This area tour was run by Dentin. A heavily 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.
For a previous tour transcript of this area, there is a
Transcript of Wyvren's Hell Tour 2013
which contains additional information and trivia.
Dentin: for starters, this was one of the first areas
added to the game, about 19 and a half years ago
Dentin: it was built in pieces by wyvren in the summer of 1995
Dentin: Wyvren was the second builder ever, other than me.
The first one was Loki
Dentin: Loki's mortal on hidden worlds was Thantos, which is
where thantos the executioner got his name
Dentin: right now, we're at the entrance. This room used to
connect south to the light forest east of ralnoth
Dentin: this room is one of the special teleport rooms on the game
Dentin: these rooms came later, but the basic idea is that if
you're in a teleport room and you teleport, you'll end up in another teleport room
Dentin: this is one of two ways you can get into the area right
now. The first way is to teleport at random and hope you land here
Dentin: the second way is to use a teleport room. The teleport
rooms take about five minutes, wheras random teleporting might never get you into the area
Dentin: to answer slej's question, there are other teleport
rooms scattered about the game
Dentin: the reason its so easy to get here using the teleport
rooms is because there's only about a dozen of them. I'm pretty sure there's one straight
north of the aozumi waypoint
Dentin: this black willow wasn't originally a black willow
Dentin: the reason it's important is because it too came from
hidden worlds, the game I originally started playing muds on
Dentin: on HW, there was an area which had a black ogre in it.
Wyvren added it here, only she changed the name to "The black ochre" instead of ogre
Dentin: eventually she turned it into a willow. to this day, im not sure why
Dentin: if you looked at the willow before it died, you'll see
that it still carries the belt of ogre kind
Dentin: that's why it has that belt :)
Dentin: just to be clear, this area was not ported from anywhere
- it is original, but it happens to have a number of mobs in it that were based off mobs we saw elsewhere
Dentin: the entrance to the area splits, with one path going
east and one path going west. The west path leads to the willow and the lake. this path
leads to the river of blood
Dentin: I always thought this was one of the creepier parts
of the area. The river of blood flows downhill almost to the entrance and it's got wandering
blood clots in it. Like eww man
Shryth: it doesn't exactly fit the common idea of what hell looks like
Dentin: yeah, this doesnt exactly fit the common idea of
what hell would look like. That's because technically, this area was supposed to be about
ten areas, and this section was really supposed to be the limbo leading in to hell
Dentin: there are some weird creepy thing in here, like the
river of blood, but most of it is for all intents and purposes wasteland
Dentin: two things before I forget: the animal trap, and the wolverine
Dentin: for years, like a decade, one of the best low level
items for neck was the spiked collars from the wolverines
Dentin: people would save them for their multis, or come here
and get them for noobs etc
Dentin: but even before that, there was an animal trap of some
sort in here that was leveling equipment. You could use the animal trap to lower your hitpoints,
so that when you leveled you got more hitpoints per level
Dentin: that leveling system doesnt exist anymore, but its still
pretty funny to think about. We had all this equipment for low level players but it was
in high level areas like this where only high levels could get it
Dentin: it meant that if you didnt have a high level friend
when you were staring out, your first character was guaranteed to suck
Dentin: I have to say I like the new system better
Xvordan: ha. yeah. never would've liked AA with that old equipment leveling system.
Dentin: so there's this big lake out here, and we're walking
around the edges of it. There's some parts of the lake we can go across, but other parts
we can't - the old areas were a lot like that, with blocking you off from things that should
be obvious for no good reason other than we didnt want to build the paths
Dentin: if you have a map, you'll be able to see pieces of the
lake as we map it out, but there's big sections that don't have any rooms there
Asuka: wow isn't there an under water section to this lake
Dentin: get this - even though you can't walk from one section
of the lake to the other, you can swim underwater to get there anyway
Mathayas: did the concept of underwater already exist then?
Westie: wb wasnt properly around so no wb was needed
Note - the daughter is below the surface of the lake.
Dentin: this is another neat piece of equipment
You take a flannel nightgown from The ghost of the daughter.
Dentin: this nightgown on the girl was another piece of leveling equipment
Dentin: it had 2 intelligence on it, and I believe some negative mana
Dentin: that was an awesome piece of gear back in the day, because
you got more mana with a high int and low starting mana
Dentin: later on, it just became an awesome piece of gear in general
Dentin: ok, so who knows what the wilies are?
Dentin: im guessing nobody. wilies are apparently ghostly undead
dancers, doomed to dance forever when they die
Dentin: wyvren knew about them, I suspect from her ballet career.
She was a dancer, so there are a handful of ballet and other dance related references in here
Dentin: ok, that was myrtha, the queen. She is apparently the
evil spirit that has master control over the other wilies in the fairy tales
Dentin: this is myrthas throne. Normally she would be here,
but we took so long wandering around that she got bored and left
Dentin: these devilkin trees and lost souls were always pretty funny to me
Dentin: so much of the stuff in this area was low level or cheesy and not hard
Dentin: but then you'd come across the wrong thing, and splat, you're toast
Mathayas: what's a devilkin tree actually, just made up by the builder?
Dentin: I think just made up by the builder mathayas
Dentin: so that druid priest that you guys killed was actually
the high level druid teacher for a long time
Dentin: when we first added lethargy, it ended up here on this
druid, along with a bunch of other stuff
Dentin: another thing of interest about the druid that was here
before you guys murdered him
Dentin: he has the druid cloak, which for years was the number
one piece of about body enchantable gear for ac
Rhorae: yep, I used to use that cloak all the time
Westie: this was also the location where druid lost near on a billion xp
Dentin: yeah, that too
Westie: he was half asleep and he cast c greater druid and dead
Slej: oh god
Kaden: rofl wow
Dentin: he only lost 500 million I believe, he had like 980
million on him at the time
Westie: nod i knew it was alot
Dentin: when that happened, something snapped in my brain and
I said "thats bullshit" and changed it to cap the loss at 20 million per death
Jorah: when did leveling eq stop becoming a thing?
Mathayas: when ltype 2 was invented, which I think may have been
around the year 2004 though that is just a guess
Note - ltype 2 came online in 1997 and quickly became the dominant leveling scheme.
Dentin: and that would be the wolverine and its collar
Dentin: these used to be I believe 5 ac, 2 hit, 1 dam or something
similar. Level 18
Note - the wolverine collars were the premier hit/dam equipment at level 20 for
literally a decade.
Dentin: the next mob was particularly dangerous
Dentin: coronado was also based on a hidden worlds mob, sorta
Dentin: soon after I started playing HW, a new area opened up
called 'headhunters'. It wasnt so much an area as about 20 rooms with some high experience
headhunters in it, a volcano, and a fiery phoenix which lived in the volcano
Dentin: somehow, we ended up getting the phoenix and volcano
in here because it sounded neat
Dentin: but then wyvren changed the name to coronado, around
the same time she changed the ochre to willow
Dentin: the bad thing about coronado is that it wanders
Dentin: jerks would come in here, open the magma, and recall
Dentin: that would let the phoenix out, and it would wander
around all over the place until it found someon trying to get collars
Dentin: then it would crater them
Jorah: god you really could be such a jerk with this game then
Westie: used to leave the zone, killed me in dark forest
Rhorae: think I died to that on the way to the druid for a cleric spell
Dentin: between coronado and the bobcat, those two mobs were
like 90% of the player deaths in this area
Lilmike: bobcat got me and rhorae a couple times when he was someone else
Dentin: things like this really help me remember just how much
anti-griefing stuff has gone into the game over the years, and how impotant it is
Dentin: the screaming ice demon here is yet another HW mob. Keep in mind
that for every one of these, there's three or four other original mobs which I dont talk about as much
Dentin: also, the HW mobs came from different zones, and are
dramatically different here than they were there
Westie: [this bit] was unlinked for ages
Dentin: one of the more awesome weapons on the game was the
ice whip that you could get in this area
Dentin: it was 5d9 plus some high amount of hitroll. It had
to change later due to composite issues
Dentin: and the fact that it was low level
Dentin: this is the barrow wight region
Dentin: there's still a couple of unconnected places in here
that have god-only doors on them
Dentin: there are wights and wight lords and I believe even
an underground chamber of some sort, but I cant remeber the details
Dentin: this is inside one of the mounds. I havent really explored
in here, so I'll just show it off and say have at it, for those of you who intend to come back :)
Dentin: and now we head to the castle
A set of wrought-iron gates
At the entrance to a drawbridge leading over a moat a set of wrought iron gates
accompanied by a rather large gargoyle block your path. The only way around him
seems to be through him.
A giant stone gargoyle sits here guarding the gates.
Dentin: that iron crowbar is a key. We'll need it
Dentin: the crowbar was used I believe in the lost spear quest
at one point, but I'm pretty sure its not a key anymore
Xvordan: It still is
Dentin: we are now inside the castle proper
Dentin: when I was mid level, I would often come here, sneak
into the castle, and farm the crap out of mithril equipment
Dentin: the mithril equipment is on the top floors of the castle,
in the watch towers
Inside the southeast watchtower
Sitting silently in the alcove the man stares off into infinity.~O
A lookout is DEAD!
Dentin: there are four lookouts, one at each of the four towers,
and four gargoyles, one at the top of each tower
Dentin: the lookouts would prevent you from tgetting to the
stone golems with the mithril
Mathayas: mithril equipment apparently has some history to it. I
recall mobs in other area refering to it
Standing on the peak of the tower
A giant stone gargoyle sits here guarding the gates.
The gargoyle blocks your path, preventing you from passing.
Xvordan: haha. they block you going back out
Dentin: yeah, that used to be a deathtrap if you were too low level
Dentin: I died many a time trying to take out a gargoyle and failing
Dentin: so, another piece of history
Dentin: on HW, old thalos had stone golems, and those stone
golems had mithril equipment
Dentin: here, the golems became gargoyles, and that's where the
mithril ended up
Shryth: I believe thalos in here has golems too
Xvordan: haha. yep. the old thalos stone golems that are part of every stock mud
Mathayas: it does have golems yes, but no mithril eq
Dentin: but there was a big, big problem with it at the time
- when we built the mithril equipment here, I pretty much copied the stats from the other game
Bodmall: I like that stock area
Dentin: we used those pieces of mithril as a sort of reference
for how powerful equipment could be
Dentin: and it just so happens that the first version of the
mithril gauntlets was weight 2, ac apply 8, 3 hitroll and 1 damroll
Dentin: level 20
Dentin: You could maybe get those kinds of stats on an artifact these days
Shryth: could we get those back please? :P
Dentin: heh no shryth. We honestly didnt know any better at the time
Dentin: there was no composite, we had to put down numbers somewhere
Dentin: I eventually pulled back the stats on them, until eventually
they ended up more normal for AA
Mathayas: when did the actual working composite as we see it today come into play?
Dentin: there was an early version by 1996 I think, but I dont know for sure
Jorah: oh wow. Thought composite was a lot newer. Like at least 5/10 years newer
Dentin: funny thing about the object composite is that
at first, the builders really, really didnt like it
Dentin: they said that it limited their freedom, they couldnt
build with those kinds of constraints, and that it would never work
Dentin: again, we just didnt know better at the time. Building
a mud is a learning experience
Shryth: you're doing a great job of that, even if we can't have 3/3 belts at level 10 :D
Dentin: there have been pretty substantial improvements to it
over the years, every few years - for a long time, it wasnt very good at all
Dentin: it took us a long time to figure out that rarity was
stupid, and that artifact flags were awesome
A black iron breech loading cannon looks out over the surrounding lands.
Dentin: this cannon weighs 500 pounds, and it's got a special
composite exception flag that lets people wield it with only 26 strength
Dentin: for a long time, this was one of those screwball weapons
that people would get just to do silly stuff
Mathayas: oh that cannon. lol I used to get that and spam gods with it. not
maliciously of course. but I'd leap shit with it and gods would send me tells to stop it. lol
Shryth: level 29 , HUM NOSAVE , damage 1 to 99 slowest crush needs
26 str. , MOVE minus 100, hr minus 6
Shermanator: hadn't noticed the str needed for that. hmm
Mathayas: it used to be 1d127 shryth
Dentin: the funny thing about the cannon is that people would
have to offload basically all their equipment to pick it up
Dentin: it was right at the limit of what you could pick up
with an empty inventory
Rhorae: even now you only have a 20 pound buffer
Mathayas: yeah remember that was what you could get with max str back then
On the flat deck
A keen-eyed archer waits for an opportunity to practice his skills as a marksman.
Dentin: these were just exp mobs
Dentin: if you knew what you were doing and were just strong
enough, you could basically run this area indefinitely killing stuff and waiting for it to repop
Dentin: and hardly anyone ever went in here either
Dentin: before instances, farming an area like this was a lot
of how people leveled without a group
Shryth: good to know for the 95 port
Dentin: the cannon master though, he used to kill me a lot.
Dangerous guy, stay away from him. If you're level 20. ha ha
Mathayas: wow I didn't notice the cannon master was here before now
At this point, the tour went from the roof to the lower floors of the castle.
Dentin: the first floor is a big ring of tunnels inside the
castle walls, with a number of rooms in the central area
Dentin: there's a hidden chamber on the first floor and a few
other minor things, but nothing really noteworthy. If you want to investigate it later, look for rothgar
Dentin: the promenade floor took me a while to figure out.
At some point, the promenade was supposed to be a raised walkway around the lowest floor
Dentin: but because we didnt have mappers in the olden days,
and because we didnt know mapping was important, it was all kinds of nonlinear and linked stupid
Dentin: in the center of the promenade, there are four rooms
that are a bit lower down. There are four mobs, one in each room
The Peacock Room
A temple dancer dressed in a chiffon hip-skirt and halter walks about the room, swaying to and fro.
Princess Aramin is in excellent condition.
The Gold and Burgundy Room
A beautiful tall slender lady in a burgandy robe sits by the fire and smokes a cigarette.
The Lady Emalphia is in excellent condition.
The Emerald Room
A six foot tall muscular female warrior in emerald glazed armor towers over you.
Shannon of the Celts is in excellent condition.
Dentin: of the four, this one is the most interesting:
A slender lady in a metallic silver jump suit sits in a comfortable chair reading.
Colonel Derring is in excellent condition.
worn on body - (rare) a silver spandex jumpsuit
Dentin: did any of you watch old 1980's and 1970's tv shows?
Dentin: so this mob here is colonel derring, who was the silver-spandex-suited
girl in the buck rogers tv series
Dentin: I have no idea what she is doing in hell, other than
perhaps after being in buck rogers, it was an improvement
Dentin: the altarian guards were another one of the dangers
of this area if you were low level
Dentin: they didnt have swarm code, but it still seemed like
they would swarm you at the drop of a hat
Dentin: same with the gunnery sergeant
Dentin: wyvren actually had a lot of interest in the military
personally, and I think thats where she got some of the ideas for this zone
Dentin: wyvren was considering joining the military for a while,
and she would have been good at it
Dentin: we are now on the bottom floor of the castle
Dentin: if you pay attention, you'll notice that the spiral
staircases spread out as they go up into the castle. On the bottom floor, all four staircases
are together, while at the top each one ends in one of the towers
Dentin: there's an indoor arboretum thats about a third of the
lower floor, thats where we are now
Dentin: you'll notice that some of the mobs in here are dead
or ghosts, but nobody else seems to notice
Dentin: this area was supposed to be on the edge - part way
to hell, part way to reality, mostly in limbo
Dentin: the lass here has a very interesting weapon
Samon: the famous look of death
Dentin: that look of death was one of the first nonorm damage type weapons
Dentin: it would cut through all resists and saves
Mathayas: and it notably has no damage type
Mathayas: so if you wielded it, it'd be like, "You devastate it!"
Dentin: there are still a few of them that are truly old versions,
and when I see people wielding them they post something like +20 on the weapons composite
Dentin: it used to have a much higher dieroll. When we updated
the code and changed the weapon, there were only a few of the old ones in existence
Dentin: I only know of two of them right now
Dentin: something else you might have noticed here is that you
can knock or pick most everything, and that there's a lot of doors
Dentin: that seems to be uncommon in modern areas
Coffeeking: the door descriptions are a little strange too. One words are comon here
The chef's kitchen
A bizarre machine of torture hangs from the rafters.
A man in a blood covered uniform wanders about with a cleaver.
The chef is DEAD!
Rubi gets Yan's Ultimate Cleaver from the corpse of The chef.
Dentin: take a look at the eggbeater
A three whisked hand crankable egg beater fashioned from the modern unstainable steel.
Dentin: thats the bizarre machine of torture
Dentin: one of the things I always liked about wyvren's areas
was the long descs. They usually weren't very long, but the words she used and the way she
strung them together almost always elicited a specific feel for a room or place
Dentin: a lot of the time the descriptions would be grammatically
incorrect and full of typos, but you'd still see something cool in it
Slej: I've noticed the typos but they are still pretty neat
Sliding through the dumb waiter
[Exits: out ]
Dentin: this is the famous dumbwaiter
Dentin: this fucking thing didnt
have an exit in the olden days
Dentin: and there were dumbwaiter exits all over the place
Dernan: rofl
Dentin: so you'd be exploring, do do do and bam, noexit dumbwaiter
Dentin: I must have walked back here a hundred times after accidentally
falling in here
Dentin: this is just a background hallway for servants
Dentin: this is basically the end of the area, or very nearly so
Dentin: this machine, the wain, was added long after the original
area. Wyvren had planned to add more expansions, and this was the link point
The great machine hovers above the ground in the exact center of the
meditation room. Massive rings, one stone, one metal, one fire, one blood:
rotate in a complex multidimensional fashion. Chords of equally diverse
matter gyrate within the rings. Gazing at the machine induces a fogginess of
the mind, and a sickness in the stomach. The machine is silent, yet you feel
it deep inside yourself, rotating.
You enter the gyromantic wain and become disorientated.
Dentin: by passing through the wain, you end up in the third
official part of hell. The first was the plains with the lake and lost souls, the second was the castle
Dentin: I actually don't know all the stuff in here, so we're
going to stop here. I've removed the keypass restriction on the doors, so if you guys want to come back
and take another look that would be fine
Shermanator: removed what retrictions?
Dentin: there was a restriction on the wain door, I think to
keep people out of this section
Dentin: its probably not finished, so explore at your own risk
Dentin: if you're going to explore the area, you might want
to start from the beginning so you knmow you can get back here if you die. Or not, if you
have death cards
Dentin: anyone got any other questions or comments?
Shryth: the guards in the castle, are their names related to the mud's own name?
Dentin: I dont think so shryth
Dentin: I recall asking wyvren and she said that no, they werent
based on alter aeon
Vanzan: is there a deed attached to this?
Odi: killing the siege engine is a deed yes
Dentin: apparently so. it had to have been added fairly recently
Dentin: fairly recently being like 2002
Mathayas: any plans to link this up again?
Dentin: not right now mathayas
Dentin: it would require for all intents and purposes a full
rebuild to make it usable
Flamestar: it would be cool to be rebuilt.
Newt: i like having some of the old areas stay old
Dentin: yeah, its kinda like the 1995 port, it gives you something
to compare against
Note - the tour ends here.
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