There's a buffet of RuneScapey delights heading your way this month, and you'd better be hungry! There's the month-long in-game event known as the RuneScape Road Trip; Zarosian combat content; elder divination and more, along with countless tweaks and smaller improvements requested by you.

The RuneScape Road Trip

Members only, month-long in-game event.

The opening salvo comes from the RuneScape Road Trip, which is happening right now and will have something to offer every day in May! Scoot over to the Challenge Mistress in Burthorpe, and gain hefty amounts of XP for the completion of in-game tasks. Every five tasks you tick off will unlock a new piece of the hiker outfit, and a monkey pet will be yours if you manage to complete every task! If you miss a day, don't worry: J Mods will be on-hand to stamp your Road Trip journal, which counts as a completed task, so you don't have to be available every day in May.

There will also be special weekends and weeks for slayers, skillers, minigame players, port captains and dungeoneers, offering enticing stuff like double slayer points, extra Castle Wars tickets and double Dungeoneering tokens. Take a look at the RuneScape Road Trip news post for full details.

Ancient Combat

Members only, new mid- to high-level combat abilities.

Learn the secrets of the old masters with Ancient Combat! This update contains fifteen new additions to combat, each with a distinctly Zarosian flavour.

First up are three ultimate combat abilities, as voted for by you in a Power to the Players poll in February. These are tentacle-themed abilities for magic, melee and ranged, and they require level 75 in their respective skills. Activating these will hurt you a little, but will damage your opponents a lot, making them a risky but deadly strategy in combat.

For players with level 91 Constitution, we're also throwing in Ice Asylum: a group healing ability. This ultimate maps down a healing zone that regenerates the health of anyone who approaches it.

The other updates are for those who have completed the recent Fate of the Gods quest: four new combat familiars. Blood, shadow, ice and smoke nihil - each with a combat level of 160 - will be summonable at level 87 by gathering ingredients from nihil creatures. These have unique passive combat buffs and pack quite the punch. Plus, in case you're unhappy with the nihil ingredients you have, we will offer a divination transmutation that swaps your ingredients for the ones you want.

To give you more reasons to fight the nihil and muspah, we'll be jazzing up their drop tables. Get lucky and they may drop dragon hastae, dragon throwing knives or dragon magic wards. If that's not incentive enough, both creatures will be unlockable as slayer targets for 50 points.

Ninja Dungeoneering

Some free-to-play, some members-only; batch of Dungeoneering updates.

Determined to release the most updates in a single month, the Ninja Team have set their sights on Dungeoneering.

There's a new resource dungeon, a new slayer task, the ability to pay tokens to skip floors, a new chaotic weapon, a gem bag upgrade, new pets themed after Dungeoneering creatures, more skill scrolls, an item collector in the same vein as the bonecrusher, and dozens of nips, tucks and improvements for your day-to-day delving into Daemonheim. Phew!

These changes have all come from your ideas on the forums, Reddit and other social networks, so please do keep them coming. If the ninjas are happy and busy, they're not sharpening their blades and looking our way...

Ashdale Repeatable Boss and 'Choose Your Path'

Free players and members.

This month, the end boss of A Shadow Over Ashdale will become a repeatable weekly encounter, with juicy bonuses for defeating it. You will also be able to hop onto an Ashdale lodestone to cross paths with the crassians, and re-watch cutscenes from the quest.

We'll also be slipping in something called 'Choose Your Path': an extension of the Path System for players who have just joined the game. This will direct them to the best low-level stuff in the game, according to their mood - whether that's adventuring, skilling or hitting things with swords.

Elder Divination

Members only.

Elder Divination - delayed from April - is now the first update in May. We apologise that we couldn't get these high-level Divination additions to you sooner, but we will be including a two-week Early Bird Bonus to make up for it.

Drop one of the new Divination-oriented divine locations and you'll get double Divination XP, energy and portents. Also, divine implings will be far more frequent for the bonus period.

Solomon's Store and Treasure Hunter

Solomon Store highlights include fiery weapons and rest animation overrides, our favourite being the 'Mechanical Marvel': a lazy chair of dwarven design.

With so much going on this month, there's bound to be something that catches your eye. Remember to keep stamping your Road Trip journal and have a marvellous May!

Mod Mark

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.