Wednesday, November 3, 2004

And there are those who Him as the Dark Sun ... So about a week ago I started playing a MUD (Multiple User Dungeon, an online text-based role-playing game) by the name of Forgotten Kingdoms, heavy emphasis on role-play. My roommate here at the fraternity said he played it at one point and was considering getting back into it, so I decided to check it out as well. He sent an e-mail into the admins telling them that our characters would be playing under the same IP, and that we were in fact two separate people, not one person multiplaying. I started a human rogue character, with an alignment of chaotic neutral. I wanted to be evil, but they have a system where you need to have played the game for a certain number of hours (over one hundred for sure) before you can play evil, mainly to keep newbies from messing things up. I know I could have done it, though. But oh well. I had my character going along pretty well, mainly to get from town to town (since he did not have a map) I just played that he would wander the roads aimlessly. Oddly enough, I always ended up in the cities I wanted to be in according to my roommate. But at one point my step fell wrong. To move about the map, you just type the direction you wish to go: "n" for north, "sw" for south west, etc. Well, as is a common mistake, I would sometimes hit the wrong direction and wander off the road; a very dangerous thing to do at a low level. I had done it a couple times before and lucked out, but on my way to some other place, I accidentally typed "se" instead of "ne" and put myself right in front of a Hill Giant, and was killed shortly thereafter. Now when you die, your soul is moved to the Realm of the Dead. A single room, where everyone goes when they die. From here, people have but 3 options: (a) reincarnate, usually a last resort because you lose a point of Constitution for doing it; (b)find a priest, if you have met a priest earlier in the game who greeted you with his name, you can send messages to him and tell him to come ressurect your body - if this priest follows any deity, however, you are indebted to its god; (c) you can pray to the gods themselves for ressurection, in which you pretty much pledge allegiance to it. Me? I chose prayer. The first time I did it, I accidentally put a semi-colon in it, and that breaks the line, thus ending the prayer right there, so it would only about a sentence and a half long. I waited about a day (I died yesterday) to see if the gods would respond to that, thought it can sometimes take a long time for someone to respond. My roommate told me to go ahead an try typing out a longer one today, sans semi-colon, and see what happens. So I did, and about five seconds later the next thing I know is I am surrounded by four priests of Cyric (SEER-ik). Cyric is the main evil deity of the game. He started off a normal human, but grew to be an epic fighter and upon his ascension to immortality he slayed three other gods, taking their power, with a vampiric sword that came to be known as Godsbane; the sword later rebelled against him, but he maintained his power. So pretty much, I wet myself at this point. I was totally not expecting Cyric of all the gods to ressurect me. If Cyric himself actually brought me to him, I probably would have been scared shitless. I kneeled before the priests out of respect, but this is the general jist of what I got from them: A priest of Cyric gives you a robe. "Now get up and leave this place before we think of something else to do with you." Needless to say, I did not stay much longer. They gave me robe, because when you die, you lose everything you have, clothes and all, and running around naked is not becoming of a follower of Cyric. Now Cyrics emblem is simply a skull, sans jawbone, within a purple or black starburst. So pretty much, as my character learns more about this deity of which he will follow he is going to physically change. From the beginning I already made him very skinny and skeletal to begin with. So maybe I shall have his hair slowly fall out, and his skin begin to wear away revealing the top of his skull ... I think it would be cool.

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