Jesus, you're trying to kill me, man. This is a lot of questions.

>How many of the current IMM staff played Sea of Blood

I don't know that anyone who is currently active did. BoltThrower and a lot of that super-old crew did, certainly.

>and does
>anyone know the history behind the player of Xaixara (who went
>on to found Darkmists)?

Somewhat. She played a lot of Masters and Master-friendly characters for a while. I recall that she played Saphyra (sp?), who was a d-elf assassin I think, and the IC wife of Daeldrin (I may also be mangling that name, this is 11+ years I'm going back), who was the leader of Master at the time I immed Nepenthe. After that it was mostly Masters with an uncaballed bard or two mixed in.

Good Master each time in terms of RP and that whole end of the game... weak on the PK side. I recall her being frustrated with a number of things that are the way they are to make the game balanced/interesting, but are unpleasant from the POV of a perennial Master player. The fact that you could throw/kick dirt in the Master tower, for example. I understand she "fixed" a number of those issues with Darkmists' closest Master cabal equivalent/ripoff.

Seemed like a nice enough person back in the day, and I don't really know why she went the route of getting in with people trying to clone CF (I don't know what the game looks like now, but originally it was a pretty bad rip) instead of, for example, trying to imm on CF. There's probably a lot more to that story that I don't know.

>Regarding the infamous rescue "bug". Did Muubai have the
>fireshield immunity stripped moments before the plan was
>executed? The log clearly shows that he had it cast on him
>and it was in his affects list before the attack.

Nope. I was on at the time, and I didn't do it. I also checked the logs afterwards just for kicks. Additionally, there isn't any command (imm or otherwise) that I'm aware of that would strip the immunity without being extremely obvious. That is to say, I could go down there and cast dispel on Muubai and I'd give good odds that would strip it, but I can't think of any 'subtle' way to do it with commands that existed at the time or currently. There are a few ways that SEEM like they could do it, but as far as my experimentation goes, none of them actually work. There are a couple ways to do something like that with a mob, but they don't work on players.

My assumption is that the log was doctored, either intentionally or unintentionally (e.g., bad cut/paste or bad client gag or whatever). It just seems like it would take such a convoluted set of circumstances to somehow make it happen intentionally as an imm and also get it past my scrutiny.

>Do you take any of Hastur's statistics seriously? (We don't)

Nope.

>Zorszaul and Jafarlin were very close in-character. Were they
>room mates?

As far as we could tell, I don't think so. A level of immortal detective work not seen before or since went on around those characters.

>Who played Aarakocrus?

I want to say the guy who was later Tureanthen did, but that's probably wrong. It's been a while and a lot of the old stuff runs together.

>Who is/was the more skilled out of Twist, Nepenthe and
>Sebeok?

Depends on the era you ask, really.

In his prime, I always felt like Twist was the best guy to ever play the game. Not that he picked up any one thing and completely dominated, but that he was just so versatile. He would play every crazy race/class/cabal/role combination known to man and he would somehow make them all seem good.

>Kuslatromi was not denied for his name but because he PK'd
>Cador's mortal and Cador couldn't hack it.

Not true. I mean, maybe he did kill one of Cador's guys; I couldn't even tell you what Cador was playing in that era offhand. I was online when we noticed the name, however. If I'm not misremembering, I noticed it. He was denied very shortly thereafter.

>A lot of people have speculated about why Masters implemented
>the non-aggression policy. Was Graatch just being a bitch?

Blame me for that one. Twist foolishly handed me the reigns of the Master cabal and I decided to try to do some different things, that probably being the most noticable. I was trying to make the cabal feel more like a cabal of scholars and less like a super-powered gang-down-everyone massive-gear-whoring cabal, and that was what I came up with. It ended up sticking, for the most part.

>Is there actually a MORON tag next to characters names once
>their site has been labelled as such? If your character was
>labelled with this, it was not able to join a cabal.

There is such a flag. We wanted a way to prevent some characters from joining cabals, usually after being thrown out of another cabal. Neutral Knights being thrown out and trying to join Shadow the same day, that sort of thing. We let Cador code and name it, thus the name.

It's always applied to single characters, though. There's no easy way to apply it by site.

>A SMUG thief peeked at Istendil's inventory, one day after the
>introduction of a/b/s appearing on the motd, to find a pile of
>black rods. The rest of the hero player base did not start
>using them for another month. What gives?

I honestly don't think this ever happened. I certainly don't remember things going down that way.

For one thing, why would I leave them in my inventory, when they still would've gone in my 300 lb. screw-you-thieves sack at the time? :P

>Gareth played a series of mindless pkers, including a level 25
>knight with glowing swords, he even died to the multi kill
>rule when it first came in, his mindless pking was overlooked
>because he was an imm?

Gareth did play a lot of very aggressive characters; whether you would call them mindless PKers or not is a judgement call. Generally they exhibited above average RP for the time with their allies, though it's clear their enemies didn't see nearly as much of it. With few exceptions, they were good in alignment and only preyed upon evil characters. In some ways, he was the closest good equivalent of Zharradam/Crewso at the time. ;)

He did lose a few characters to the lowbie mass killer code, I know.

I believe he did have one midlevel Knight who was blooded earlier than many characters. Considering the character had good RP and something like a 70-2 PK record at the time, this isn't that surprising to me.

As for the mass PKing being overlooked, I don't think that's accurate. Certainly there were some imms at the time that didn't like the way he did things and argued with him about it. Beyond that, he wasn't breaking any rules, and wasn't doing anything that a zillion other mass PKers who went unmolested weren't doing, usually with more style.

>Cador gave himself the wolverine which owned beyond belief, it
>was not due to a moment of utopian roleplaying.

Eriwal had Twist's tattoo; Twist gave Eriwal the wolverine.

Eriwal's RP seemed probably disproportionately good to me at the time. I knew the character's story and motivations and tended to notice a lot of subtle things. Some years later, it occured to me that it wasn't that fair that I'd get to know these things about some imm characters, but not about purely mortal characters. This was a major initial inspiration for the role command.

>Balron was the first person to take the oath.

I'm pretty sure not the first. Oathed in the first few days of Empire, sure. Moving on...

>He was an evil
>neutral shaman that lost empowerment due to the ethos change
>to lawful. The imms let Balron take the oath because he was
>played by Arolin.

A lot of people took the oath and got screwed by the alignment or ethos change. Arolin doesn't have the monopoly on that. :P

>The imms gave Arolin's arial necro a lich quest which
>consisted of all under water items (before hydrophobia was
>introduced)

I don't think all. Definitely some, I remember.

>plus Palan's axe with 100+ charges on it because
>it was Arolin.

Maybe that was karma for Yagar, and maybe that was a general tendency at the time to try to pit tough characters against each other. I didn't write that lich quest. You decide!

>The fabled "frosty potion" does not actually exist (one of
>Vidar's lich quest items).

It does exist; it was also one of Oroxazrian's lich quest items. He did successfully return with it, if I'm not mistaken.

It's even still in the game:

It has no detectable odor, and were it not for the frost, you would think
this ordinary water.

A frost-covered potion is a potion, made of glass, and weighs 1 pounds 0 ounces.

>Nepenthe's master invoker went to hell with Arolin's invoker
>(Sko), when Arolin asked his cabal companion whether he should
>say yes to Satan, Nepenthe's master said nothing so he would
>turn evil, losing all spells. Masters of the same align
>typically did not back stab each other, so it's proposed that
>he knew who played Sko.

That was like ten hours into a hell trip, man. Who even knows what I was thinking. I doubt it was that.

Probably, I was preoccupied with the fact that my suggestions on which way to go next had inadvertantly led the group into a pit fiend, resulting in most of our deaths. So much for having lead the first successful hell trip. :P

>They took away charm person from bards and transmuters because
>of SMUG.

I wouldn't say that's the whole explanation, but certainly the SMUG charm-based assclownery of the time was another brick in the wall. :)

>The imms allowed the SMUG site to be periodically unbanned
>because the imms knew that continued addiction was a bigger
>punishment than being banned.

Not true, as far as I know.

>Saba, Stiles and Vargas (level 40 hitman team) were not denied
>until they ganked Gareth's latest mortal.

Not true, or possibly coincidentally true but irrelevant. It's not like we gave Gareth deny, and it's not like we didn't bust up a lot of SMUG teams in those days. :)

>Ptain (invoker hero) lost 1 of his shields for botting because
>the imms were jealous that Ptain had mastered all 7 paths.
>Before botting was added to The Rules.

Huh. I want to say it was me who stripped out one of his spells to make a point, but I could be misremembering. I've kicked a lot of obviously botting invokers in the junk over the years, though I'm certainly not the only one to do so.

Let me know why I'd be jealous of that and get back to me. It's not like I haven't played a few 7 path invokers. :P

>The imms made the guardian at the entrance of hell refuse
>people based on socket, in this case .smug

Certain people can be refused entrance to explore areas in various ways based upon site. For example, I'm guessing whatever used to be Aether's site can't get in. :P Whether or not SMUG was ever on the short list, I have no idea. After some of the latter-day Arolin stuff it wouldn't surprise me.

>SMUG were guilty until proven innocent.

Sometimes, possibly. But weren't you, in fact, guilty? No further questions, your honor. ;)

>SMUG was never allowed a fair shot at liching purely because
>of Sacer's and Seboek's hatred towards them.

Nope! A lot of lich quests were tough. Most successful liches of the time looked for their items for a long time.

>The % random chance of an elixir failing is dropped to zero
>when an Immortal wants to lich.

Nope. I know for certain that Twist attempted to lich a necromancer and was killed by the elixir.