A Stray in a Manger – Free and Members

The poor old Varrock dog has had it bad for the last few years, and this Christmas you’ll have the chance to turn his flea-bitten, mangy life around! In a special update more akin to the Christmas events of old, you’ll be able to clean up a pack of stray dogs, build a permanent kennel in your choice of RuneScape city, and turn the dogs into a pack of Christmas reindeer, all geared up to help with Pet Christmas.

You’ll also be able to hunt special Christmas snow implings around the game world, gaining plenty of stocking fillers like bubble blowers, snowballs and special Christmas food.

There will be plenty of special RuneScape presents available for those players who get involved with a RuneScape-wide game of Pass-the-Parcel. In this Christmas variant, you’ll find Santa beards and sacks, and plenty of god-themed accessories for your kennel, including Zaros chew toys and a Guthix flea circus! That’s right, the fleas get re-homed too, and they get to play with high wires, flaming rings and unicycles.

Christmas is a great time of year to enjoy with your friends and family, so we are making some changes to our ‘Refer a Friend’ system, offering you extra rewards when introducing RuneScape to others.

Santa will also be crash landing this month, scattering presents across Gielinor for marauding monsters to pick up. Defeat the creatures, collect the presents and return them to Santa to be rewarded with gifts of your own, with greater prizes for those who find complete sets of certain present types. Yelps will be getting in on the act, so you’ll have an alternative method of gaining presents on the Squeal of Fortune.

Pet Update

The stray dog has had a profound effect on the RuneScape team – so much so that, this month, we’ve been taking a look at the way pets function in the game. We wanted to improve the interactions between master and pet, so we will make a few changes to encourage more players to find a cuddly (or ferocious) friend for Christmas. Most noticeably, we are removing the need to feed or carry your pets, since they will be accessible from the new customisation interface.

We are also adding two brand-new, re-colourable and re-nameable pets to Solomon’s store, each with their own unique set of powers.

God Statue Construction D&D – Members Only

For our final update of the year, we’re adding a new monthly D&D that could earn you Construction, Slayer and Prayer XP. Simply put, you’ll be able to build statues dedicated to a variety of gods by solving puzzles based around an ingenious mix of physical scaffolding and code-breaking gameplay. Sound strange? Not as strange as the sculptor who’s designed the holy landmarks dotted around the world. It’s available to players with any Construction level, and is all set to end the year with a real bang.

Have fun…and here’s wishing you a most excellent Christmas from myself and the RS team.

Mod Mark
Design Director – RuneScape

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What is a ‘Behind the Scenes’ article?

Behind the Scenes is a sneak peek at the planned game updates that we hope to launch in the coming month.

This, however, is only a plan; not a promise that a particular update will be released in a particular way or at a particular time. To get you the highest quality updates as quickly as possible, we usually keep on tweaking and testing right up until the moment before release, so sometimes things change or take a bit longer than expected. We aren’t afraid to change our plan if necessary, as we will never launch an update before it is ready.