Everquest II lets you become an in-game author

In terms of in-game originality, EverQuest II should probably win a prize. They're implementing a new feature in GU52 which will let players pen their own stories and distribute the books to other players. Think Lulu but with an EQII twist. Granted we're not talking War and Peace here but for anyone who has dabbled in fantasy fiction or would love nothing more than to pen tales of their character's exploits then this is definitely a feature for you.

Rothgar (aka dev Greg Spence) has put up a post explaining how the whole thing works - as well as sharing the first page of his masterpiece, Death of a Dragon. Essentially the process is simple: nip to your local crafter and buy a blank book. Once you start writing, that book becomes tied to you the author. According to Rothgar, there's no limit to pages but there is to words. For example, this screenshot shows 16% of the book has been used up which probably means around four pages of text.

Those concerned about losing their previous works in progress will be pleased to know there is an auto-save function built in. But once you've written your masterpiece, what do you do with it? Well you can easily copy the book to another blank tome, then you can give out copies to your friends or even sell them via a broker so the entirety of Norrath can read your tales.

As MMO innovations go, we're quite excited by this. It's a small feature which promises to encourage EQII players' creativity and we hope something similar should be included in other MMOs.