Arislan says, 'so what did you think of my area?'
You say, 'it's the punniest thing I ever saw'
To this day, I'm still kind of possessive of his area. During the course of playtesting it, we got to know each other pretty well. I still have this conversation on a log file:
Arislan says, 'those are some pretty good ideas, you're creative'
You say, 'thanks'
Arislan says, 'I like creative people, i try to put creative ppl into my clan'
Arislan says, 'I could use more people like you'
Arislan says, 'you're an elder of lawful evil, aren't you?'
You nod.
Arislan says, 'hrm'
Arislan says, 'kindred is looking for people'
Arislan says, 'I could get you in pretty easily'
Arislan says, 'what do you say? you want to join kindred?'
You say, 'LE is my prodigy, I will never give up on her'
Arislan says, 'that's commendable, you're better than I thought. Evilavatar is fortunate to have a member as loyal as you'
I was asked to join clan kindred years later by Kralen. Clan dragon has also asked me to join a couple of times. It might have been Ruin one time. I've been asked to join plenty of clans over the years, but I so readily dismiss the idea that I can't really remember.
Heh, here's another random Arislan quote I had floating around in my logs:
Arislan gossips, 'sakura is pretty hot for a 10-year-old'
North Moria Entrance
This is the first area I helped to build. EvilMasterRob built much of it and later invited me to help build, and we finished it together. For the most part, I wrote long descs for him because he didn't like doing it and I did! Btw, Darklord was only level 21 at this time.The first mobs I ever made were the 3 dark dwarven shades (turned out okay I think), and the first object I ever made were the distrurbingly dark cloaks (worn by the aforementioned shades). Original stats of the cloaks were level 30, antigood antineutral, ac15, 2 damroll, 2 dex, chr -1 worn on neck -- that was before I knew what the composite was for :p Hehe, I made the Enchanted Gauntlets of Working something like 65 tot, ac13, 2hit, 2dam, 2 str, 12 hp, -2 castabil at first. Luckily, Dentin set me straight before I made TOO much overpowered eq.
For the longest time I wondered what the heck dwarven banshees were -- were they banshees that used to be dwarves or smaller-than-average banshees? Or both? Tarrant said they're from Dark Sun; I very recently borrowed a boxed set of the AD&D Dark Sun campaign and read the little blurb about dwarven banshees in the travelers' guide. The long desc I wrote for them was much different, and I like it better anyway.
Those of you having trouble typing in the dwarven weaponsmith's insult string before getting whomped on by banshees will be grateful to know that the letter 'w' is a valid name for him. While building him, we got tired of typing in 'dwarven' or 'weaponsmith' in every time, too.
(Say hi to the Evil Presence for me!)
Dentin not only didn't smite me when he found out I wasn't Evilavatar, he granted me my own builder! Evilavatar and I received builders whose names matched those of our mport mortals, and Void was converted into a level 30 playtester that we shared.
Don Milano's compound
This is the first area I ever built myself. I wanted to do a conquistador kind of area. Milano's first name I borrowed from a character in One Must Fall 2097, a fighting game made by Epic Megagames way back in 1994. I loved that game.The group I refer to as Milano's posse, basically all of the mobs with proper names, were all invented by me save Marina. She was the wife of Hernando Cortez.
Milano's posse and the clergymen are good-aligned, whereas pretty much everyone else is neutral. Aztecs are evil. Now go learn the know alignment spell.
It took me about a year to build it. When I finished, Darklord was level 25. The area has undergone several revisions; I'd recommend you go see the bulletin board at the southern exit (room 17101) for details.
The Spanish used by Milano and his men is the Spanish of the late Middle Ages. Back in those times vos (like the French veus) was considered to be the formal second-person singular pronoun instead of the modern day usted. It could also be used to represent formal second-person plural (nowadays this is ustedes) when addressing nobility. Even though this usage was obselete by the 1600s, the ambiguity made it ideal to use in talk strings since the mobs could be addressing either one player or a group of players. Therefore the 'vos' used by Milano's men is not the shortened form of familiar second-person plural vosotros used in the Zulia or Rio de la Plata regions in modern times for familiar second-person singular (nor all of its subsequent screwed up conjugations), rather it represents the archaic form of the pronoun.
The only thing I regret about this area is that I used real life references to Europe instead of inventing my own fictional nationalities. This is something I plan to rectify later this year in an upcoming area update, along with adding fully functional firearms.
Aztecs
The Aztec city seemed like the natural continuation of Don Milano area, really. Cuauhtemoc was the emperor that usurped Montezuma, who was a puppet of the Spanish, and led the Aztecs to war against the Europeans. Just like the real Aztecs, Aztecs in the game use a lot of copper and they wield weird weapons that the real Aztecs used.I tried hard to keep it historically accurate; I will, however, admit that I skirted the whole human sacrifice thing -- it was disgusting and unnecessary. I did give Aztecs specps to have them sacrifice corpses, which made them hated throughout the mud. Aztecs are quite infamous for this little feature because players feared losing their corpses (along with their equipment and gold!) to the Aztecs' relentless sacrificing for many years. In reality this was only briefly true -- Dentin made it so mobs were bound by the same rules regarding player corpses (such as no saccing while eq was still in it) soon thereafter, but it took a long time for people to realize that. Still, most Aztecs have been made less aggressive and have been retrofitted with specps that make them empty corpses before saccing them to prevent treasure and key loss.
Jaguars were revered by the Aztecs: thus the jaguar in the temple, the jaguar paintings and artwork on their buildings and the wearing of jaguar skins. Jaguar lycanthropes (werejaguars) were part of Aztec folklore, stories of which were told as we would tell ghost stories.
I try to update the black giant informant with new info every once in a great while. I don't always succeed.
Vember helped me map it out and make it work with the rest of the world. Dentin endured (most of the time) my constant questioning as to whether such-and-such kind of eq already existed on mport. And finally, Wyvren took the time to set the cost values on all of the objects on the rack that now don't mean a darn thing anymore.
the Daigaku-Tatami ambassador gossips, 'hellero'
Islaine@alter aeon gossips, '*ponder strategic alliance between ancient oriental and mesoamerican peoples*'
**Kenai: you sure know how to fuck up history, darklord
Shadow plane
The Shadow Plane began as a continuation of the Northern Moria Entrance, which contains a portal to a 'darker plane' within a hidden shrine. As it was, the plane consisted of three rooms and an Evil Presence. Draak thought a dimension should somewhat larger, so he reserved two racks on which to build. He figured that the fall of Moria must have been instigated by an organized force, so the idea of the remnants of a defeated Army of Darkness came to mind. Draak put another hidden shrine within the Griffins' Mountain to match the one in Moria and adapted the Necromancer's chamber in Kookien to be a similar shrine as well. Most of the demons are original creations, though the Nazgul wraiths and the language 'Black Speak' are obviously based from the Lord of the Rings. (Nazguls were later changed to 'dread wraiths' to avoid copyright infringement.) The Blok Sabats come from an idea our father had: massive black demons bent forward as if making an offering, with soft flesh but unbreakable bones, unable to pivot on one foot but moving with blinding speed at prey straight in front of them. Sak'trids are based very loosely on the cat-like shape-shifters from the Steven King movie 'Sleepwalkers', which Draak saw edited on UPN. Brat'nik was a nickname we had for our sister when we were younger.I made a major revision at Draak's behest to the wandering paths of the plains demons. I also made minor additions of my own accord, and unfortunately some didn't quite fit in with the rest of the area. A major error, a diamond-studded silver bracelet worn by an evil creature, was changed to something that fit better with the area.
Something to look for in the tunnels: O.J. Simpson and his white bronco, a terrible reminder of that awful media circus that assailed our television sets and newspapers for months.
Players wishing to explore the shadow plane would do well to prepare themselves with some breathsaving equipment. The hp loss from ambient breath damage can be quite substantial, especially since the code affecting it changes from time to time.
Mob Factory
Unbeknowenst to me, I guess there was a standard merc module called the mob factory. In retrospect, I probably did dredge the mob factory concept out of the depths of my memory...most likely from the first mud I played, Endless Nameless. I only borrowed the name, though; nearly everything in the factory was invented by me, and the rest was conjured up by Pinky.Speaking of Pinky, her involvement in building the mob factory was a little scheme I concocted to try and get her a builder. I was already getting overtures to obtain a main port god, and I wanted to help my clannies get builders. I had so much fun building the mob factory that I worked on it day and night and almost finished it without her, so I purposefully left some rooms undone for her to do and moved on to designing Kookien's Pleasure Pit. She didn't work on it until after I lost access in July of 1998, but when I returned a couple years later: lo and behold, she had her own mport god! And top billing on the mob factory credits! That's okay though, Pinky did a fantastic job finishing the last several rooms. She even went beyond that and rearranged the factory and added bump strings to all of the outer walls. She didn't want it opened to the public in my absence (aww, how thoughtful!), so I quickly approved it and it got implemented.
Dentinspawn can be killed. I saw someone do it, but I can't remember who. The player landed a x16 kaoken for 9000+ damage, went berserk and slew it. Luckily, this was after the time that xp was set on individual mobs instead of xp being determined globally. Otherwise, the triumphant player would've gotten -10k xp!
**Darklord: have you looked at the mob factory yet?
**Dentin: it's definitely not like the standard merc area, very original
**Darklord: how do you like it?
**Dentin: it doesn't offend me
Kingdom of Kookien
This area started as one room: Kookien's Pleasure Pit. That's what the whole place was called, I still didn't know what I was going to do beyond that when I started. Turns out that its a planet in the BattleTech universe; I was an avid reader of the series for many years (until the Inner Sphere kicked the crud out the Clans and invaded Strana Mechty, as far as I was concerned that was the end of the good stuff). Anyway, if I had Kookien's Pleasure Pit, then I needed a Kookien. Kookien became the monkey king, and, with a little inspiration from Disney's Jungle Book movie, the Monkey People came to be. The plan was to make Kookien in a fortress in the middle of the jungle, and the area would basically be a big circle around him with several layers of defenses. I made a lot of the soldiery and even some dwarven equipment, because I originally had thought to make a dwarven settlement at the northern tip of the jungle between the mountains. I also had quests to find caches of good-aligned equipment that would be hidden throughout the jungle. I then took a back seat to developing this area, and Draak took over building at that point. The circular area proved to be too room-consuming, so a squarish shape was adopted instead. The dwarves were dropped, and equipment made for the quests was worn by the monkeys. The Pit was enlarged to accomodate the fruit loops and golem subquests. The final area turned out much better than I had hoped for.The Death Monkey was named after a player that used to be in our clan. The first line of the mob's long description was also the first line of the player's long desc.
It's just a little black monkey, surrounded by an aura of DEATH.
The Necromancer under the Pit is a visage of Draak's mortal, Gisco.
By far the most complicated mob of this rack is the Mandrill Shaman. This insanely powerful teleporting mob has been the bane of many. Luckily, he only aggros on guards. Woe be unto the newbie who names himself 'Guard'. The Mandrill Shaman's home has one of the more unique bulletin boards on the game (and it's a safe room).
The great blue toucan...ah, Toucan Sam: so cheesy, yet so hilarious.
Gisco says, 'hopefully it will be hard to even get down to him'
Tarrant says, 'well, it's only a matter of time before Druid summons Raven in anyway'
Bandera Azul
The latino area was inspired by my time in Venezuela as a missionary. Draak likes to say that I invented my own genre: "latinopunk". Admittedly, the area chock full of a satire in its hilariously accurate depiction of a South American slum, and latin american players have commented to me on how they appreciate the humor in it. All of the mobs therein are based on people that I knew irl.Originally built as an addition to Ralnoth, it later was broken off and adapted to become its own village on Sloe when the starting islands were developed.
I'd like to add more to the sewers later, but it's going to be a long, long time before I get around to it.
A more few areas
After finishing the latino area, I went back and finished Sephiroth's sea elves area for him, seeing as how he had long since stopped playing. I had the password to his bport builder for some reason. Anyway, it took me two weeks.After that, I built the mob factory extension miniarea with the help of Kralen. The extension was based on the area of the clan Kralen had before he joined kindred: clan Unforgiven. The entrance to their area used to be in the tree trunk that became the entrance to the mob factory. It actually ended up being a complicated little piece of work, and I put a lot of detail into those twenty rooms.
Kralen's personal room from Unforgiven is still part of the kindred area at the time of this writing. I had a object that let me in there (as thus the rest of their area) whenever I wanted, but I lost it a long time ago. I used to go in there and put stuff in Snoopy's inventory just to cheese Islaine off.
Next, I built Cornia. Cornia was an attempt to return to a traditional fantasy area after dealing with the goofiness that was the latino area and the mob factory extension. And yes, the cow quest was inspired by the Legend of Zelda game where Link saves the cows from being abducted by "them". The bubbas are due for a name change, however.
Around this time, I got my own god and Draak and I started to coordinate our building efforts. We built more of Aztec jungle, the Sashalas, the quarry, and the Swamps of Sorrow. Draak also built the salt flats, setting up the area eastward for our biggest project yet...
The Naginag Combine
It was Draak and I's idea to attempt a few things in the southeastern portion of the world that had never been done previously.- Multiple areas built to be part of the same region. Terrains blend from one area to another, and each individual area has multiple connect points to nearby areas, save a few dungeons. Storylines from different areas weave together to form quests and strengthen the lore.
- A region where all areas are governed by the same entity and share a common history and culture. Races dwelling in the Combine are not monolithic, but they are divided into different tribes, communities and subspecies, just like real life.
- A region of the world where humans are not the most numerous species. In the Combine, murlocks easily outnumber all other races. (Humans are a distant second, unless you consider the Quelese to be techincally half-elves and not humans. Half-elves would be the second most numerous were that the case.) The idea of a versatile race of amphibians appealed to me, especially since they could flourish in places humans could not, namely, underwater and, to a lesser extent, underground.
The whole of it started with the first area, which would become what is now Draj and Zin. This was the last area I built on bport.
Glorida was getting started on bport around that time, so we decided to collaborate and have his area (Ubar) become part of the Combine. Other builders, such as Shift, Xo, Areon, Cobra, Cryos and my wife (Kagome) have also contributed to the Combine.
FYI, if you didn't know before, all nagas are worth fame.
The Naginag Combine has been an extremely fun project to work on. I've gotten to try out and build so much awesome stuff, or, as I like to put it, push the code to the limit. Much of my best building is in the Combine.
As of now, the Combine is nearly complete. We do intend on adding more dungeon style areas in the future. Those of you familiar with Combine lore will know that the Combine capitol, the Isle of Naginag, also will be added in the future. Though mostly completed, Draak and I would like to release it after Dentin is done adding new classes to the game in order to reduce the chance of have to retcon things. We do tire of waiting on this, so we might go ahead and release it anyway. A few more areas will be built along the eastern coast of the mainland, northward as we move on to our next large region, the northeast part of the mainland that is called the Dunn Hurr.