Recently in Mirkwood Category

Years ago, I created these banners to advertise Mirkwood, a free, online, social, fantasy game started in 1995 and still going strong. Keith and I were (and technically are) high gods in this crazy, addictive realm. Check out the Mirkwood category in the right-hand menu for more information on MUDs -- unfortunately, though, I haven't yet gotten around to writing much about Mirkwood itself. In time. Anyway, I recently re-discovered these banners, and if you take a liking to the game, feel free to use them to promote Mirkwood on your sites.

The next one needs a bit of explanation. JellO, one of the founding gods of Mirkwood, is insanely creative and funny and wrote some incredibly cool and whacked-out areas.

Update: I just discovered that Mirkwood (the MUD) is mentioned in Wikipedia's "Mirkwood" entry.

This entry picks up a narrative thread captured in the Mirkwood category in the right-hand menu.

Firmly ensconced as chiefs of RMES, Marge and I set out on a policy of expansion. Modeled after Victorian exploration/scientific clubs, The Royal Midgard Explorers' Society's chief mission was to discover and catalogue the world around us. That meant, in addition to recording and categorizing with the precision of a proper Linnean the available items, including weapons, armor, and magical paraphernalia, scattered across the vast lands, we sponsored cartographic expeditions and made the resulting maps available to all.

Mostly we got others to make maps; they are a bit of a chore. Chiefhood has its privileges.

In addition to our routine work, we also plotted out the growth of RMES, both in terms of new recruits and in additional construction. We debated this thoroughly, and finally decided to spend some of the Valor Points we had been granted by the gods to build a pet shop. On MadROM, as on many MUDs, players could acquire pets who would obey some simple commands. We'd have to write the room, write the shopkeeper, and write the pets. In keeping with our mission of exploration, we decided to place the pet shop in The Galaxy, among the very stars shining down upon our world.

I wrote a draft that placed the shop on the edge of a supernova shockwave. Keith took a shot at the draft, and then we wrote the shopkeeper and the pets, a weird assortment of intergalactic beasties. It was whimsical and nutty -- the actual shop was a pickup truck driven by a chain-smokin' redneck. Slip him a few bucks and he'd reach back through the cab window, smack a run-down cigarette machine, retrieve the smokes, and hand them to you.

We submitted the pet shop to Etaine and then sat down to wait. Getting new stuff on a MUD can take time -- later experience taught us just how involved implementing new stuff could be, but at the time, we were clueless. All we could do was wait.

About the same time we submitted the pet shop, another player submitted a player-room catering service that not only supplied food and drink for a price but also formal wear. While we all waited, Marge run some more RMES quests, I dunned current members for their dues, and we plotted even more expansion -- leading the list was a submarine modeled after Captain Nemo's Nautilus.

Finally we got word from Etaine. She praised the pet shop and gave us the date it would go up. For Marge and I, this was huge --- after many hundreds of hours of play we were finally going to make a permanent mark on the MUD. It called for something special, perhaps a party? And -- hey, that guy is getting a catering shop put up, we could spend some of our members' dues on a Grand Opening.

So that's what we did. We sent out invitations,which included a plug for the catering shop, ordered food and drink, got fitted in formal wear, and became very nervous. What if no one showed up?

We needn't've worried. Three quarters of the MUD showed up, including a delegation of gods headed by Etaine. All of us were crammed into one room spamming up the screen with drinking, eating, smoking, boasting, acts of divine magic, heavy flirtation, and much straightening of bow ties and smoothing of ruffled dresses. Etaine even hauled Marvin, our drink-dispensing robot, to the affair.

It was a smashing success, a great triumph for RMES and Marge and me. We were shining stars on MadROM; who knew what the future held? Perhaps, dare we think it, godhood?

All those speculations changed, though, after two players, Tomasin and Nym, paid me a secret visit.

More to come. ...

I'm glad to see my colleague jumping in. The MadROM months and the Mirkwood years represented a huge investment on our parts, and contain more stories than will ever be told. So far, I've just sketched out the basic backdrop in preparation for the real stories.

About Marge. What is curious now is how little we thought about or commented upon a male player assuming a female persona. In the online world, gender and personality are assumed traits, and it's a foolish guy who assumes that the flirty tells he's getting must be from a gal. Whenever Marge would get hit on, we'd laugh and laugh. My policy was to assume that all MUDders were guys unless evidence to the contrary.

For years, this policy kept me out of trouble. But then. ... well, I'm getting ahead of myself.

More to come. ...

In light of the flurry of MUD entries posted by my peer, I feel a quick word is in order, just to clarify an identity question before I settle in to tell some longer stories now that Trent/Gerrold has painted the backdrop for our years-long adventures in MUDding.

My reasons for MUDding were somewhat different—no real insanity save the regular bits that have marked my entire life. I jumped into the world of MUD with the same manic energy I chased performance poetry. It was theatre. I assumed a personality and pranced all about the stage with little to no inhibition.

Now. About the character I played. I didn't set out to play a female persona, not with any goal or agenda in mind. Trent picked the name Gerrold, I the name Marge, as in one's aunt Marge rather than any kind of echo of the Simpson's character. A middle-aged, hefty, built-like-a-truck-driver kind of woman, a powerful one who might attend Adrienne Rich readings wearing a Carhart field jacket, Redwing boots, and a watch cap. It was a temporary thing, or so I thought, but after 50 or so hours playing the game, it stuck and I was Marge. The range of the character allowed everything from a discussion of biscuit recipes to a forceful feminism. And I maintained the persona for five years without revealing my own gender.

Henceforth in these entries, as on two MUDs, I shall be Marge. It'll be good to wear her again. To be honest, in a way, she represents an ideal, the kind of person I might like to be given the chance.

As Chiefs of The Royal Midgard Explorer's Society, we took our responsibilities seriously. We ran recruiting drives, Marge first started to run her amazing quests, we mapped out areas (one of our primary missions as Explorers), and we began plotting ways to further enhance the reputation and status of our Clan.

At the time, the most powerful god on MadROM was Etaine, a funny, irreverent goddess with a penchant for witty one-liners and practical jokes. Marge and I got to know her a bit by talking to her when she'd slum in mortal areas. Going to her place was impossible -- the gods do not often grant mere mortals entrance to their divinely protected lands. We mortals would exchange hearsay and speculation about these lands, but few of us could speak from direct experience. The gods were mysterious, dangerous, and often a bit psycho. Etaine, however, was just cool.

Crash was another powerful god; he served as the MUD's Questmaster during our time on MadROM, and Marge got to know him very well through her efforts to sponsor MUD-wide RMES quests. Ozymandias was high in the divine hierarchy, too. Although a bit capricious and sometimes abrupt, Ozy wrote the coolest areas on MadROM, including the awesome Hades, which served as partial inspiration for a massive project Marge and I undertook later, on a different MUD.

As you can see, when Marge ... er, Keith ... and I fell into MUDding, we did it in a big way. Why? It's not as if we didn't have enough real-life demands on our time. We were both doctoral students in the English department of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. We had classes to attend, papers to write, prelims to take. Keith will have to give his own reasons, but for my part, I was a bit insane at the time -- and, of course, that means there was a woman involved. Thwarted love, agony, watching your desire walk off with another guy, crazy treks across half of Knoxville to deliver heartfelt statements, scads of verse written and then buried, never to be seen by anyone -- it's all damned pathetic and embarassing. What's more, the affection persisted, became part of who I am today. Anyway, MUDding was a diversion, an escape more encompassing than chess, a way to have some control, albeit virtual.

It's difficult to explain to an outsider how addictive a MUD can be. When we eventually decided on what direction the future expansion of RMES would take, we devoted our energies to it with a passion we rarely devoted to our scholarly papers, even the papers we published.

This obsession of mine and Marge's soon led to our greatest triumph on MadROM.

More to come. ...

Keith and I had a blast on MadROM. It was all new, exciting. We were progressing through the levels, establishing ourselves as personalities, learning strategies to take out mobs (short for mobiles, computer-driven opponents), and getting more savvy all the time.

As an elf mage, I burned at a furious rate mana, that magical but limited substance that fueled my increasingly powerful spells. Keith, playing as the dwarven warrior Marge, had hit points like nobody's business. We learned to team together -- Marge would serve as the tank, the player who could take the most punishment, and I would serve as a spell-casting platform. Marge would go toe-to-toe with a sultan's guard, and I'd hang back, lobbing fireballs from a safe distance. It was a good system, and we progressed at a steady pace.

MadROM had 91 mortal levels and nine immortal levels. Now, the most any particular player could hope to achieve was 91 levels, which put you in the mortal elite. In time, both of us made it. Because of frequent deaths due to my elven fraility, it took me 976 hours to achieve 91 levels, or hero status. Marge did it in much fewer.

After you tap out the available levels, the game changes. No longer are you searching the vast lands looking for a mob strong enough to make fighting it for experience worthwhile, but weak enough that you could actually beat it. Now you had to find different things to do.

MadROM, like many MUDs, had a tribe or clan system. Mortals would band together to fight evil, promote evil, save the lands from the scourge of the demigorgon, or whatever. It looked cool, so Marge and I looked around, found a fledging clan -- The Guardian Knights, or GK -- that could use our services, and signed up for the noble cause of ... heck, can't remember and it doesn't matter; it was a noble cause, though, of that I'm certain.

Our experience in GK was less than satisfactory. The Clan had about four members, including our grand leader, whom we rarely saw and even more rarely spoke to. We had one room. It got a bit ... boring, sitting there, doing nothing, waiting for directives. To entertain ourselves, Marge and I set up shop outside our Clan headquarters; I'd offer spells such as "remove curse" or "enchant weapon" for a price, and Marge would hire herself out as a corpse retriever. In the world of MadROM, as on many MUDs, when you died, your spirit was drawn to some temple or altar but your corpse -- and all your hard won items -- lay where you fell. You had to go get your corpse, loot it, and then sacrifice it to the gods. The problem is, when you are reborn, you are naked and weaponless and not likely to survive long in the harsh world. Thus, players would perform "CRs," which meant they found your corpse and "summoned" you to the location. If the CRer, so to speak, did not have the spell "summon," then the CR was much more difficult. You had to literally walk the poor sap back to his corpse, clearing out baddies from room to room.

Marge did not have "summon," and had many CR adventures, but those tales are for her to tell.

At any rate, we floundered a bit in GK. It was possible for mortals to improve their clans by negotiating with the gods, but Marge and I were not the leaders of the Clan, and thus had no access to those divine beings (at this stage, these gods were mysterious, uber powerful, inscrutable, capricious, and best approached cautiously). Thus our Clan was weak, puny, barely alive, and there wasn't much Marge and I could do about it.

After two or three weeks in GK, a delegation from The Royal Midgard Explorer's Society, or RMES, secretly visited Marge and me. The three -- Ringoshin, Mithras, and Deilon -- were Chiefs of their Clan, one of the most vibrant and engaged Clans on the MUD. They had heard through backdoor channels that they were going to undergo apotheosis -- they would be gods. Naturally, they didn't want to leave their Clan leaderless, and turned to us.

We wasted no time in severing our GK ties, though we had to endure a painful and awkward session with our alleged leader, in which it seemed he was more interested in some real-life video game than us. Then we hightailed it across the lands to RMES, where we were welcomed with much high-fiving. RMES had cool headquarters -- four or five rooms, maps of the surrounding areas, and Marvin, a robot who uttered cryptic comments and served as a drink dispenser.

In short order, Marge and I became Chiefs of RMES. Our headquarters was expansive, our influence over the MUD impressive. Our portraits were placed in the foyer of RMES headquarters. As leaders of the most prestigious Clan on MadROM, we had come a long way.

Best of all, now we could deal directly with the gods.

More to come. ...

As I noted in the last entry in this category (Mirkwood), after putzing around a few days looking at various MUDs, I started playing MadROM as Gerrold. Why did I pick MadROM? Well, it had color for one thing, and that made it stand out a bit. (This was on a CGA monitor, for you computer historians.) I got a level or two under my belt, called Keith, and together we started exploring the nutty world that was MadROM. (For more information on MadROM, do a search at Mud Connector.)

I was playing an elf mage, physically frail but magically powerful, and Keith was playing a female dwarf warrior named Marge, a short, squat, powerful fighter built like a brick house (read the cliche literally, not metaphorically).

On a MUD, there a number of things to do. At the heart of it is a game. By killing stuff, you gain experience, which gives you more levels, skills, and, if applicable, spells. In short, the more you kill, the more powerful you are. That is a key way to gain status. The other way is more complicated. MUDs are a text medium, and people who can manipulate text fluently have an incredible social advantage. Witty chats to the whole MUD were not only tolerated but appreciated. MadROM is not a MUD for purists -- there is no real attempt to maintain a consistent world: norse mythology, Woodstock, Star Wars, Tolkien, all this and more were tossed into the mix. It was a crazy MUD. Irreverent chats were part of the nuttiness.

Keith and I became addicted.

More to come. A lot of background to cover to give the forthcoming stories their proper context. ...

In a previous entry, I detailed how Keith and I first encountered a MUD, or Multi-User Dungeon or Dimension. Before I proceed with the narrative, I better explain what a MUD is, though, really, you have to experience one to fully get it. A MUD, of which there are a zillion different varieties, is a bit like a huge chat room, except instead of one chat room, there are thousands. Add a highly addictive role playing game. Toss in hundreds of people, some sane, some not so. A person can spend years playing a single MUD, and many have. People meet their mates, get married, have kids, lose their jobs, destroy their grade point averages, indulge monomania, and exhibit a wide variety of other psychological pathologies because of MUDs. They can also be the playgrounds and canvasses for exceptionally skilled and creative people.

Nowadays, there are graphical online multi-user games such as EverQuest. These games are derived directly from MUDs, which are entirely text based. The Gods create the environments, spells, skills, laws of the universe within these MUDs, and depending on their rank, can have near omnipotence and omniscience, since they have direct access to the very code that makes a MUD possible.

More than that, you just gotta experience one itself. Here is the web site of a good one, which, if you dig a bit, will explain what you need to know to play. The Mud Connector provides information on most of the known MUDs. For an overview of the history of MUDs, check out this brief essay.

After Keith and I first encountered a MUD one brain-clouded night, I was intrigued, and for a few days cruised Gopher looking at other MUDs. Finally, I found one that looked cool -- MadROM -- and started to play using the pseudonym Gerrold.

More to come. ...

Much have I traveled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
       -- John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

This is an unlikely tale, full of all sorts of unlikely things. It's a tale of serendipity, coincidence, unbridled power, near omniscience, lust and love, and unfettered creativity used for grand and sometimes bizarre purposes. But I mislead -- it is not a single tale, but many, and for the most part they all occurred while I was sitting alone in grungy apartments and dilapidated houses.

Sometime in 1994, Keith and I sat in his apartment using Gopher to cruise the internet. For those not born before the the first moon landing, the internet back then was shiny, new, geeky -- and, for the most part, text based. Oh sure, even then, for a few bucks a month, we university students could get something called a SLIP account that would allow us to cruise the spanky just-out-of-the-packaging graphics-oriented WEB, but -- well, you know, we were snobs. Words not pictures, don't you know.

As a diversion from love gone bad and as an alternative to dark corner, fetal-position whimpering, I had gone to visit Keith and to imbibe in various freely available intoxicants. I recall we used a 161 gram Frisbee, that marvelous invention that served more than one of our recreational pursuits. It was around the same period that Keith acquired from some hot-to-go student a fucking incredible video of Bill Hicks, who could in one deeply funny line speak truth about God, sex, and drugs.

Anyway, somehow or other Keith had a laptop, so we entertained ourselves by poking into the hidden backwaters of the internet. At some point we came across a Gopher listing for MUDs, with hundreds of sublistings with strange names such as Rivers of MUD, Twisted Realms, and Blue Facial Mud. We randomly clicked one, got a telnet screen asking for login information, and, after making up some goofy name, got dumped onto a bizarre, continually scrolling screen.

Eventually, we figured out that we had created a character and were in a text room with lots of other characters, all chatting and moving and brandishing weapons in a blur of rapidly scrolling text. We were too nervous to do much, though I think we figured out how to move into another room with more rapidly scrolling text. Finally, we logged off and got out the Frisbee and panned for more gold.

That was our first, inauspicious encounter with a MUD, which we eventually learned stood for Multi-User Dungeon or Multi-User Dimension, depending upon whom you asked.

We didn't know, then, what we had gotten into. ...