Isaiah decided to check the who-list to try to get an idea who Nightfall was.
Players and High mortals
Aigir the minor rogue
Alindha the trapper
Baldwin goes to Jihad
Brand the war-monger
Cimber the deceiving fiend
Conrad the great gladiator
Cyclone the high destroyer
Dawn the minor priest
Gaelen the minor believer in natural unity
Isaac the Faithblade of Torm
Keldoran the diviner
Koil the lurking criminal
A ghost
Mahray the page
Mosutha, the mage
Syrian the petty thief
Tremmor the employed fighter
That is odd, don’t see Nightfall on that list. Wonder why he doesn’t show up. Suppose it is something to ask over the lines or Light later.
Time to face reality, Isaiah was sitting in a church naked and afraid. He had been oneshot by a character who he hadn’t even spoken to before. It reminded him of his very brief time playing diablo. He got a demo and logged on to battle.net. For some reason there were level 99 characters going around joining people’s games and murdering them instantly in dungeons. It was so toxic people were justifying that it was okay to hack their characters to a level not possible in just the demo version. Terms like “they needed to be taught a lesson.” were thrown around in chat. The only thing Isaiah’s player thought when it happened to him by some rando was that it was time to uninstall. Well, he was playing this game on a mud client so the game ran on a server somewhere in Boise so technically he couldn’t uninstall the game. He could uninstall the mud client but that would just be petty. Open world PK was a harsh reality but he met a couple interesting characters. Isaiah’s player had to weigh his options. Perhaps if he got his character a little more powerful he wouldn’t just just get stabbed down but whatever class Nightfall was.
Anyway, now it was time to go back to get his corpse. Isaiah’s corpse was gone, his killer was nowhere to be seen. His items sans his money were laying on the floor. He got his spellbook with it’s solitary spell. He got his leather armor. He got his longsword. He got his goblin scepter. Now just to equip it all.
He went and wore the armor and wielded the longsword. He was about to wield the goblin scepter when his gamer-sense tingled. If he equipped a cursed item he wouldn’t be able to remove it without paying for it. Apparently, a poor man’s break curse was death. Either pay the church’s fee in gold or the grim reaper’s fee in 10% experience to remove the cursed item. He went to the weapon’s shop and sold the goblin scepter for 50 gold. At least cursed items were not worthless to vendors. And 50 gold was better than 0 gold. Getting PKed had left him completely broke.
While the thing with Nightfall was unexpected, unwelcome, and unsettling there was a goblin stronghold that had some unexplored rooms. Isaiah made his way out of the west gate of shadow and headed back to the gate. He promptly slaughtered the gate guards, buried the corpses and collected the few coppers and silvers they dropped. Next he carefully killed the goblins on the way back to the king so as not to get yet another unexpected death. Next he slowly and painstakingly killed the king and the royals with his pew pew magic missile. It took a while but he got it cleared. The goblin scepter dropped again as well as a few pieces of goblin armor. Sadly, goblins were small creatures. Nothing they dropped was usable by an elf. Elves were medium sized creatures after all.
On a side note, there were three sizes of living creatures. The sizes are unsurprisingly small, medium and large. Considering most of the equipment in the game was medium sized, playing a small or large sized character was harder. However, there was something to be said about that voadkyn ranger who could dual wield two handed swords. Dual wielding large weapons had great damage and also a really cool mental picture. Imagining a giant chopping machine is really cool.
While Isaiah’s player had zoned out for a bit spamming ‘heal’ to get his character’s health topped out he remembered what he had come here to do. The place north of the goblin king’s room was the last bit of the goblin stronghold yet to be explored.
Dryzil laughs and offers everything in the room as lighting crashes down!
Dryzil Cackles.
What was that? There is a mob here. A closer look says it is a hobbit assassin! Well not sure why there is an assassin in a newbie area but it doesn’t seem aggressive to him. He’s got some kind of assassin’s dagger equipped. Maybe it is better to just not mess with this monster.
There were two more rooms left. To the east was a goblin witch. To the west was a goblin mage.
He decided to go for the mage first.
Goblin Mage attacks you!
Goblin mage misses you.
Goblin mage starts casting a spell.
You strike goblin mage.
Goblin mage shoots a stream of fire out from his hands burning you.
HP: 20:25
Goblin mage misses you.
You slash goblin mage.
Goblin Mage tickles you innocently in the left arm.
HP: 19:25
You slash goblin mage strongly in the left leg.
Goblin mage misses you.
Goblin Mage starts casting a spell!
You strike goblin mage.
Goblin mage drops dead before you.
Well that wasn’t terrible. Isaiah buries the corpse and checks to see what loot remains. And there it was--the legendary long awaited spell scroll! Isaiah gets the spell scroll and transcribes it instantly. He didn’t even check to see what spell it was. Now, no one could call him a one hit wonder mage. He was now the proud owner of a spell book with two spells. Not one spell, nope two spells. Two spells was twice as many spells as he had before. This was cause for some minor internal celebration.
Reading his spellbook revealed what new spell he got. It was a sleep spell! He tried to cast it and got an error message.
You do not have the required components to cast sleep.
Isaiah’s player grumbled. Great this game also has spell components.
Isaiah would have to farm this mob. Reset time for the room seemed to be around 15 minutes. Even if he was barely using his mage class he just had to have every possible scroll to add to his spellbook that those caster goblins could drop. Hopefully there are some spells like his magic missile that don’t need components. Where does someone get components anyway? And how do you use them to cast spells?
Isaiah used the annoying heal skill to top off his hit points after the fight. It took a few minutes but the goblin witch was just a couple rooms away. He walked past that room with Dryzil again who offered everything again. Was that some kind of ability? The assassin did his annoying cackle. Isaiah’s player tried typing ‘offer’ but it just prompted him for what he wanted to offer. Next he checked the help file and saw the command was ‘offerall’ and the same thing happened. It destroyed everything in the room leaving it cleaned up. Why would a monster do that?
The fight with the goblin witch started right as Isaiah entered the room. She was a female greenskin with pointy ears like the rest of her kind. Her inventory was as follows:
Sword of Insanity (wielded in right and left hand)
Goblin Robes (worn on torso)
Goblin boots (worn on right foot, left foot)
A scroll
You slash goblin.
Goblin Witch hurls a bolt of evil at you
HP: 19/25
Goblin Witch missed you.
You stab goblin.
Goblin cackles wildly!
Mana falls from the Heavens!
Goblin Witch tickles you innocently with her sword of insanity.
A rabbit appears from nowhere and attacks!
This continued on for a few more rounds. Isaiah retreated back into the room with Dryzil once to heal up. The assassin offered everything on the ground like he did the last time and cackled. Maybe as well as an assassin his part time job was keeping the rooms clean? Isaiah’s player was getting distracted by his own plots. He headed back in and finished off the injured witch with his word in a couple more rounds. He collected the loot after burying the goblin witch’s corpse. He tried to equip the goblin robes and goblin boots but they were too small. He equipped his sword and went to equip the sword of insanity when his gamer danger sense started to tingle.
Isaiah says: “Wait, you’d think I’d learn my lesson after having to be killed by Nightfall to remove that last curse.”
Yes, even if no one is there sometimes it helps to talk to oneself to collect one’s thoughts.
Isaiah had collected the gold, copper and silver coins the witch dropped. Every goblin in the place dropped a little bit of coin. Obviously, the king dropped the most coins but it was still not much. He would have had to run through this place several times to get enough money to break a curse. Isaiah was really wishing he would have picked a fighter/cleric class as he spammed the heal command to top off his hit points to restore the damage that the goblin witch’s magic had done to him.
Some of the rooms had reset and Isaiah had to fight a few goblins as he headed back to the church and paid the 100 gold to check the sword for curses. He was lucky! The sword was not cursed. Also, because he wasn’t a small creature like the goblin he could wield the sword in one hand. He could also equip a second weapon and have an extra attack per round. However, his class was not ranger so the second weapon had to be a smaller one. He would need to use a sword sword or a dagger in his off hand.
Isaiah sold the stuff he could not use at the general store in Shadow. He got a few hundred gold coins for that. The goblin king dropped another one of those scepters but Isaiah sold it. He didn’t want to have anything to do with that weapon after the trouble one had caused him in the past. The sword did more damage. If Isaiah was a fighter/cleric then it would have been needed because cleric’s couldn’t use bladed weapons.
Isaiah spent 2 gold on buying a dagger from the weapon shop. He noticed an annoying problem that was getting worse. His mage class wouldn’t allow him to cast spells with armor on. It also wouldn’t let him cast if he had weapons wielded. He had to type 3 commands to unequip his armor and two weapons. Also, casting the spell required a command too. So to cast his one magic missile he had to type 4 things. These 4 things needed to be typed in 5 seconds because that is how long the round was in this game. If he screwed it up it was a damage loss. He would attack with bare hands for that round. Also, because he wouldn’t be wearing his armor his AC (armor class) would be worse. That meant he’d get hit more often with melee attacks. Being a fighter/mage is tough, hopefully it’ll get easier when he has more spells.
The commands to cast a spell would be:
Unwield sword
Unwield dagger
Remove leather
Cast magic missile on goblin
Wield sword
Wield dagger
Wear leather
And it needed to be done in 5 seconds. How many words per minute would that be? Isaiah's player tried to do this. He wasn’t timing himself but it became apparent he couldn’t do quick enough without screwing up a word and messing the whole thing up. It was time for him to use one of the functions of his mudclient. It was called a macro. Isaiah’s player made two macro’s one called ‘arm’ that wielded the sword, dagger and wore the armor. The other called ‘unarm’ that unwielded the sword, dagger and removed the armor. With that done hopefully it would make his life a little easier.
Ungrim has defeated whitefalcon in the arena.
Zeal has defeated whitefalcon in the arena.
Whitefalcon has defeated zeal in the arena.
Great, more global arena spam. Who thought it was a good idea to broadcast arena results across the whole game? Deaths, maybe an argument could be made but arena matches? Is there a way to request that it be muted? Or dare he ask one of those wizard people? His one interaction with one didn’t go well. They seemed like a bunch of angry programmers.
There was one more thing to do before calling it a night. Isaiah had killed dozens, possibly hundreds of goblins. He could level up. The places to level up were churches, rooms with boards and temples. This time Isaiah wanted to go level up in the temple of Lathander where him and light chatted earlier in the day. He headed west of shadow along the road and to the temple.
The temple of Lathander remains a bright place with high ceilings and gold and white painting on the inside. He remembered his chat with light fondly. Light wasn’t online right now it was getting late in the night. She might be in a different time zone too that could affect how much time they could have together. He advanced mage and fighter. He was a level 4/4 mage/fighter. Apparently he had grinded much more than he realized and still had enough to advance mage but not enough to advance fighter. For whatever reason it took less experience to advance his mage class than his fighter class. He advanced again. Now he was a level 4 / 5 fight/mage. Anyway, some up and some downs but most importantly progress was made. Isaiah’s player was sleepy and there was still time to log in for the morning before class the next day.
