Early Memories

Now, my first bit of time in Abandoned Realms was spent groping around blindly trying to find a niche that suited me. This was something that I spent a few weeks doing late summer 1998 (I think it was mid August). But if you put a gun to my head and asked me for a specific memory of all that dickering about, wouldn't be able to give you a single thing. Rather, I think one of my first memories of the game that really sticks out was being dragged to Emerald Forest with my friends to level. Now this was at the pinnacle of MUDs, before a lot of people had the computer or the fast internet connections capable of playing first gen MMO's like Everquest. So MUD's were HUGE. If you were around for this, you're probably nodding right now in agreement with me. I remember in the middle of the week after supper I'd see easily a 100 players on. Let that sink on for a minute, 100 players. Minimum. And while there might have been a dozen or so level 50's smashing around, there were far more level 30's running around murdering the faces off each other, because it was just the thing to do. I swear every third person was a dark-knight, and the ballsiest thing you could ever do was run into Market Square and start dropping fireballs (Market Square was the half-point between North and South Square). There were lots of Justices back then, and man oh man were they always busy! I swear people started trouble just for the sake of the attention of the Justices. It was chaos! It was EXCITING AND AWESOME!

But I digress. Back to my story of getting dragged to Emerald Forest! So here I am with a gang of thugs I attended high school with, trying our best to carve a bit of Emerald Forest out for ourselves. Not really that hard to do these days, but back then? If you only were competing with one other group, it must have been the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, or in the dead of night. Here  I am looking, and there's at least a dozen other people trying to grab anything to level off of they could. And as soon as the place was cleared and no one was satisfied with their haul, it turned into a bloodbath. Want to see a real nasty fight? Try watching half a dozen dark knights start fireballing

and iceballing in a room mixed with a few berserkers and mages for flavor. As Drowning Pool would sing "Let the Bodies Hit the Floor" 8 rounds of combat later and there'd be 8 or 9 dead bodies and a few survivors who would crawl away to heal up before someone who died could sleep a tick, unghost and try to fireball and finish the rest of them. So if you were lucky enough to be out of the pk ranges of all these schlubs, and were greedy enough to not care about provoking the owners of the corpses, there was loot to be had! Something a lot of people forget, or never knew, was that in the beginning, there was no level restrictions on player looting. A level 1 could loot a level 50, and often did matter of fact. But in turn, no one could be pk'd until level 10, so it made for an interesting situation as to how anyone had a chance to get their gear back. So here my friends and I are in this room with all these bodies, with most containing at least a full set of red dragon, if not something even sexier, and hell-blades and fiery daggers and everything you could possibly want to make your leveling easier. The only thing that stopped us from picking everyone to the bone was our max weight capacity, it was ruthless to watch.

But Emerald Forest was great for other train wrecks other than just giant brawls over leveling resources. It was pretty common place back in the beginning for people to get stuck in no-exit rooms, like the spider web. And so they'd toggle nosummon off and persuade a higher level to haul them out. AND THEN NEVER TOGGLE IT BACK ON. So you'd find all these high level griefers sitting deep in the witch woods trying to randomly summon anyone in the area. And it worked A LOT. You would not believe how many people would start keeling over in the forest before all the other people figured out what was going down and double checked their nosummon was on.

And then of course, nothing was as satisfying as hiding with a group invisible inside the mountain (that spot right before the boogum) and summoning people for beatdowns. Another thing that has long since been changed was the fact you could summon people into no-exit rooms.So you'd have a few in there spamming close boulder while another summoned some poor bastard in for the beat down of their life time. 

It was crazy, exciting, made people extremely prone to rage deletes, and was one of the things that hooked me about Abandoned Realms. Over the years there were other things too of course, but that giant orgy of violence in Emerald Forest really stands as one of my first memories about AR.