This area tour was run by Dentin. A rough, edited transcript of the text, with notes and
additions, is provided below.
Hell was an area created by the god Wyvren in the very early days of the game. It was huge,
and had a lot of useful things in it for players, at a time when the number of areas on
the server was pretty thin. It was taken offline and turned into a museum nearly a decade
after its initial construction by request of the area author.
This tour starts from one of the old linkage points on the southern end of the area.
Dentin: this area is very old, and has hardly anything that would actually be considered dangerous
Dentin: the only real dangerous things I can think of off the top of my head are the queen, the phoenix, and the bobcat
Raven: I remember doing a cr here for ashton, and we all ended up dead and had to ask aja the nun to save us all
Note - 'cr' means 'corpse retrieval', and Raven isn't lying. Ashton was in fact low enough level to die
at one point, and Aja the Nun was a real character, the mortal of the builder Astarte, who has several areas to her credit.
Dentin: first, some history
Dentin: hell was originally created by the god Wyvren, a long, long time ago
Dentin: I'm not sure why she wanted to make it, but she had this idea of a shadowy
forest, which gradually became a different place and ended up off plane and descending into hell
Laniloa: is she still around?
Raven: nope
Dentin: that's why originally, this area was on a different plane, and when you entered it, everyone on the who list vanished
Dentin: her plan, as I recall, was that the forest would slowly turn to desolation,
and eventually lead to lower layers. I seem to recall she had at least 7 different sets of areas in mind, but she
only ever started working on the third or fourth before leaving AA
Dentin: that's why the initial part of it, which is what we're exploring
today, looks like a relatively normal area, instead of hell on earth
Dentin: hell has a lot of levels, and the outer ones are simply desolate
Dentin: these glyphs are one of the only reliable ways into the area.
The teleporter rooms allow teleporting between the various points, and sometimes you can end up at this one
Dentin: just fyi, for those of you who might like to visit
Dentin: as I mentioned earlier, this area was originally connected.
It had two connect points - the room we started in was connected to light forest west, and the room
two west of here was connected very near castle dragnok
Dentin: the area was taken off line due to a dispute I had with wyvren,
the creator. It may never come back online in any official capacity, and for now it remains as
a museum and historical zone
Dentin: the first creature we'll encounter is the black ochre
Dentin: the ochre was a play on words from hidden worlds
Dentin: there were many, many obscure references to hidden worlds in the old, original areas
Dentin: near the chaos area on that game, there was a 'black ogre' who had the belt of ogre kind
Dentin: wyvren somehow got it into her head to make it an ochre instead of
ogre, and so we have this plant like tree thing instead. Close enough
Dentin: a few years later, the ochre was changed into a willow. I dont remember why
Dentin: there's a boatload of little creatures like the fruitbat that populate this area
Dentin: basically the whole zone is one big set of open rooms, and only a few things have limits on where they can go
Dentin: we're going to hit most of them randomly
Dentin: I always found the muskrat to be funny
Dentin: the steel trap of the muskrat was leveling eq back in the day
Dentin: leveling eq was needed for type 1 chars
Samon: type 0
Dentin: yeah, type 0 and 1
Dentin: people would wear crap eq that lowered hp and other stats so
they would get more hitpoints when they leveled
Note - all new characters are type 2, and this technique has no effect. There are
approximately 100 old type 0 characters still in existence, however they cannot gain levels without
switching to type 2 first.
Dentin: ah, the wilies
Dentin: wyvren, who built this zone, had a lot of experience with ballet and ballet history
Dentin: wilies were betrothed dancers who had died in some way, I dont remember the details
Dentin: anyway, they end up here
Dentin: her shout out to ballet in Alter Aeon
Raven: 18 years and I finally find out they not just walking willys
Dentin: something you may find amusing is that wilies were considered damned dangerous back in the day
Dentin: certainly to mid level characters, they were risky as shit to approach solo
Athlon: they do like to attack in groups
Dentin: I dont know how characters would fare today
Raven: they were a bitch
Dentin: here near the beginning of the area, there's a big lake. We're
on the south shore of the lake right now, which is where the wilies lurk
Dentin: the lake is north of us, and we'll be going through more of it later
Dentin: I never did understand this one
Dentin: I asked about the stone crying blood, and the river of blood, but never got a clear answer
Dentin: these blood clots only hang out in the blood river
Dentin: when I would come here as a mid level, I would always go up the
river so I didn't have to risk the wilies at the lake
Dentin: usually, as a mid level, you'd just come here for collars, mithril, or the priest
Dentin: ah, the coyote. There's tons of those around here
Dentin: we'll head to the priest now
Dentin: one of the things you'll notice is that this is a really, really
big area. When you're a mid level just trying to get through it, there's enough mobs, but certainly
from a group standpoint there's not nearly as much here as in more current zones
Dentin: the locusts are basically a biblical pestilence mob
Dentin: swarms of locusts eating your crops and the like
At the Druid Priest:
Dentin: back in the olden days this guy was pretty much the only one to teach certain spells and skills
Dentin: for a long time, he was the only high level teacher
Dentin: if you listen to the cleric guildmaster in ralnoth, he'll
talk about some old druid with weird spells
Dentin: this is that guy
Dentin: he taught leth for a really long time
Smith: he was the only one that taught the heal spell for a long time
Raven: funny story
Raven: druid once lost half his xp here when drunk by fireballing druid
Jadon: how long ago was this?
Dentin: ten years or more
Dentin: the player druid killed himself by fireballing druid here
Raven: when half xp meant healf xp
Dentin: I dont remember this stallion at all
Dentin: ok, lets go hit up the lake
Dentin: I'm pretty sure that the water mobs and other watery stuff here
was related to wyvren's real life playing in the potomac river
Dentin: I went water skiing there with her and some friends once,
and the flavor of this area matches that pretty well
Samon: she told me she used to wander off into the woods there and explore all over
Note - the group went underwater, beneath the lake, for this part of the tour.
Dentin: so this nightgown here
Dentin: it was leveling equipment as well
Dentin: there was a lot of leveling style stuff in this zone
Dentin: and now, we're on the surface again
Dentin: strangely enough, most of the rooms down there are linear and link up right
Dentin: that was a freaking miracle back in the olden days
Dentin: this is one of the other exit points for the underwater part of the lake
Dentin: I'm pretty sure this was built before we had waterbreathing and underwater drowning
Dentin: myrtha here, queen of the wilies, was brutally dangerous
Dentin: if you were afraid of wilies at all, you stayed the hell away from the queen
Dentin: this chunk of rooms here used to be a ridiculous, ugly maze of nonlinearity
Dentin: you could always follow the paths back and get somewhere, but it didn't lay out
at all. I beat on it a bit last night to make it navigable for this tour
Dentin: now this, this has history
Dentin: the wolverine originally loaded with a level 18, 2 dam, 1 hit, 2 ac collar worn on neck
Dentin: and I'll be darned, it's still got those stats
Dentin: anyway, those collars were the shit
Dentin: it used to be a rite of passage for mid levels to go get their own collars
Dentin: when the area closed, that was a big deal too, because most people didn't know how to replace them
Dentin: one of the classic mobs
Dentin: the phoenix lives down here
Dentin: and apparently the phoenix doesn't like zinge
Note - Zinge was a player in the tour group who got attacked by the phoenix.
Dentin: the phoenix loads phoenix wings, which back in the olden days were
level 25, 4 hitroll, 1 damroll, and -10 armor
Dentin: they were stupid overpowered, and it took a long time for the composite to catch up with it
Raven: i still have two pairs hehe
Dentin: and this is the famous bobcat
Razer: used to scare the hell outa me
Dentin: yeah, me too. You never knew when you were going to run into the cat
Dentin: as a low level, the bobcat was as dangerous as wilies, or more
Dentin: this eye (from the bobcat) was the only +2 con piece of leveling eq on the game for a long time
Dentin: hardly anyone used it though, the mages spellbooks were better
Dentin: this is the section of hell that has the mist demons in it
Dentin: the mist demon was also based on a hidden worlds area
Dentin: a lot of the stuff that I and wyvren pulled in was from a specific set of two areas on HW
Dentin: in particular, chaos, which is similar to but smaller than my chaos zone here
Dentin: and things like the mist demon
Dentin: the mist demon on HW didn't wander and had the ice whip, which for a while was one of the
most powerful whips on the game. It still sucked, but as I recall it was level 25, and 7d4 or something similar
Note - the one that loads on AA is much better.
Dentin: this part of the zone was disconnected for some reason, and I only reconnected it
last night when I was collecting notes on the zone
Jadon: why?
Dentin: we dont have area logs going back far enough to figure out why it was disconnected
Xorg: Dentin, is there any history to the barrows?
Dentin: I'm really not sure
Dentin: I wouldn't be surprised if they were from the lord of the rings and or hobbit
Dentin: but I'm pretty sure the mist demons are wyvren's amped up version of the HW mist demon
Dentin: you'll notice a lot of typos
Dentin: wyvren was very, very bitchy about people modifying her descriptions
Dentin: even minor typo fixes caused a lot of drama blowups, so after a while
I simply put a moratorium on modifying her stuff
Dentin: the typos persist to this day
Dentin: now we're at the castle
Dentin: kill the gargoyle
Dentin: I'm pretty sure this iron crowbar is the only way to open the gate
Rhorae: nah it should be pickable
Dentin: this is metacles
Dentin: I have no idea about him
Westie: it loads the key to the next door
Dentin: there's a handful of things without descriptions in this area, I get the
feeling not all of it was completed properly
Dentin: lets hit the moat before entering
Dentin: khet lives down here
Dentin: that's odd, I wonder why ammit is dying
Dentin: I'm not sure why the demon of the deep and other things are here in the moat,
but they definitely made it an interesting place
Raven: was there not a way in under here
Dentin: I dont think there was a way in directly from the moat
Dentin: ok, into the castle proper
Dentin: there's altarian guards all over the place
Dentin: this inner section of the castle really only contains two important things
Dentin: one is this fireplace
Dentin: which really isn't very important
Shadowweaver: what's in the fireplace?
Wily: fire
Dentin: the other is in here
Note - this is where the skeletons in the closet are, on the ground floor, leading to Rothgard.
Dentin: everyone has skeletons in their closet
Dentin: some have more than others, heh
Dentin: this is the other important thing
Dentin: Rothgard, the castle master
Dentin: he's a pain in the ass to find
Dentin: ok, lets go up to the top
Dentin: this is the lookout. There's a lookout on each tower, there's four towers
Dentin: staircases go from the basement to tower top in all four
Dentin: the stone gargoyles at the top of each tower have mithril eq
Dentin: so back in the day, mithril was another one of those must-have equipment sets
Dentin: it was all level 25, and a lot of it was like 3 hit 1 dam
Note - the earliest stuff might actually have been level 20, not 25, but with similarly high combat stats.
Dentin: usually was the first thing I would get when I was high enough level
Dentin: we're not going to hit up all the gargoyles, but remember that they each have different things on them
Ladislaus: how is there binding eq here?
Dentin: there have been some updates over the years, and some automatic
updates, which is why you'll find binding stuff in here
Dentin: here on the deck of the castle, there's cannons for defense
Dentin: and there's also the cannon master and a few guards
Dentin: these stationary cannons I recall had some goofy uses if you could pick them up
Colonel: those cannons are fun to leap with
Dentin: ok, basement time
Dentin: this is the second level from the bottom
Dentin: near as I can tell, the idea behind this level was that there's an open floor
with rooms in it below this walkway, and the various rooms are basically an entertainment area for guests and the like
Dentin: there were also some really, really awful nonlinear linkages
and maze style rooms, which I destroyed, because I'm a bastard
Dentin: if this area ever does come online again, at least it won't be ridiculous in terms of how the map is laid out
Dentin: there's a lot of gaurds, and as a mid to high level player this was a pretty good exp zone
Dentin: even for me, and my characters sucked
Dentin: we're going to walk down into the entertainment center now
Dentin: each room has something or other in it
Dentin: there's the princess, in the previous room
Dentin: this is colonel wilma derring
Dentin: I actually dont recall who she was based on
Dentin: I think this was the secret disguise of wonder woman back in the olden days
Dentin: oh wait, wilma derring was in buck rogers
Dentin: anyway, pop culture reference
Dentin: this is shannon of the celts
Dentin: the emerald glazed bracer on shannon was awesome
Dentin: and it was even more awesome when ltype 2 came in
Dentin: not only did you get a hitroll and a damroll, as type 2 the extra con gave you actual hitpoints!
Dentin: I thought it was awesome anyway. Then again, I was pretty much the only one using type 2
Dentin: and this is the good lady of no long description
Dentin: I have no idea who she was supposed to be
Dentin: we are now in the great hall, on the lowest floor
Dentin: all the staircases end up here, and from here you can effectively quick travel to any of the castle corners and towers
Dentin: this is the mad cook
Dentin: I think he was related to fozzie in ralnoth
Dentin: speaking of fozzie, he was made after my roommate in alaska
Dentin: guy was built like a bear and had the hair to prove it, hence the name
Dentin: there's wine cellar and pantry and all that connected to the kitchen if you're bored
Dentin: this set of rooms in here is an indoor garden. It's connected to the queens room directly
Dentin: but since this is after all hell, the royalty and other inhabitants aren't in the greatest condition
Dentin: a lot of these mobs, like the lass here, dont have descriptions and I have no idea what the builder was thinking
Raven: yay, the look of death, weird weapon
Gordan: ah, so that's where the look of death loads
Dentin: that look of death was a very special weapon for a very long time. We ended
up having to make nonorm changes to nerf it, but only because other weapons were even worse
Dentin: man, every [door] in this zone has a lock on it
Dentin: this wain gyro thing, I dont remember
Dentin: and this concludes our tour of the castle
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