Hello, friends. We are friends, right? We've been through so much misery together already and, rest assured, we have many years of the same ahead of us.

Well, ONE of you certainly is not our friend. We've been trying to find out who, and all we can discover is it's some sort of clever-clogs. We admit it takes some skill to poison a messenger goblin by such an exact quantity as to be able to time his death for just after his walk back to Webley and his delivery of your awful scroll, but for before he could identify the hero in question.

It pains us to say it, but we've had some rather negative feedback against the union.

It's left us pretty heartbroken, guys. We've already had to have half a dozen pints this morning to cope.

We've decided we'll go ahead and copy the letter word for word for all our valued members, because we've seen Tripeak governors do that and of course politicians are the most trusted people in the Hive. It practically PROVES we've got no hidden agenda.

Here we are. Exhibit A:

"To QUOUA,

I wanted to take time out of my busy schedule foraging for meaningless herbs to tell you that you guys suck. I mean, come on, this is the worst way to spend a gold coin ever. I'll never get the seconds back spent reading your terrible advice.

It's painfully obvious you are involved in a conspiracy to end the influx of poor adventurers looking for work. Usually in permanent and grisly ways. If I had been following your advice so far, my time here would look like this:

1. Give up hope that I'll find a quest at all and just lie there and lose half my strength.

2. Restrict my search to four measley cells where everyone's so. Fucking. Happy. All. The. Time. It's hard to get chores off people who actually have their lives together. We know there's more danger further into the Hive.

3. Fight every new quester I see in the same situation as me to the death. Because that will HELP me? We're supposed to be in a union finding work together!

4. Poke insanely powerful imps in the face to gain a rotten old shield.

5. Be using that shield. Which I've since discovered has a hole in it and bright yellow paint on the outer side, showing arrows pointing to that weak spot with the legend ''Stick pointy objects and nasty spells through here to win."

I must admit Pete's recent article on hitting things hard until they are dead was pretty sweet. I was only hitting them once with a daisy I found on someone's lawn until then. I've had a bit more success since.

But everything else is garbage. You just want us dead. Oh, and our money. It's plain to see that hostage situation is fake too. Any more tricks and I'll be cutting off your drinking money. As well as your heads.

Sincerely,

???"

Grim reading, isn't it, friends.

Let us just say we were up front about the hardships you would face here in Questworld. Our very first scroll was called The Bad News. None of the disappointments following that should be coming as a surprise.

Here at QUOUA we strive to deliver only the highest quality advice, though not necessarily the highest quality maps judging by Dave's performance. Our goal as stated before is to allow you to survive and eventually thrive as an adventurer in these troublingly peaceful times, and our goal remains.

There IS a hostage situation, it's just that those big bad boys happen to make for excellent drinking companions so we might as well enjoy ourselves while we beg for our lives. And even acknowledging such a ridiculous conspiracy as to get you all killed off to pave the way for evil to sweep the realm unchecked would be an unfounded comment on our integrity.

We will issue more guidance soon enough, and pretend this never happened.

Signed,

Sober Pete

Drunk Dave

Lovely Lawrence

The dark, robed figure only known as The Fourth, the Bender of Wills, the Chainer of Realms, who sits drinkless in the corner, churning out advice scrolls yet to be published while cackling intermittently through dry, ageless lips, and muttering between about how we all fit so easily into the dark lord's master plan.

Oh, wait....