Edit: Not all of my nostalgia is/was necessarily accurate. A few things corrected by some folks.

Seems like a fitting topic for the night of 100 players (we've hit 105 so far): the old days. These are random tidbits that will likely be mostly useless for powergaming purposes.

1. Twist was first pk'd at level 5 by a BattleRager wannabe named DeathBringer. I learned later that char was played by Cador. Also pk'd in that encounter was my groupmate, a level 6 warrior named Commodore. We were both lured outside Midgaard by some guy who was saying he needed our help really badly.

2. Being pk'd used to cause exp loss. For that reason very few people pk'd each other until Derit changed the code to remove exp loss for pks.

3. Twist joined Master at level 10, which used to be the earliest you could join cabals.

4. Cabal powers could not be taken, initially. There was no raiding system.

5. The initial cabal raiding system involved killing the outer guardian (about as tough as inner guardians now, maybe a bit tougher), getting the key, unlocking an altar inside the cabal, and getting the item out of the altar.

6. Furthermore, keeping a cabal without powers meant simply dropping their item at your own altar. Anyone from any (or no) cabal could pick this item up and restore powers to that cabal. This meant a lot of fleeing past outer guardians (used to be possible) and sprinting in to try to pick up your own cabal item. This also lead to a lot of "lowbie cabal members" being stuck on "pick up enemy cabal item when they come for it" duty.

7. Mortal Nepenthe fought (and raided against) my Rager, Relon, quite a bit. He was too damn fast at the above retrieval method, made me pretty mad.

8. Twist had 16 INT until level 30, when someone clued him in that with 17 or above he could practice things to 75 in only two practices. He never did train it above 17. Leader of Master indeed.

9. Twist was uninducted from Master at level 49 for acting foolishly with Saher and Nighthawk. We challenged Loki (an IMM) to fight us.

10. Twist was also uninducted from Master at level 23 (when many of us were uninducted). Rahvin ran a 2-hour-long personal quest for me that ended up in me killing Heimdall (level 60 badass mob) with a single fireball (He'd set his hp very low). I died 2 or 3 times during the quest, but Rahvin advanced me and reinducted me at the conclusion.

11. Old areas that I miss: Moria (purple potions of 2-3 tick sanctuary), Dwarven Daycare (pink ice rings), Elemental Canyon (dust for detect invis, superlight water jugs), Wyvern Tower (almost no good eq but it was the first area I ever really explored).

12. When I wrote the Forest of NoWhere, I was so sure that it would be PK-central, (13 steps from Midgaard, the only hometown available, with nice ranking for good an evil at almost every level) that I put in a room that had no doors into it called the PK-Viewing Booth. It still exists, but with far less purpose than it used to have.

13. Some names I remember from the First Age: Bigfoot, Lancelot, SlipperyJim, Eldritch, Crow, GhostRider, Tenfan, Blaze, Ishmael, Ctvrtlik, Dru, and of course Sho, Truck, and Bladerunner.

14. I miss Lancelot. I also miss Nazmorghul.

15. Sho was the first mortal to become an Imm. He did this simply by reaching level 51. Tenfan was second, I was third. Sho did not actually become an IMM (by being advanced to level 53). Tenfan and I did.

16. Original classes: warrior, thief, mage, cleric, ninja, antipaladin, ranger, paladin.

17. Original races: human, giant, dwarf, elf, half-elf, dark-elf, gnome, arial.

18. The end of the First Age involved the only (intentional) pfile purge. This was because the mage class was split into necromancers, transmuters, and invokers and the giant race was split into fire, cloud, and storm giants. The cleric class was split into shaman, druids, and healers between the 2nd and 3rd ages, I've been told.

19. Original cabals: Master, Battle, Justice, Entropy, Shadow.

20. The end of the First Age DID not feature a character named Launfal sounding the Horn of Fate. That was the end of the Second Age. The beginning of the Second Age is, however, when the name rule went into effect. Though I was an Imm at the time, I hadn't know about the name rule, so my first attempt at a mortal, Anarchy, was denied as soon as I got done rolling.