DOMANERS'S PROFILE

Right, I'm new to this RPG Maker XP business, although I'm quite excited about a game idea I have right now.

Just wondering, I want to make a short screen that will pop up before the first map, which will have some text that pops up to set the scene (you know just a black screen with a couple of lines of text).

The only way I know of doing this is to create a blank map and then have an autorun event that displays text and then jumps to the next map. By doing this, however, I have to have my character somewhere on this screen else the game will throw up an error. Is there a better way of doing what I want or is there a way to hide the hero?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

PS If anyone knows of any good tutorials for getting to grips with RPG Maker XP, send a link my way. I haven't really found any good ones (other than guides on the scripting language).

Thanks!