While Guthix Sleeps - Overview (2024)

One cold winter morning in 2008, 'Scapers awoke to a brand new quest. It was a richly immersive, sprawling adventure featuring a thrilling cast of murderers, spies and druids – plus the return of the rarely encountered Mahjarrat! It would become one of the most iconic RuneScape quests of all time. Do you remember your first encounter with While Guthix Sleeps?

We’ve since continued the Mahjarrat storyline in Old School, with the likes of the recent Desert Treasure II and, as you’ve just seen, the upcoming Defender of Varrock. But now it's time for us to return to one of the most re-quest-ed stories from the original game – this time with an OS twist! While Guthix Sleeps will send you on a journey for one of the most powerful artefacts in existence - but can you stop a deadly Mahjarrat from obtaining it first?

The new quest will be a remake of the 2008 original – this means that backporting will be used as a starting point, but with enhancements to ensure it meets the standards of modern Old School (and accounts for our long-term Mahjarrat storyline plans). A selection of new rewards will be added too, so that the experience matches existing Grandmaster quests when it comes to impact and longevity.

We do want to stress that we’re trying something new here, especially with the rewards. We're going to be sharing some initial ideas and we want to work with you very, very closely to help refine them into something we all feel will work! Nothing said today is final, and we're super keen to start consultation right away.

So, let's start with....

One of the most desirable rewards from the original quest was the chance to take on Tormented Demons. These mighty foes were so beloved because they might drop Dragon Claws, which are an incredible addition to anyone's arsenal!

Now, we already have the Dragon Claws in Old School - they can be acquired from the recently revamped Chambers of Xeric and our own form of the Tormented Demons, the Demonic Gorillas. So while we're not trying to move too far away from the original While Guthix Sleeps, it does present a problem for us in terms of rewards!

That's where you fine folks come in. We've come up with two possible solutions to this problem, and we'd like to hear your preferred option.

Option A: Tormented Demons have two unique drops. The first is a brand new item (yet to be designed) and the second is Dragon Claws.

To keep it in-line with the OG, we could simply give them their iconic claws drop from the original release. This would mean however, it would be removed from Chambers of Xeric. But we've seen plenty of discussion talking about how Chambers has too many rewards and we've already removed the other dragon items and redistributed them, so why not here as well?

However, if the Claws were removed from Chambers and added to a single repeatable NPC, it goes without saying that this would affect their rarity and price. To counter this, we would likely make them quite a bit rarer than they were in 2008, to have them retain the majority (if not all) of their value.

While this will retain most of the nostalgia, we'll still also give them a new unique so you have something extra to grind for!

Option B: Tormented Demons will have a single unique drop. This is a brand new item (yet to be designed).

If you all feel like the ship has already sailed on Dragon Claws, then we'd still look to add a brand-new item to the Demons, so they keep offering value after your completion of a Grandmaster quest!

We'll be including an OPINION question with the Summit Poll to get your direct feedback on which approach you'd like to see! We’d also like to know what unique you’d like to score from these dastardly demons, too.

Before we get into the exciting new proposal that is the Rites of Balance, do you remember the Ruinous Powers? These were a new set of prayers originally proposed as a reward from Desert Treasure II. Unfortunately, after multiple stages of refinement, we made the difficult choice not to move forward with them. However, we promised we would revisit the core ideas at a later date - and we received some amazing suggestions on how we could do this! One of these suggestions was NinjaGamer1337 (AKA NinjaPig)'s popular suggestion for God Alignment Prayers.

The Rites of Balance take inspiration from NinjaPig's suggestion. These are just a concept at the moment, and we're presenting them to you now to discuss whether they would work as a possible reward.

After completing the quest you will have unlocked the Rites of Balance, and you’ll be able to use them by praying at the Ancient Guthixian Temple. We'll also look to introduce ways of switching to these Prayers through areas such as your Player-Owned House Altar. The Rites are four additional prayers that will act as new late-game extras to the current Prayer Book - so you'll have access to everything else you currently know and love.

Just like in NinjaPig's design, the intention is that the Rites of Balance would be our first set of God Alignment Prayers. In future, we'd look to add further God Alignments, though you'd of course only be able to access one at a time. We’re particularly keen to introduce the Zarosian God Alignment as an additional reward from Desert Treasure II. Over time, the system will hopefully grow to offer increased variety to Prayer, without falling into the same traps as the Ruinous Powers.

We would, of course, need to figure out a suitable way to unlock them! However, if you like the idea in principle, we’ll dive into much more detail in future. For now though, please keep God Alignments in mind while thinking about the Rites of Balance, as there is plenty of room for expansion.

All sounds pretty exciting, doesn't it? There's plenty of room to develop these ideas too, as we are very much at the beginning of consultation, so please let us know what you think. While Guthix Sleeps is such a classic quest – with your help, we can reshape it into another timeless Old School adventure.

You can also discuss this update on the 2007Scape subreddit, the community-led OSRS Discord or the Steam forums. For more info on the above content, check out the official Old School Wiki.

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