I started playing muds in junior high and was fairly addicted through most of highschool, but at some point a mixture of RL and other hobbies came along and I no longer had time for them.

In the five years or so since, I occasionally get an urge to play again, but it always seems like a temporary thing. The muds I used to spend most of my time on seem remarkably dull and immature now, and I've never been able to settle into a new 'home'.

There are other factors, too - I've been playing/attempting to write interactive fiction games for a couple of years now, and besides annoyances like having to retrain myself to type 'exa' or 'l' instead of 'x', most mud environments come off as painfully shallow when compared to a genre where not having a seperate description for just about every noun mentioned in a room is a cardinal sin and indepth puzzles are the order of the day. (Of course I realize that just wouldn't be practical when implementing an entire fantasy world as opposed to, say, a creepy little Lovecraftian village, but the difference is still jarring.)

But anyway, recently I got that urge again, and decided to give Carrion Fields a try. I've known about it for awhile and heard a lot of good things about it, but it's always looked to have a fairly steep learning curve, and PK has never really been my thing. However, I'm going to have a little extra time on my hands for the rest of the summer, and I figured a little challenge might be just what I needed to keep me interested this time around.

So I rolled up a char, and so far, from what I've seen in game and read on the forums, I've been very impressed. I love the atmosphere, the strategic approach to combat, and the way the Imms have somehow managed to make an RP enforced game that's actually fun and doesn't make newbies feel oppressed/intimidated. (I'm all for the concept of RP, but at least in Muds I'm afraid I'm lousy at it, and previous experiences on Harshlands, etc. nearly turned me off even trying for life.)

Most of all I love the feeling of having this enormous, amazingly well-written world to explore. I haven't been this excited about 'going adventuring' in a long, long time...it seems like there are countless little things to discover, and for once it seems like there are actual practical reasons and rewards for taking my time getting to know an area and snooping around in every corner. (BTW, whoever came up with the quest you get from Simon in the Academy has my gratitude. There's no way I would have been tracking halfway across a continent and sailing a sea that early on my own initiative, and the whole thing was much more useful as a 'learning experience' than what most mud schools offer.)

My current character is a ranger with a fairly generic role that I'm just going to use for solo exploring and getting to know the different areas as well as I can, though of course I fully expect her to get butchered the moment I reach level eleven. (It's pretty humbling watching your contemporaries in the Academy just soar past you in rank, or to see people who are half your level decked out in all kinds of cool equipment with the best you've managed is a padded vest, but for awhile at least I suppose that'll be the norm.)

However, I've already got a couple of more interesting roles and descriptions written out for when this char inevitably get turned into a small smear on the ground, and I look forward to becoming at least a passable PKer/RPer at some point and playing for a long time to come.