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My girlfriend at University of North Texas was always online flirting in chat rooms. One of her dudes was running a mud, and she liked when he gave her his big sword. I tried it once (the MUD, not his sword) and though it was completely retarded, I liked the concept.

So I searched around in the computer lab for something different and found Carrion Fields.

My first character was an elven ranger who got repeatedly tooled in the teens by some dude whose name I can't remember. Later, I tried a necromancer and set up a fancy macro that cast all my spells in order and zapped two lodestones from elemental temple with one click of the mouse.

It takes some of us longer to figure out game mechanics than others....

Anyway, I finally heroed my first character five years later, and the rest is history.

My officemate showed me the game in 1994 and I think the first thing I said to him was, "A *text* game? Really? It's the 90s!"

(Mind you, the year before that he showed me the world wide web and the first thing I said to him was, "Why do I care what some guy in his garage is putting on the internet? This will never catch on." I told my college roommate the same thing about Nirvana and Pearl Jam.)

But he convinced me to roll up a character. I messed around with the character for a little while until someone came up and killed me (I think his name was Beta). I didn't realize I could be killed by a player. I was outraged. That pretty much hooked me. I think that first character was a Ranger and ended up being inducted into Masters. Transform + Bears... oh my.

My officemate later played and immorted Vilhazarog.

I was looking for some sort of game where I could immerse myself in the Tolkien world. I was waaayy in to Tolkien back then. So I started searching the internet and came across these things called MUDs. Somehow CF came up and I got started. This was probably in 97/98ish time frame. I remember very little about who played or anything like that. I do remember my first character was Mandalor a human ranger. I literally plagerized his description off of Aragorn right out of LOTR. My first memborable PK experience was a duergar killing my groupmate, wherein I promptly sent tells to probably half the mud telling them that "Oh noes! This guy is soo mean!!" Heh... ahh the memories.

I was playing a text multiplayer spaceship combat game called mtrek that sounds alot like Eve, but with alot more action, less downtime, and only like 50ish players at any given time.

There was a chat function, and as I was unloading photon torpedoes into a romulan warbird, the warbird started talking about her dark elf anti-paladin on carrionfields at maple.net.

I tried to get my friends to play, but they wanted a little more instant gratification in their games. Little did I know I could have just shown them the battle cabal and they would have been fine :)

...but maybe some haven't heard it.

Was living in the dorms at UND (Smith Hall yo!) with a nice roommate whose name was Dan.

Dan was hanging around some other guy's dorm room down the hall with a guy named Ken. Ken was doing some rough coding ideas for a MUD he was helping with. I forget the name, I don't think it ever launched.

So Dan asks him "Ok I don't get it, what exactly is a MUD anyways?"

Ken does a search on alt.rec.mud.diku and sees an announcement from Rahvin about a new MUD that started up a few weeks ago named Carrion Fields. Ken logs in to show Dan how it works.

Dan started playing it. Ken kept playing it. Ken's roommate started playing, as did a couple other guys down the hall. Pretty soon everyone and their dog was playing it. I tried it, rolled up a thief named Twist, got killed by a "wimpy aggro mudschool monster" because I thought sleeping next to the Adept of Derit would keep me safe. Decided this game sucked, and deleted. Found a ShadowRun flavored MUD. Hated it too, and somehow decided to try this Carrion Fields that everyone was playing "one more time."

This time I rolled up a mage named Twist. Kept at it and the rest is another story.

Ken's char on CF was Ishmael. :)

>...but maybe some haven't heard it.
>
>Was living in the dorms at UND (Smith Hall yo!) with a nice
>roommate whose name was Dan.

Pshaw. Fulton Hall's cooler.

...but it was kinda vagina-required when I was going to school at UND so not so much luck with that.

My (then girlfriend) wife lived in Fulton though.

Do you still live in ND?