So I have no idea how active this forum is, but since posts have been made this year and there seems to still be a small community of people who still play BoE, I guess I'll put this here. I've started designing a scenario (mainly for fun, but if there are people out there who would play it, then that's a bonus) and I'm having an issue with Stairway encounters which is baffling me.
I've essentially got two towns that are linked by a forced stairway which I've dropped on a portcullis. That works fine. However, I wanted a dialogue box to come up when the party enters the second town for the first time, like you get in Sweetgrove in VoDT. No matter what I try, it won't appear unless the special is on a space the party walks onto (when just having it in the town specials list didn't work, I tried having it so that the stairway deposits the party onto the space containing the special, but it wouldn't activate until I walked off and on again). I could live with having the party walk to it in this case, but there might be a point later on in the scenario when I really need the special to be triggered just by entering the town.
Now, here's the thing - I looked to see how it's done in VoDT and ASR (it's probably done in ZKR too, but I don't remember), and it seems to be this: using VoDT as an example, when the party enters Sweetgrove, the game checks to see whether the party has activated the quickfire machine yet, in which case they'll have been sent to Sweetgrove via a forced stairway. If they have, they get a few dialogue boxes, then a reward, and then the scenario ends. If they haven't activated the quickfire, the game checks to see whether the party has visited Sweetgrove before. If they have, nothing happens, if they haven't, a dialogue box comes up. All this happens just by the special nodes existing in Sweetgrove's list. Zaskiva has much the same thing, only it checks to see if you've inadvertently killed Lord Volpe, and if you have, you die.
I made a tiny scenario containing three towns, representing Fort Talrus, Sweetgrove and wherever it is in the school that the quickfire machine is located (Major Waste Repository?) I copied the above as simply as I could, putting a special in the third town which changed flag 0,0 and then sent the party to the second town via a forced stairway. The second town was supposed to check the value of 0,0 and display a dialogue box accordingly. Did it happen? Nope. I like to think I understand specials fairly well and I can't see anything vital I'm not doing, so unless someone can enlighten me I'm guessing it's a bug. Why it only affects my scenario and not the official BoE ones though (I've played through the beginning of VoDT and the Sweetgrove message comes up), I have no idea.