Here are some random memories from the start of CF (I believe I started playing after it had been up for 2 weeks or so). I'd never played *any* MUD before. Ishmael lived in my dorm and found CF when trying to explain to someone what a MUD was, and so a few of us started playing.

Logged in to the Mud School.

Fled from a mob that was actually named something like a "wimpy aggro mud monster".

Slept at the Adept of Derit because its description said he was here helping and defending students of the Mud School.

The wimpy aggro mud monster yells 'Twist! Now you die!'

I assume the Adept of Derit will kick its ass.

I die.

Ok, mages aren't for me. DeleteDelete. Rolled up a thief.

Got through the Mud School, got my diploma! Woot!

Walked into Midgaard. Got garbled. Thought it was permanent.

DeleteDelete. This game sucks.

Hah, Twist's posts brought up a bunch of memories I hadn't thought about in a long time...

Keep in mind that this was all a long time ago and my memory may be faulty, feel free to correct.

I started out as Aldor, a mage. Mage back then was the best class, had so much fun with it... was also very overpowered, but we were still figuring that out at the time...

Used to summon the red dragon to the pit in Midgard... where everyone used to just hang out, back in the day. It would immediately aggro, area breath attack, all the poor newbs hanging out there waiting for a free heal would get splattered.

So they changed it, no summoning aggro mobs... so I summon something else that isn't aggro but still had an area attack, attack it... more helpless lowbie deaths. So they changed summon again.

So then I summon a bunch of mobs to the pit, sleep them all. Then put plague on them all. Then sleep the cityguards and put plague on them... meanwhile everyone in town started catching the plague... it spread to unkillable mobs... eventually people starting yelling, "Everyone leave town! The plague! It's unstoppable!" Muah hah hah... more lowbie deaths. Imms tone down the plague.

You could charm all kinds of mobs back then... there were these metallic orbs or something, don't remember what area they came from.. but they were immune to physical attacks... so, you know, you could have them rescue you and they'd take no damage... fun. Or you know, back to charming stuff with area attacks... or other overpowered stuff. IMMs go and take that all away.

Summon to no exit room, a good one. Or summon to a room with one door, and have someone spam the door shut. (Can you still do that?)

Got into MASTERs... eventually became leader during a down turn, i think, by Twist. Was leader for a long time. Gave quests to get in... ultimately the difficulty was determined by how much I liked you, how desperate MASTERs was at the time for members. Sometimes I screwed up and the quest was way too hard then I thought it was... oh well. Many newb deaths there trying to complete my quests. Sometimes I inducted on the spot for answering a simple question. Got yelled at by Twist for inducting too many at least once.

Sucked at PK. Was great at running away though. Nepenthe reminded me of the time when I commanded him to stay at cabal entrance and spam the door shut while I tesseracted away.. Hah hah! Fond memories of the cabal in the Galaxy, and ragers getting stuck in the black hole. And masters getting stuck there as well. MASTERs was always my favorite cabal... tesseract, transform, brew and scourge... the coolest powers.

Never made it cap... the MUD blew away all the mages (and everyone, we all started over).

I moved on to the next overpowered class, the cleric. Gate, summon, sanctuary... you really couldn't die unless you screwed up. Got into SHADOW. Never really enjoyed SHADOW, though, not my thing. Made it to cap... almost immorted.... couldn't think of a decent area idea. Then clerics were blown away.

Back to MASTERs, anti-paladin this time... Vilhazarog. Still had my summon and plague. Eventually immorted this time. Had an idea for making the elemental plane of air, but some of the IMMs thought it was dumb. Eventually settled for a much more modest area (it's still there, I checked!) My officemate (Scarabaeus) been hounding me to immort because he wanted me to help him with Hell. The area file format is dumb. Making that area was tedious and painful to get all the rooms to connect right. And that one was simple!

Spent lots of time catching cheaters... getting lied to, a lot. Crazy amounts of cheating going on, all the time. Probably still is. Like following some guy out to a remote place, he drops his equipment on the ground, quits. Then logs in another character, heads straight to the spot and picks it up. "Hey, what's with the cheating?" "I wasn't cheating." "You dropped this eq and picked it up with another character." "No I didn't." "yes, you did, I saw the whole thing." "Wasn't me." !!!! Yeah it's always a 'brother' or something.

Bots... invoker spamming bots. Teleport to invoker spamming a spell. Bring a mob, mob says "Hey, so and so, I got a deal for you." no response, still spamming... "So tell you what, I'll give you this sack of gold if you say "I'll take the gold." Or say nothing, and spend eternity trapped in some horrible immortal plane." No response, still spamming spells. "You sure?" Still no response. "I'll give you five minutes to think about it." Still spamming, no response....... "Ok! *Poof*" Five hours later, a prayer "Uh, hello? Anyone there? Why am I here??"

Kitten killers... people would buy kittens and then practice on them. I made them talk. Or they suddenly broke out with the plague...

I pitched an idea for two new cabals... Sylvan and an anti-sylvan (originally some underground kinda cabal, I forget...) Sylvan went into more or less as I proposed, but the other cabal was reworked into Empire. I was made EMPIRE imm, because it made sense.
Never was really thrilled with the cabal though. Too complicated. But it was fun getting everyone in and starting it all up.

MASTERs was still the best.

Had a cool tattoo. Don't remember what procs I wrote into it, but they were cool. Something to do with pc corpses.

Istendil wanted my tattoo, but his initial 'prayer' and offering sucked. Too cocky. I put him in my own personal area and left him plagued, assumed he would die in 15 minutes... He didn't. He was trapped there for hours. He was pissed. Oops, my bad. He complained that wasn't fun and he was right. Felt bad about it. Later gave him a quest to get Palan's axe and sac it, just cuz Palan had a ton of kills on it and I wanted to see what would happen to him. I think I even coded that punishment but never seen it work on a real mortal. Istendil killed him, sacced the axe (which killed Palan again), and I gave him my tattoo.

Wrote a ton of the procs for Hell. Wouldn't be surprised if the players haven't seen even a fourth of them. A lot of respect to Scarabaeus for all the tons of content he put in there. Fun times helping him get Hell working.


How's that for a wall of text!!

...pretty sure it was Zorszaul who followed you/sacced Palan's axe, not Istendil.

Also, mages and clerics got split during the first (only intentional) pfile purge. Giants got split at that time too.

Man, that was almost 20 years ago now...

Good read though, this is from waaay before my time. I joined CF around -98-99.

Always shoot first and then call whatever you hit the target.

nt

Why did you have to show me this infernal game?

Was bored at College, discovered the internet, look for discwold game, find discworld mud, connect. You are in the Q.......... disconnect, scroll up yahoo list of muds, Carrionfields.... hrrmn this sounds interesting.

Connect, fight monster, die.
N (You feel to relaxed)
E (You feel to relaxed)
Wake (You are already awake)
D (You feel to relaxed)
Sleep (You go to sleep)
Rest (You wake up and start resting)
N (You feel to relaxed)

Help sleep, Help rest, WTF?!?!?!!
Friend tells me in RL #### I just died! Yeah? Figured out how to move?, DUH Stand?

Start playing, friends start watching, start playing, start pking each other all over town at level 11 or so. So amazed to get to level 11. Awesome! (PK was at level 11 I think it could have been 5 o.O)
Go to the woods, get killed by the Black Knight, get summoned, get slain, get denied for my friends praying we are multi-charring.

Log in one day, Everyone is boosted to level 30 or what ever level they wanted, MUD is moving server have fun.

We go to new server, start up level up, think we are bad ass. get to hero pk range. as Neutral uncabballed trying to get in Herald, get married.

Every day after goes, (Log In (in the Dojo (safe ))
Jhyrbians backstab does UNSPEAKABLE things to you!
Jhyrbians dual backstab does UNSPEAKABLE things to you!
You are DEAD!!
T arbiter (Heh this dude just killed me in town!!!)
Arbiter (There was no yell.)
Unghost, corpse is full looted, Jhyrbian tells you 'Potions of return are bad and your bracers are magical'.
Leave guild, get summoned by Master necromancer get Scourged to death in two seconds.
Leave guild, go to gather crap (Red Dragon + Some black dex cloaks and stuff).
Masters invoker type dude is here, does UNSPEAKABLE things to you. Awesome.
Get up, #### a bear druid form attacking me in my guild, god damn Entropy.
Get up, theres an Empire now, theres a lich, try finding lich, (with no concept of how powerful a lich is)
Hang around, LICH leaves empire, See Remath new Emperor on eastern with mage. He is evil i am good, i am hidden he cant see me!!!
Remath has Summoned you!
You step out of the shadows.
You yell 'Help! Someimperial dude triped/bashed anhilated me'
Next day, rinse repeat. Good times

Cleric gates to me. Charms me. Orders me to drop everything. Orders me to attack the warrior guild guard in Galadon. Dead.

Some guy's yelling about Captain Canuck in Midgaard. I mock him because Captain Canuck is a stupid name for a comic book character. (It is.) He promptly kills me for my insolence.

Spending half an hour atop the Master's tower obsessively brewing stuff so I can get haste and sanc, only to die immediately when ragers attack and have all my brewed potions destroyed. Repeat.

Getting summoned into Nep-Emperor-Whose-Name-I-Can't-Remember and Llorenthos and getting two-rounded.

Having Laios (sp?) insta-kill me at my recall point with dual backstab.

Going out to fight Zorszaul at the fortress after he just killed some other fort guy. Having a transplendant archon, thinking I am safe. Wrong. PWK.

Passing gear (that mithril sword the golems in Thalos used to have) from a warrior to an invoker in order to have the invoker enchant it. Getting caught for it and, before getting denied, having the imm say something like, "You cheated for this? Really?"

When i played Vens (assassin) there was Provost Magistrate minotaur warrior sword/mace Carolooth (or something like it).

I had good eq myself, but Carolooth had strange bracers. I really wanted those bracers (Vens was my first or second hero and i never had these bracers) and i was always attacking Carolooth whenever i saw him online.

He had cabal power to see me so i couldn't assassinate him. He liked to spend 95% of his time sitting in his guild in Galadon with 2 leutenants. I think i made him writing 2 times, but never could kill him. He got these bracers from Nreishe (or something like it) and had it for 1 rl week already. I was wanted all this week because he didn't leave Galadon and had to attack him there and it made stalking other people to assassinate them almost impossible). I think he killed me once or twice. So this "war" against him costed me much time and effort.

I got blademaster gloves in PK but didn't wear it because i was already at "old age" and didn't want to age-die.

I annoyed Carolooth for 1 rl week already when i saw him finally leaving Galadon. He went to the frigid wastelands and didn't have his cabal power on and i stalked him 7 times. On his way back i tryed to assassinate, failed, got bashed and died. He took my blademaster gloves.

When i returned to the corpse i got my things and noticed something strange. Carolooth looted my gloves, did wear it and AGE DIED! Then i asked healer applicant and another Scion to kill that mob with bracers 2 times and finally they were mine!

Damn it was so sweet victory after spending 1 rl week trying to do anything about Carolooth. I think it was my hardest victory even thought i didn't actually kill him myself.

i remember that time, i think it was my second healer, and i helped vens getting those bracers... I belive i got inducted only because of that, and a bit later you got uninducted as i far i remember:-=

So I have my lowby necro (some dude named Zauphates or something gave me a set of red dragon gear, and I can carry almost all of it!)(yes, drow). Some dude tells me he wants to group, and has a third, but they are wanted so we can't meet in market [] like I normally do, but to go to the shire.

This was my first exposure to what I was later told is called the 'summon-hose'. (summon-acidblast is a powerful drug)

Summoned to the thains room and ganked. Splat. Real fast.
I still leveled faster than I did on the old black knight mud so I stuck with it for awhile. Been around off and on since then.

If you look east in a certain room you can still see fallen trees blocking the path to a clearing where I got empowered a lot by the bestest gnome ever. . .

Feb. 1997 rec.games.mud.diku post by Cador in response to a guy who was complaining about how various Carrion Fields imms are bastards because they denied his character.

Teaser quote from the original complaint:

"Some of the real asshole imms are Twist and Lloth"

Cador's response:

"And geez man, you should know that ShaidarHaran and I (Cador) are the real assholes..."

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.mud.diku/tree/browse_frm/month/1997-02?_done=%2Fgroup%2Frec.games.mud.diku%2Fbrowse_frm%2Fmonth%2F1997-02%3F&

Anybody know if the complainer (John Printon) is someone we know better by a different name?

What imms have the current imms been in past incantations? I'm not really curious about all the mortals or leaders you've played but how many imms have been imms in the past and which imms were they or are currently? This would be awesome to know that an imm I had a great time with back when I started was still around as a new incantation.

Brian

Ok in reality this game doesn't suck. That was way too much fun to just not play again.

Rolled up Twist again. A mage, again. With 16 int. (But 18 Str woot!).

Edited (again) to add that I didn't realize until level 31 that training int up once meant not having to put 3 practices into each spell. And I didn't ever learn as a mortal that I could train int up enough to where I'd only need 1 practice to get to 71%.

This time, things were going well. Got a groupmate. We hit level 5 pretty easy, eventually killing homonculus' down in the sewers. No name-shortening back then. Do you know how hard it is to type cast 'magic missile' homonculus over and over on raw telnet? At 14.4bps? Oof.

Uh oh, someone just told me they need my help, just west of Midgaard. Come on, Commodore (my groupmate), let's go save Deathwar! There's a big mean monster after him just west of MidgaaaaaaWhy are you bashing me we're here to help you ow ow damn ow ack!

Huh. So that's what "PK" means.

Edited to add: Commodore and I also both lost EXP due to that PK death.

Deathwar, btw, deleted after a short while and rolled his next char. You may have heard of him. His name was Cador.

Ok, we put the Deathwar debacle behind us. Some guy named Ghostrider set me up with awesome eq. He summoned me into his guild, then gated away, then gated back to me, and handed me a bunch of stuff. A ward minor! From some place called the High Tower of Sorcery! This thing is -10AC! And he got me Hercules' armguards! They are +2Dam and +2Str! And invisible! Awesome. Ghostrider must be the highest level character ever. He's level 27.

Fell into a group with some girl and a guy named Bigfoot. I'm not sure where they took me - it was out the east gate of Midgaard, a place called the Wyvern Tower. Not sure how to get there. When we killed all the stuff in that Tower, we went to a nearby area named Elemental Canyon and killed stuff like dust, and water elementals, and other neat things. I got a little excited and cast my new spell (burning hands!) at the lightning ruler. Oops. Bigfoot says I'll still level up pretty fast with them, so I'll get my stuff from my corpse.

Heh, some poor newb just got garbled by Entropy, and they are saying all kinds of weird stuff on the gossip channel. Ghostrider just made me laugh out loud by telling them "That's easy for you to say." Not sure what Blaze meant when he replied "rofl" to that. I'll have to ask Bigfoot.

Ah, level 10! I've come a long way, baby. It only took me about 3 days to get here.

Someone asked me if I wanted to join Master. I wasn't sure what it was, but I said sure. They explained it was a cabal (that means guild, or group, or "team") of magicians and stuff. Sounded great to me! So they inducted me.

They told me about this spell called Transform. It DOUBLES your hp! So now when I cast it, I have 120hp! I feel a little safer, now.

The police-people (apparently they are called Justice?) just made it illegal to wield your weapon in town. I'm not sure how they expect me to survive without wielding this dagger. I'm upset!

We don't have anywhere, as part of the Master cabal, to go hold magic meetings or anything. Apparently there will be someplace soon? That'll be cool.

I found out about a place called the Mob Factory today. I wish I had known about that place earlier. The mobs in there don't give me any XP, but that might have been better than killing stuff in the sewer. Oh well.

I also found another area called South Midgaard. Apparently you get there just by going south, in Midgaard. There was the cityguard headquarters there. I went in to take a look, but the cityguard lieutenants attacked me! I wimpied out (good thing I set it to 60 hp - I LOVE YOU TRANSFORM!) so I didn't die. They were chasing me, so I tried to recall, but my blood was pumping too much. So I had to run. I found a chain that went up, so I went up there. There was a knight at the top of the chain, wearing a bunch of armor of the rose.

I knew I needed to keep moving or those lieutenants would catch me. Just needed a little time until I could recall. South of the Knight were some clouds, I should be safe there. Hmm, when I scan around, I see some mobs. I wonder if they are easily killed? Let's go have a look. Oh, they are called harpies AND THEY ARE OW killing me. Darn.

A couple of my fellow Masters took me along with them to level up. One was named FatJohn, I forget the name of the other one. They were both anti-paladins. Since they were evil and I'm good, we had to kill neutral mobs. Which is ok. They really knew their stuff. The one guy had the dagger of the Yochlol and was hitting really hard. Like he was doing MUTILATES and DISEMBOWELS.

I asked how he hit so hard and he said he had a lot of +dam eq. Apparently Ghostrider had gotten him a full suit of red dragon. I'm going to ask Ghostrider to get me some +dam eq, too.

WOW! I just did a MUTILATES with my color spray spell! Where's Deathwar now, huh? I'll take him down easy!

Ghostrider isn't around to ask for +dam eq right now, but the God of Magic, Rahvin, just talked to us over CB, so that was pretty cool.

Oh and Blaze asked over gossip if anyone knew the way to the red dragon. I do, because I walked in and died there with Commodore, so I told him. He told me thanks, and he owed me one. He's an anti-paladin too, and apparently in something called Shadow, but he seems nice.

Someone else, a paladin I think, just complained over gossip channel about being able to be summoned to the red dragon. Wow, sucks to be him. At least I can tell him how to get to his corpse. Or he could ask Blaze, now, I suppose - he seems nice.

Well shake it up baby, now, shake it up baby
Twist and shout

I immed as Twist. Back then, if any mortal reached level 51, they were suddenly an Imm - they could see the immchat channel (but that was it, no other powers) and were basically forbidden to keep doing mortal things.

So, mortals generally reached 50 and made sure not to gain any more xp without losing some via dying in some fashion.

For me, I discussed whether I could imm with Morgath and he said yes, so once I hit 51 he immediately made me 53.

About a week later, Rahvin made my title 'the Violet Spider' and said I was the God of Magic now, and that I would lead Master.

Tenfan and Blaze both immed around the same time as me - Tenfan first, I think, Blaze shortly after. I believe Tenfan stopped being an imm due to getting drafted into the Israeli army, and Blaze was denied for cheating.

I was an Imm as Twist (and, later, Balgrimnr) for quite a while, until I quit CF completely in about 1999 or 2000.

When I came back a few years ago, I decided I wanted to come back as Twist, and the other IMPs had no objections.

Talk some of the other folks into contributing.