Wilderness Warbands

Wilderness Warbands are heavily guarded storage camps of followers of the different Gods. These camps are founded to gain an advantage for the followers of a particular God once their God returns. They will set up camp in the Wilderness every 8 hours, 3 times per day, one time at each of the three locations. Quercus, an ancient seer Ent, will send out adventurers to fight in the camps to balance the followers of the different Gods in Guthix's name. Quercus can be found just outside the Grand Exchange agility shortcut. Each world has its own timer for the warbands, and there is quite a bit of random variation (so a warband is unlikely to appear exactly 8 hours after the previous one on a particular world.)

The activity was released on 25 March 2013 and was first mentioned in Jagex's special Behind the Scenes post.

How to Participate
Players will be notified via a server-wide notice when a Wilderness camp appears. To find a camp after missing the notice, you can talk to Quercus in Edgeville, near the Grand Exchange shortcut. Quercus will also inform you when the next camp is if there is not one currently occurring.

Players must then head to the camp and avoid any attention by the sentries posted around the camp. They must sabotage the god's beam in the middle of the camp by finding a spot close enough to the beam in a direct line of sight, which then causes another god's followers to appear and start fighting the followers who are in the camp. Players can then intervene in the fight if they choose to, and then must fight the general who has several unique abilities. Players should be very careful when fighting the warbands, as they fight like players (in that they use abilities) and the general can execute powerful ultimate abilities, including a variant of Meteor Strike.

Succeeding in the sabotage grants Prayer experience for changing the alignment of the beam, followed by Summoning experience for summoning opposing forces. Failing (by guards witnessing a player for too long, the camp getting suspicious after three incidents, or getting too close to a guard) results in the whole camp turning hostile without any reinforcements to distract them from attacking players.

After the general dies, any assisting followers teleport out of the camp, and then players have at least 5 minutes (if they mess up) or 10 minutes (if done correctly) to loot the tents. Only 3 out of the 5 tents can be looted, and players may get various rewards, including a wand of treachery. If a wand of treachery has been looted, the game will announce to everybody in the vicinity that a wand has been found, and the player who has looted it will glow for 20 seconds, and have their Prayer points reduced to 0. In addition, it will disable single way combat and level restrictions for attacking that player, and like the other loot, prevents the player from teleporting until they have left the Wilderness. Only one wand can be found per camp.

While the players cannot teleport with the items in their inventory, if they can make it to Daemonheim, they can be transported out of the Wilderness. They will be brought either to Taverley or Al Kharid. From Al Kharid, use the boats to go to Edgeville. Players beware, as treachery is heavy among the warbands, and some friends chat channels tend to target people who are at a warband but not in the chat, and spies from pking clans infiltrate peaceful channels in order to direct the clan to where the channel members will go.

Enemies
Various enemies may be encountered while looting camps. 2 of each type of follower is in a camp, and each camp  has one general.

Rewards
Warbands grant experience in a number of skills. Aiding in the interruption of the beam grants $$(x^2-x+100)\times(2)$$ Prayer experience (where $$x$$ is your level in Prayer); aiding in the summoning of opposing reinforcements grants the same quantity of Summoning experience. A quantity of Slayer experience is also granted for aiding in the fight against the leader of the camp.

Reward items are also looted from the tents in the camps in the Wilderness. Several different items may be acquired:


 * Farming, Construction, Herblore, Mining and Smithing supplies. These can be given to Quercus for experience in the skills. If a player manages to kill somebody holding the crates before he or she manages to escape the Wilderness, the crates are converted into 4000 coins each for that player to loot.
 * A Wand of treachery can be acquired once per camp at most. Note that this does not mean that a wand is a guaranteed drop, but that the limit per camp is one wand.

You can loot up to 25 different supplies before you will have to go to Quercus to turn them in. You can loot from 3 camps every day, resetting at midnight GMT. After a recent update, there is no longer a wait period of 8 hours between being able to loot. This means that you can loot a maximum of 75 items per day, but only if you manage to get the maximum of 25 from every camp. Once the items are looted, players are tele-blocked and must walk/run back to Quercus to exchange them for a XP reward associated with the items. $$\frac{x^2-2x+100}{2}$$ experience is given per crate handed in, for a total of $$25\times\frac{x^2-2x+100}{2}$$ experience for 25 crates.

You may log out with skill supplies at any time (provided you are not in combat) without losing them; this is recommended to avoid death. It is also possible to teleport with supplies in your inventory if you are logged into a Free world. However, on looting of the Wand of treachery you are prevented from logging out for 10 seconds.

Trivia

 * Assuming players hand in 25 Skill supplies from each warband, it would take a player participation in 148 warbands (a minimum of 50 days) to go from level 1 to level 99 in a skill. It would take a player participation in 1685 warbands (a minimum of 562 days) to go from level 1 to 200 million experience in a skill.
 * When reinforcements come in to fight a warband, they start off attacking a follower that is weak to their combat style. For example, A saradominist thaumaturge (magic user) will first attack a bandosian reaver (melee user).
 * When a general uses his magic attack, ALL players within range will be hit by it.