, deed some land, recruit citizens and work and have fun together. Land on Wurm has never been the ridiculous extravagance it is on other games. For a start, you don't actually need a deed to build your own place, but owning a deed means you get guards to help keep it secure, decay of buildings and walls is very much reduced, you get an exclusive village chat, and everyone else knows exactly what belongs to you.

And on the Wild server, players take their villages to extremes - building huge earth walls, employing lots of guards and making their home as impregnable as possible.

At Wurm Online, we know these communities are incredibly important to the game. Players organise them selves to make sure that between them they have all the skills needed for the village - blacksmith, carpenter, weapons smith, priest, boat builder (if they are coastal), forester, and so on. This is so much more than many of the social networks can come up with. On wurm you can chat, share ideas, talk about last night's soap, make new friends, and all while you are building your house, farming your fields, fighting a huge scorpion or, on Wild, building your defences and training your fighters.

A Brand New Deed System

To go along with all this, we have just launched a new and improved deed system. We have lowered the price of land so that you can build larger villages, we have made the system much more variable so that you are no longer fixed to just a few sizes, but customise to your own specs. And we have made the hiring and firing of guards more versatile so you can really just employ the guards you need depending on your situation.

It all goes towards making Wurm Online a more detailed and interesting place to spend your online time. And we will keep making developments, bring out new ideas, make things better or closer to reality, and offer more and more ways for people to interact with each other while they are playing their favourite game. At Wurm, we don't believe that gaming and networking are different things - and Wurm Online intends to prove it!

I am not sure what the Gods of Wurm think about this, but every year the people of Wurm celebrate Christmas. Rolf gives out prezzies and free food from a table laden with goodies, Santa visits every server, accompanied by a tower of lights and snow covers the ground and the trees making the whole place glisten with magic.

Every year the players celebrate too. They make presents for each other, wish each other well and this year they were able to make Christmas trees and put presents underneath them for their friends. I was given a nice new pendulum by my friend Lolabelle.

This year, on our free starter server, Golden Valley, a group of players got together to add an extra special something to Christmas. They built a cart, added a horse (who gallantly pretended he was a reindeer) and loaded it up with all kinds of presents that they thought would be useful to the players on Golden Valley – which ever kingdom they belong to.

Tools, seeds, meals, weapons, charcoal (to make snowmen) gems, the players worked hard to wrap the presents and fill their cart. Strawberry, Spoedi, Teluris, Elite – between them these players dropped over 200 presents, organised races and hid presents for players to find in treasure hunt competitions. Not the GMs, not the creators of Wurm, not even me, the wandering Bard of Wurm, but the players did this, in their own way and in their own time – because they wanted to. And with no help from us.

Elite and Steveaustin, who are moving to the premium servers, gave away many of the tools and other gear that they had made over the months they have played on Golden Valley. They had built a 400 tile farm near Fort Willow on the west side of the lake near Libila’s Gate. Here they had a large herd of animals and were able to produce great quantities of crops and leather.

You should ask all these players for the full story for I do not have enough room here, but between them and the other characters on Golden Valley, once again Wurm Online has proved itself to be truly unique – in what other game could you celebrate like this, in the snow and ice, with the winter sun shinning down, and giving each other presents that have real meaning to how you play the game?

Give a player a pendulum and they can find water so their character won’t go thirsty. Give a player some leather armour and they are better prepared for what awaits them in the forest. Give a player a helping hand, and you have a friend for life.

Only On Wurm! Happy Christmas, whoever you are!

Those ever so nice people at PC Gamer have listed Wurm Online on ther annual game voting site all ready to be voted for by the readers. So, all you need to do is go to the Top 100 site, register and then select your five favourite games in order of preference - and of course, Wurm Online will be your number one choice! Having selected five and put them in the right order (remember, Wurm at the top), then submit your votes. And that is all there is to it.

So, Click Here, and go and help Wurm with some heart felt voting!

The perils of the dreaded Circle Sea has made crossing from North to South on Wurm near impossible. While mariners are defeated in their attempts at this journey, and they realise that the flight to Freedom from the Northern Kingdoms was just pure chance, miners working in distant mountains on the lands of Wurm have unearthed the wondrous Portal Stones, previously only thought to have existed on Golden Valley. Now, these stones have been transported to the Wilds of the North and to Independence in the South, and gateways between the lands established.

But, travellers betware, for as has been discovered, this is not a gentle undertaking, and inscriptions found with the stones gave the following warning:

"The gods of these mighty edifices demand payment, and your Lords of Wurm must take ten silvers in tax from the coffers of you that wish to pass. And passage is not without its conditions thereafter, for this is not easy journey for trade, but a commitment! You must be aware that you can carry nothing but the most basic of tools given when you first arrived in Wurm, though you may carry coin and those precious items such as the Bag of Keeping that cannot be dropped from citizens' possessions. But we give some grace, for your possessions will be kept safe, and should you return they will be handed back to you.

"Those who are skilled in war craft, and have gained 50 or more in skill will lose five percent of it! And this loss can only be regained through hard grind, there are no favours here. Citizens will also be forced to wear the livery of the land they travel to, and will be adopted as a citizen of that place. For those of the Horde who travel south to the Freedom Isles, you will lose your faith and favour, and all those that travel North to South will lose one of their three conversions. Those travelling North from Freedom will not lose a conversion. Be wary and count your conversion carefully, for should you wish to return North and convert to Libila's Horde, she will not accept you if your lot of three is used up!"

Portals are dangerous at the best of times and the difficulties and restrictions we know about so far, may not be all that these ancient stones spring upon the traveller. However, this is good news too, for in the partition of Wurm, and the flight to the south, not all found themselves where their heart belonged. We wish them happy travelling.