First of all, I’ve never read her column, nor have I ever read Dragon Magazine. I’m also not a veteran tabletop roleplayer. As of today, I have a grand total of two tabletop games under my belt: a WoW RPG that fell apart due to external drama, and a DnD 3.5 that we’ve only done two sessions of so far. Maybe if I had gone to a large school instead of a small rural one, there would have been people to play tabletops with back in high school. But there wasn’t so I spent my time playing computer RPGs and free-form PBMBs instead. The closest I ever came to a DnD game was Neverwinter Nights.

Anyways, to get back on topic, wundergeek’s post made me facepalm hard. So very hard. Not really even at Shelly, but the character she portrays in her columns (whether she is really like that or not is besides the point). The fashion mentions, the whining, the neurotic behavior…it all makes me cringe. This is the representative for all female tabletoppers? I can tell you this, Shelly is not like me.

Do I get forgetful or confused by the rules in the games? Yes actually. Do I need Vahkt’s help to roll new characters? You betcha. But the reason is because I’m a new player, not because I have two X chromosomes. After spending years playing computer games where all the calculations are done for you, it is a little hard to wrap my head around them. But math isn’t hard for me, I had top marks back in high school. And the forgetfulness is because I am actually forgetful by nature, not because I’m female. In our WoW RPG game, there was another player who had never tabletopped before and surprise surprise! Vahkt had to help him make his character sheet too.

Let me tell you a little something about my characters too. In the WoW RPG, I played Lauka Stonehoof, a tauren warrior who was eventually going to become a mounted warrior. She was a 7 foot 10 meat grinding machine, made of 390 lbs. of muscle charging around on the back of an armored kodo. She could be quiet and gentle to be sure, as some tauren are wont to be. But she also hewed more than one centaur in two with her lance in a ride-by attack. It was rather like an explosion of blood and flesh, which was so awesome that I was giddy from laughing manically at it. I was also ecstatic to be able to wield a massive totem (essentially a big hunk of log that only tauren NPCs get to use in WoW). Lauka literally smashed a few quillboars into paste with it. I think there’s still a tooth and part of a collar bone embedded in the wood. Her skills were so good at splattering blood everywhere that she even earned the awe of a group of trouble-seeking Grimtotems warriors.

My current DnD character is Amli Flamecarver, a dwarf dragon shaman. Why a dwarf dragon shaman? Because I can of course, and it sounded interesting. She’s what I like to refer to as “a small but fierce woman”. She wears worn but usable breastplate armor (because duh, she needs to protect her vital organs) and swings around a morningstar that’s so large for her that she needs to hold it with both hands. Again, because I could. Her personality is more of the friendly-bubbly sort, but she can’t be dismissed as simply an airhead. The best example of her behavior I can think of is when our group had been told they’d be paid more to bring back a group of thieves alive. Due to rolling a crit, she accidentally crushed a man’s chest cavity with one swing of her morningstar. She quickly yelled to her partner, “Don’t worry, I can fix this!” before attacking the next enemy. At the end of the battle, one of the thieves is down on his knees before her, begging that she spares his life. Since she’s so nice (and could use the gold), she decides to headbutt him instead and knocks him out cold.

These are the types of the characters I roll. I like women who kick ass. I’m the sort of person who thinks armor should be both functional and beautiful, not chainmail bikinis. If I rolled a tiefling wizard, they would not be wearing an outfit that bared their cleavage and stomach, nor would I ever give them the last name of  “Sparkles”. (Seriously, a tiefling named Sparkles? I want to gag.) And I will never tote around my fashion knowledge like it’s a badge proclaiming me as a “GRRL”. I also don’t give one crap about fashion anyways so it’s moot point.

For those who don’t already know this, women are not all the same. That’s why all those books about “how men can learn to understand women” don’t work. We don’t have some strange sort of secret language because we have different personalities. I certainly can’t figure out what is going on in Shelly’s mind because it’s so foreign to me.

I truly hope that Dragon Magazine hires more female writers to show the wide range of double-X players. To think that so many readers might be getting their only impressions of female tabletoppers from her columns makes me very, very sad.

As someone who doesn’t drink, I often have the unique view of being the only sober person (and permanent designated driver) around a lot of drunks. So I can remember some of the hilarious things that happened when others were wasted out of their minds. The following two conversations actually happened and are retold from Dalea’s point of view as she gets smashed herself for Inn League rep.

Just looking at the screen makes me feel like I have a hangover

(Dalea begins the night as a happy drunk.)

Dalea: Guys, guys…I jus’ wanted tah let you know…that I loves you all. You’re the bes’ friends ever. And thissh stew’s awesome!

(Later on, turns into a sad drunk.)

Dalea: There’s *sniffs* there’s no more stew. *whimpers* *sobs* I really want more stew! *cries*

(She ends the night by passing out, only to be awoken as the beast that is Angry Drunk.)

*A drunken townsperson accidentally stumbles over her in his search for some stew.*

Dalea: [Insert a slew of vile yet slurred curses here, punctuated by ineffectively throwing her cloak and various seat cushions at the other patron.]

*The townsperson is still in Happy Drunk mode and gives an unphased smile as he rifles through the cupboards.*

There IS a rabbit inside the inn...right?

Dalea: Guys, what colour do you think the rabbit is?

Not-as-drunk townperson: …The rabbit is brown.

Dalea: No no no, what colour would you say the rabbit is?

Not-as-drunk townperson: What? Umm…maybe it likes the colour green?

Just-as-drunk townperson: I think that it would be blue.

(The question that was trying to be asked was what colour they thought would best describe the rabbit. Apparently you have to be at a certain level of drunkenness to get it.)

Like for example how I’ve completely gravitated away from Wurm Online (our poor animals are starving by now) and have become occupied with Minecraft and Lord of the Rings Online.

Virtual Legos plus mobs that ‘splode

Minecraft fulfills my childhood need to build stuff, only this time I can do it virtually instead of springing for expensive (but awesomely fun) Legos. Rades and Vahkt’s friend Jorgath managed to sway me to promises of cute pet wolves with red bandanas, which I was pretty much helpless to. So that day I bought a pair of copies, one for me and one for Vahkt so we could play together. Initially Vahkt wasn’t quite as pumped about it as I was, probably because he wasn’t there for the pet wolves discussion. But once we started playing, he was hooked. We muddled through the learning process together, coming to conclusions like the very first thing you build after a set of tools is a well-lit cave to hide in at night because creepers are merciless SOBs.

Creepers: 10% stealth, 25% green fur, 9001% EXPLOSIONS!!!111

I think it’s due to our hatred/fear of creepers that lead us to building our complex the way we did on Rades’s Minecraft server. The majority of it is underground including: a bedroom, a study, a kitchen, a dining room, a wheat/cactus/sugar cane farm, a tree farm, two mushroom farms, a storage room, a mob trap fed by a complex system of moats and underground waterways, and of course our huge mining complex. I swear our characters have the Drowning Victim White complex from spending so much time underground. Huh, rather like myself. Life does imitate art.

It’s only rather recently that we’ve begun building more above ground and most of that has been very tall spider-proof walls and towers that allow for sniping mobs. Pretty much the only thing above ground that is completely cosmetic so far is our giant domed library on a floating island. Man, that still sounds cool even now.

Yes, the entire dome portion is made of glowstone. I spent probably 8 hours in the Nether mining it all while dodging/shooting effing ghasts. World of Warcraft has trained me well on hours of mindless farming.

My preciousssssss

I admit it, I greatly enjoy killing internet dragons. Well really, I’d enjoy killing anything that wasn’t cute and fuzzy. As Vahkt likes to describe it, the definition of an adventurer is really a violent and well-armed hobo. Lord of the Rings Online is different though. There you can be a violent and well-armed homeowner.

Plus killing mobs with music makes you a total BAMF (not my character)

I had downloaded LotRO a long time ago, before it had even went F2P. I putzed around on a trial account for a couple hours before wandering back to WoW at the time. Recently however I had heard that the European servers would be put in the same pool as the North American servers, including the RP server Laurelin. I’ve grown quite attached to the idea of roleplaying servers from my time in WoW so I updated the neglected client and gave the game another shot. I started with Daredeth, the Rohan guardian mostly because I’ve enjoyed tanking classes in the past and it said that the play style was “easy”. After roping Vahkt (the self-professed LotR geek) into the game with me, I created two more characters: Dalea the hobbit hunter and Anilith the elvish minstrel.

Frankly, I’m enjoying all of them so far for different reasons. Daredeth is able to leap into a pack of mobs, laugh as she mows them all down, and walk away with a full health pool. Dalea I’ve described as a “tiny goddess of death and destruction”. Hunters in LotRO have no pets, so more often than not, Dalea can drop a mob before it even gets to her. If it does manage to get close, I can still shoot point blank (HELL YES!) or finish it off with a series of melee attacks that makes a WoW hunter’s melee skills look like girly slaps. And finally, Anilith is a healer who can still dish out reasonable amounts of damage if she needs to…all by playing a musical instrument. The drum has an especially war-like tone and I can just imagine her shouting “Hear the drums of war, they speak of your death!”

It’s hard to say which is my main at this point. Daredeth is perfect for grinding groups of mobs and crafts armor for our toons to use. Dalea is fantastic for single mobs and is a blast to play (I do love my hunters) but doesn’t handle packs so well. Anilith is kinda squishy on her own but since healers seem to be in such need, she would be great for grouping. So many choices, so little time.

Only one of the things I’ve promised myself is that in this game, I’m going to enjoy the journey to the level cap and not rush there like I’ve grown used to in WoW. There just seems to be so many different things to do other than the end-game that it amazes me. Deeds (similar to achievements) and titles are handed out like candy, which I love because that way everyone is running around with different titles.

The cosmetic outfits system just blows my mind. Essentially you can take any piece of armor ever received on one character, put it in your shared wardrobe storage, dye it about 20 different colours, and then use it as a cosmetic item on any other character on that server. Never again will you have to stare at your clown suit of leveling armor or the fact that you look like every other character in your class and at the same level. Not only that, but once in your wardrobe, the items take up no other slots. Finally, I don’t have to carry around an entire bag of RP clothes!

The housing system is wonderfully addictive too. The only tangible benefits of having a house is some more storage and a separate place that you can portal to. But that hasn’t stopped Vahkt and I from spending who knows how much money and time decorating our houses to our tastes. We’ve even found out that we mostly like the same style (although Vahkt likes to steal a lot of my ideas ). It’s another thing to occupy your time but for me, I feel more tied to the game and my characters because of it.

Questing is the one thing that threw me for a loop. We all know that WoW has some great quests (even if you don’t like them all) and there’s a lot of them. A lot of the other MMOs I’ve tried, both subscription-based and F2P, have had mediocre quest systems at best. Often there’s juuuust enough to get you to the right level for the next zone and/or they consist of “kill 200 tigers”. Honestly, in Silkroad Online, I had a quest to kill 200 black tigers. Anyways, in LotRO, there’s so many quests. I was getting lead-in quests to move onto two different zones while I still had about a dozen quests to complete in my current zone. There’s a reason why your quest log holds up to 40 quests in LotRO, which Vahkt has managed to hit already. And here’s a little teaser for all you folks who are feeling disenchanted with WoW’s current (solo) quest trend: there are a good number of small fellowship quests (3 people), fellowship quests (6 people), class quests, and signatures/rares/elites all over the place. Not to mention that the phasing mechanics make me weep with joy. The best way I can describe it as is that more often than not certain mobs and items are phased, but your character isn’t. It’s just wonderful.

Oh, and last but not least is the skirmish/instance system. I haven’t had any experience with instances but I can say this about skirmishes: you can set the level of it, the group size (for 1, 2, 3, and 6-player parties), and the tier, even for low-level skirmishes. Each character also gets an NPC “soldier” that they can customize to fill in whatever role is needed. In this way, Vahkt and I have run several skirmishes with just the two of us which is quite a lot of fun.

Ahem…so yes, having plenty of fun with LotRO at the moment. Vahkt is certainly into the games because he loves Tolkien’s work and I’m enjoying myself simply by exploring this new beautiful world. To make it all the better, we’ve managed to convince some friends (read: Vahkt’s friends) to join us as well.

Anyways, despite us finally starting to build our stone house, we won’t be throwing around our horses. In fact, the white breeding pair that was gifted to us by a neighbour will be greatly treasured and completely spoiled rotten by yours truly.

HORSIES!!!!11111oneoneone

Their names are Honeyally (male) and Warriormolly (female). It’s unfortunate that there doesn’t seem to be a way to rename them because they were totally destined to be named Wesley and Buttercup. (+10 internetz if you know where that reference comes from.)

Vahkt brought them into our paddock early in the morning when I was already at work so unfortunately I couldn’t log on to see them until the evening. The first thing that I did when I was online though is quickly craft a grooming brush and rush down to give them a good brushing. Between my lack of animal husbandry skill and their being rather skittish of their new owner, it took me several tries. But soon their coats were gleaming and they were pleased to have such a good grooming.

There’s been talk of how it will be harder to breed animals in captivity soon due to a recent change in the game mechanics. So I decided to give it a try before this came into effect and was surprised to see that it worked on my first try! Given that you can only try once per hour and my husbandry was so low, I hadn’t expected to succeed for a long time. So hopefully now we will have a little foal coming our way.

Honeyally and Warriormolly

One of the things horses can do is you can hitch them to large carts which can haul huge loads, as well as a driver and one passenger. So Vahkt and I went out for a ride around town before he had to leave for work. Unfortunately a thick fog rolled in and made it extremely hard to see, and it only went away after Vahkt had left for work. Figures.

Our first (foggy) cart ride

A space to live in

The stone house was something that had been in the works almost since we first established Terhenetar. The major roadblock in its creation was the fact that 30 masonry is needed to create it. So Vahkt had been working hard on raising it by making stone walls and statues.

When we changed the location for the house, we decided on an area where we had planted several tiles of crops. If you harvest the crops before they’re ready, you get nothing. So we waited for the crops to mature. And waited. And waited. One tile in particular seemed resistant to growth and Vahkt said that it would definitely have the troll face on it.

Finally the crop was harvestable and we quickly got it out of the way so Vahkt could lay down stone slabs for the flooring. One interesting thing in Wurm is that any item you have active and are using appears in your hand or somewhere around it. Which made it hilarious to watch as Vahkt laid down the giant stone slabs.

GIANT slabs of stone

The way building a house works is you must first activate your mallet and begin planning it on the ground tiles. Your carpentry skill affects how large of a house you can make, where the equation is (total number of floor tiles) + (total number of wall sections) = carpentry skill required. This is regardless of whether the walls will be made out of wood or stone. Since I had the higher carpentry, I laid out the plans for a 2 x 4 house. (I apologize for the dark screenshots, it was night in-game when we were working on this.)

The structural frame of the house

The frame from another angle

Inside the future house

My part of the job was then complete and it was up to Vahkt, mason extraordinaire, to put together the walls. He decided to first go around and choose what he wanted for each section of wall: a door, a window, or a solid wall. Doing this completed the roof (thank god we don’t have to build that ourselves >.>).

The roof is now up!

It was then time for him to begin finishing each wall. One complete wall requires 20 stone bricks and 20 mortar, both of which Vahkt had prepared beforehand. There’s 12 walls and he estimates that it takes about 10 minutes each…so this will take him a little while to complete.

Vahkt hard at work on a wall

The first wall is up! And has a window in it

The inside of the house will be quite large once it’s finished. To help put it in perspective, I placed beds in two corners that are about the same length of our characters. They cover maybe half of a single tile.

I’ll probably end up creating some tables and chairs for furnishings and maybe one day we’ll have enough cotton and tailoring skill to make some rugs for the floor. Maybe I should also drag the oven into it so we could have a nice warm fire going inside…

With any luck, Vahkt will be able to finish the walls tonight and then our house, christened Terhenetar Hold, will be complete.

In the Finnish epic the ‘Kalevala’ Terhenetär is a sprite associated with mist and forests.

Names mean a lot to me and Vahkt, so it should be no surprise that it took us a few days to decide what to call our new home in Wurm Online. We went through places in fantasy novels, lists of Germanic castles, and combinations of Polish words before I had mentioned the name Terhenetar, something I had come across while browsing one of my favorite name sites. Vahkt had been leaning more towards Polish names so I had thought that a Finnish word wouldn’t have been as interesting to him. Little did I know that he absolutely adored the ‘Kalevala‘ and its influence on Lord of the Rings. (Heck, I had never even heard of the thing before. >.>) Since I thought it was a beautiful name and described the foggy, wooded area we had settled in well, there was no further need for discussion. Terhenetar was now the name of our new home.

Let me describe how exactly our plot is situated before I give the screenshots I promised. The “base” of our plot sits up on a small plateau on the side of a hill, surrounded by stone walls that Vahkt has crafted. In there is our forge, oven, and multitude of storage containers. It is also the future site of our house, which I will talk about in a moment.

To the north, you first encounter the beginnings of our orchard located on a downward incline. We decided to place it there because fields need to be on relatively level land, whereas you can plant trees and bushes on any angle of slope. Beyond that, where the ground becomes level, we have our newly created paddock for animals on the western side, and our fields of grains and vegetables on the eastern side. Standing in front of those two, in about the center is the workshop building that I built over the weekend. It was the site of an old abandoned settlement, where the walls of the house had decayed completely and left the contents inside out in the open. I managed to drag all of the items (including another forge, an oven, a loom, and even more storage containers) into a 2 by 2 area and raised the wooden walls around it all. Beyond the workshop, there is enough space for a road before you come up to the foot of a huge, steep mountain. Here there are about 4 mines that have been dug into the side of it and provide quite a good amount of iron and stone shards for us.

To the east, the settlement of Willowsprings was built starting right up against the mountain and extending to the south. The owner Miloch has been a wonderful neighbor, letting us join his town for a close respawn point in case we die, as well as giving us many many logs and access to his mine for stone shards and the like.

To the south the land slopes up in a way that can’t be described as gentle or steep, and it is heavily wooded with mostly tall pine trees. We will certainly never be at a loss for wood around here.

And finally, directly west of the workshop and north-west of the base is the lake, which provides us with precious water and the majority of our food, which is fish.

Now that you hopefully have some sense of context, let’s bring on the pictures!

As for the stone house, I had originally said that we were going to build it under the old willow. we’ve since decided that there’s just not enough room there so we’re going to place it where the couple of garden patches are now within our base. Because I really really wanted some willows around the house, I went out to cut a bunch of willow sprouts, three of which ended up surviving the planting. Now I’ll get to have three willows shading our house.

My previous post was more of a general overview of Wurm Online for people who don’t know anything about it, so now I’d like to indulge myself and ramble on about what we’ve actually done in the past week or so that we’ve been playing.

After I had finished the tutorial Friday and arrived the Howl, Vahkt and I wandered around the nearby area for a while, feeling bewildered as we asked each other, “Okay…now what?” We had all the starter tools but no compass and no in-game map.

We quickly found WurmPedia, THE bible for all Wurm players, and a community created map of the Freedom Server (thank god). We traveled to the Freedom Market with the help of signs along the road and this place became our standard point of reference for the next few days. In the middle of it is a settlement token which is used to claim an area of land. Handily, it appears in-game as a pedestal with a sun clock on the top that also labels the cardinal directions.

We first tried foraging through some of the grass around Freedom Market and found that most of them had been picked clean because of course, that’s where everyone else was. We then made our way north-west to Hill Side where we spent the rest of the night foraging and making some tinder for a fire.

Vahkt then had to leave for his work on night-shift so I wandered back to Freedom Market and then headed west until I was north of Hanover Docks, looking for some clay to make us flasks and jars. I happened to come across some clay just lying on the road so I went to work. This is when I attracted the attention of Volonis and Humbrol, two helpful veteran players. They gave me some helpful tips and items, including some cotton that I would later use to spindle into lines for our fishing poles. I spent most of the night trundling back and forth with my ever-increasing inventory, which was beginning to slow me down with its weight.

The rest of the weekend was a bit of a blur after that, with me staying up much too late and waking up much too early because I really wanted to play. >.> Vahkt came back online at some point and I presented him with the completed fishing poles I had made. We then realized that we needed to find iron to make many of the tools we’d need. Someone in CA Help kindly pointed us towards an iron mine near Freedom Docks so we set up our temporary camp there. Vahkt mostly fished and cooked while I mined and crafted us some more tools and a small anvil for myself.

This is where we realized the greater potential of playing with a partner. You can do two things at the same time and our respective skills would increase much faster while still sharing the same pool of crafted items. So we decided that he would be the fisher/cooker and I would be the smith.

Vahkt then had to go again (probably to sleep) and I kept playing and eventually wandered back over to north of Hanover Docks. The weight of all the items in my inventory (especially the iron) was really slowing me down and making me have to rest often. It was here that I realized that we needed a cart. After reading up on it, I decided to make a large cart instead of a small one because then it could be locked when we were offline.

Volonis and Humbrol saw me hanging around then and chatted with me as I went through the long task of making my cart and lock. My carpentry was quite low of course so it took many tries to make enough planks and shafts for it, resulting in more wooden scraps (failed tries) than I could carry. But my perseverance won out and eventually I had my shiny new cart before me, which I proceeded to load with all my crap. It was slow goings to pull such a large cart around (it’s ideally meant for a pair of horses to pull) but at least I was moving faster than I was before.

Humbrol came by to see my finished work and then showed me a plot of land nearby. It had been abandoned by its owner long ago, to the point where the house had rotted away around the forge and storage boxes. He and a friend had been planning to use the rather large plot for a field but he said that if I wanted it, it was all mine. Not long after, Volonis came by and showed me the piece of land he had staked out for himself. Then he lead me to yet another abandoned place near his and said I could claim it if I wanted. I thanked them both and said that I’d take it into consideration and talk to Vahkt about it later. Such nice people I meet.

Volonis then went back to his land to begin terraforming it, so I offered to help. My digging skill was so low that I really wasn’t any help and spent the entire time trying to get it to 10 so I could actually be of use. A friend of Volonis showed up though and between the two of them, they really didn’t need my help. We took a quick break in between to kill a wild cat that had showed up nearby, only to have someone else rudely butcher the body and take the hide while Volonis’s friend was running back to get his butchering knife. :-/ The thief was quickly chastised in local chat and logged off not long after. Humbrol was around at the time and had threatened to put the guy on the kill-on-sight list he had for his property.

We shrugged it off and went back to work, only to have Volonis and his friend finish their terraforming right about as I hit 10 digging. Vahkt logged on shortly after so I went over to show him our new cart and let him unload his items into it. We then decided that we really needed a place to make our own because even the cart was getting full now. I showed him the two places Humbrol and Volonis had shown me but we decided to go exploring a little to see if we could find a more suitable spot.

After leaving our cart under Volonis’s watchful eye and debating which direction we should go, we headed out east of Freedom Market and began following the roads that went around the north coast. We figured out some requirements with what we wanted out of our future site: it had to have easy access to wood, water, iron (which meant rocky regions), and to a lesser extent, clay. I also wanted to be close to at least a few nice people, because you know, safety in numbers.

At one point we wandered off the road into a treed valley and found what was either an unfinished settlement or one that had been abandoned long ago. It was actually eerie to be the only people around (no one in local chat), exploring flattened plateaus that contained nothing but stone walls. It was here that we spotted a well and headed towards it, as there was no open water nearby and we were getting thirsty. A young goblin appeared and began chasing us but I thought the two of us could kill it so I turned around.

It was at this point that my router had one of its infamous disconnects and I had to go restart it. When I got back a minute or two later, I logged onto the death screen. Poor Vahkt hadn’t even had experience fighting something and had gotten killed as well. Sigh.

We respawned all the way back in the Howl and began the run back to our bodies to recover our items. Luckily it was only about a 5 minute run. I lead the goblin on a wild goose chase as Vahkt recovered his items and then I looped back to pick up mine. We then continued on our way. Now ascribing to the motto “Run and live!”, when a bear appeared on our trail, we ran for our lives…until Vahkt’s stamina ran out and he couldn’t get away. I then distracted the bear by attacking it until he could run again and then we both took off, leaving the animal behind.

At this point we arrived in a place called Stonehaven and realized that we had gotten ourselves completely turned around. Then we backtracked a little and got back on the roads heading east. Somewhere along the way, we turned north and found ourselves in Spider Hollow. It was on the edge of this beautiful little lake and we quickly found that it did have everything we needed. It was surrounded by thick pine woods, a patch of the shore was covered in clay, and there were plenty of places to dig mines. Since settling there, we have also found a tar patch just up the road, as well as some nearby copper and silver mines. It really is a wonderful spot.

We picked a little plateau of land on the side of a hill leading down towards the lake, near a place called Willowspring. As we were building, it quickly became apparent that I needed to go back to get the cart, which had the majority of our items. Vahkt would ask me for this or that and my answer always seemed to be “Yeah…back on the cart.” It didn’t take me that long to get back to Freedon Market (even though I had to dodge a crocodile on the road), but the return trip was very sloooooooow (and I had to dodge both the crocodile AND a scorpion on the way back). It’s certainly not something I want to do again without horses pulling that large cart.

From then on, we’ve been industrious little buggers, spending pretty much all of our time building things on our plot. But I think I will save those updates for when I have screenshots to show.

If you’re looking for more Wurm Online stories, Battle Priestess has some great ones and The Adventurers of Surviverman is also turning out to have an awesome read. (Yes, I discovered that blog through Battle Priestess too. )

I’m quite excited about this game to the point where I’m resisting the urge to spam my Twitter account with OMGSOMUCHFUN! And because I’d love to share this gem of a game with others, I’m going to tell you a bit about it.

First though, if you are at all familiar with Minecraft, I’d like to refer you to Battle Priestess’s excellent comparison of the two games. It was through Battle Priestess and MMO Melting Pot that I first became aware of Wurm.

I know of Minecraft but I’ve never tried it myself, so I’ll be coming from a different perspective.

Wurm Online is an incredibly complex game and one thing is is definitely not is easy. There are two qualities that you must have in order to play this game: patience and perseverance. The entire game is very very grindy and if the final result is not other the time and effort to you, you will not enjoy the game.

Imagine an RTS or sim game where you spend a lot of time building. Normally you are the high overlord commanding your minions to gather materials and then build things for you. Now imagine the new game from the perspective of a minion. In order to create, you need to have and sometimes make the right tools for the job. Then you have to go out and find the materials. Next you begin building, creating the smaller pieces from your materials, which combine into larger pieces which eventually make up the whole. Only in Wurm, there is no overlord who can see the whole map and tells you where to go and what to do. There are no quests, no arrows telling you where to go next. In fact, there isn’t even an in-game map, only user-created ones, and you only get a compass if you make it or if another player gifts one to you. It’s exciting and overwhelming at the same time as you try to decide exactly what you want to do.

Starting Out

As I mentioned before, your player begins on a tutorial island, reminiscent of the one that used to exist in Runescape. It goes through some basic instructions such as moving (different terrain types affect your speed), the GUI, and how to perform actions such as cutting trees, planting, starting a fire, and making a clay bowl.

Before you even leave this island, one thing becomes very apparent: you can and will fail to make things. It’s something that you just have to get used to. As I mentioned in my previous post, it took me about 10 minutes to go through all the steps of making a wooden mallet because of my low chance to succeed. But I will come back to crafting later.

Once you are done with all of the tutorials, you will have a chance to go to 2 different servers. The Freedom server is PvE where PvP is only restricted to duels and the like. This server is open to both free and premium players. The Wild server is PvP, only open to premium players, and is divided into three kingdoms to choose from. I choose to go to the Freedom server because I dislike PvP and I wanted to try it out on a free account for a while. There is always the choice to switch later if you want to.

If you choose the Freedom server, you appear in a village called the Howl. This is where the game lets go of your hand and says “You’re on your own now. Good luck and try not to get killed!”

This is the point where all possibilities are open to you.

The Social Aspect

I’ve noticed that at any one time, there are at least 300 people logged into Wurm. This is nowhere near the number of people in games like World of Warcraft, but it’s still a good amount of people. There’s a chat that’s set up for the entire server, a help chat that everyone is also in that always has at least one Community Assistant available, and a local chat.

I haven’t spent much time watching the server chat but from what I’ve seen, there is nowhere near the amount of trolling that the infamous Trade Chat in WoW has. It and CA Help both appear to be well monitored and I have yet to see any serious bickering. Because each chat is in its own tab, you never experience the chat spam that you do in WoW.

Local chat is interesting because since there are no defined borders in Wurm, it is literally the players that are closest to you. It’s this chat that seems to be the heart of close player interaction.

When I had first finished the tutorial and was wandering around the nearby area feeling rather lost, other players in the area noticed me hanging around and struck up some friendly conversations in local chat. There were many questions answered, items given freely, and a million times more offers to help me should I ever need it. It is true that everyone begins in the same spot but beyond that, there are no “newbie zones”. Experienced premium players mix readily with the new folks and generally seem quite friendly.

If you’re looking to acquire masses of wealth, Wurm is the wrong place to be in. Just about anything that you can’t gather yourself, you trade for. For example, I once dug up 100kg of clay for my neighbor in exchange for a pelt to improve my tools. There is no auction house and there are very few traders that will give you coins for your items. This face-to-face bartering system, coupled with the local chat and good moderation, has created a community that is loosely knit together and quickly weeds out trolls.

And if the moderators don’t get you, the other players will. Close to the starting area where I found all those helpful people, there was one guy who was being rather rude and obnoxious in local chat. One of the friendly guys told me that he was already listed as kill-on-sight on several properties in the area and would probably leave or be kicked off the server rather soon.

Crafting

Mining smelting mining smelting

For anyone who has played Runescape, you will find that the Wurm’s crafting system is like the version for advanced users. In Runescape, you would buy a pickaxe, find some ore to mine, smelt said ore, and then hammer it into armor or a sword. That would give you points in blacksmithing. In Wurm, Smithing is an overall skill that breaks down into the following subskills:

• Blacksmithing – Used such as nails or pots and pans
• Weapon smithing – Used in the creation of weapons such as swords and axes used in fighting
• Armour smithing – Used in the creation of armour for added protection against attacks
• Locksmithing – Used in the creation of locks and lockpicks
• Metallurgy – Used in the creation of alloys like steel, bronze and brass
• Jewelry smithing – Used to make jewelry

And that’s just smithing. Mining is its own skill and so are things like digging, carpentry, pottery, fighting, animal husbandry, masonry, rope-making, gardening, cooking, repairing, and yes, even catapult-making.

Also thrown into the mix is the fact that every single item in Wurm has a quality level out of 100. Your tools will lose their quality from use and repair and once they reach 0, they will break. When creating or gathering materials, the lower your skill is, the lower quality the item will be. The good news is that not only will your skill improve as you use an item, but a lot of items can be improved upon over time.

Let’s take the creation of a small cart as an example of the crafting system. The overall materials needed for this are 7 shafts, 12 planks, and 2 small nails. Assuming that you already have the required tools on you, you will need wood for the shafts and planks, and iron for the nails.

For the nails, first you will need to find an iron mine. Prospecting and digging your own mine is a whole other process so let’s just hope that you’re lucky and find a pre-existing mine. You need to activate your pick and start mining. Each mining action will result in 1 iron ore weighing 20kg. So you’d gather a couple and find a forge to light and put them in. (Did I mention that building a forge and creating a fire in it is yet another process?) Each iron ore will eventually heat up into a lump of iron weighing 1kg. Small nails take 0.2kg of iron each so theoretically you could get 5 small nails out of it. Ah, but you have maybe a 50% chance of actually making the nails correctly! Each time you fail, you’ll get iron scraps which can be reformed into lumps but have very low quality. Depending on the quality of your tools (which include a small anvil that you of course must make), you might go through several lumps of iron to get your necessary 2 nails.

Now onto the shafts and planks. First you must find a tree that’s suitable to be cut down, as in it has to be the right age and not on someone’s property. You equip your hatchet and begin to cut down a tree, which can take about 5 “chops” lasting 15 seconds each. Once you fell the tree, you must cut it up into logs. Let’s assume that you receive 5 logs weighing 24kg each. A plank requires 4kg of wood to make and yields a 2kg plank plus 2kg in extra wood scraps. A shaft requires 2kg of wood and yields a 1kg shaft plus 1 kg in extra wood scraps. You’d have about a 50% chance of success for both the shaft and the planks, if you’re lucky. I think you can imagine just how many logs and thus trees you might have to cut down.

Finally, you have all your materials prepared. But the cart requires subcomponents, 2 small wheels and a small wheel axle. Luckily you have the mats for those, they just need to be put together first. But guess what? There’s a chance for failure for that too! Luckily your hard-created items don’t get ruined when you fail, they only become slightly damaged. You just need to repair the damage before attempting again.

So each wheel requires 3 planks and two shafts to make. Once both wheels are created, you combine them with another shaft to make the completed wheel axle. And now…finally now you can take the remainder of your materials and attach them to the axle. When the last nail is in place, your very own small cart will be in front of you, crafted by your virtual hands.

O what is the point of it all?

In an RTS/building sim, there are often times maps that are freestyle. You have no objective to complete, only to build to your heart’s content. Remember how small those maps seemed after a while? There was always a point where you’d have conquered every square inch of the map and could expand no further. Then you would end the game and it would all be lost forever.

Now think of a world that’s exponentially larger than that, filled with forests, grasslands, mountains, lakes, and seas. This world not only never ends but it can be reshaped by you and by each of the hundreds of other players on the server. Whole forests could be cut down and then replanted again, mines can be dug, and the very earth can be shaped to your will. You can pick any free spot in the world and set down roots there, building houses, walls, gates, forges, ovens, and storage. Land can be cleared and flattened for gardens, orchards, and fields, and fences can be erected to keep and raise livestock. Any little corner of Wurm can be yours and there’s just something thrilling about planning your settlement and watching it slowly form before your eyes as you work to create it.

If you’re curious but still not convinced, give it a try. There’s no time limit on free accounts, only a skill cap of 20. A lot of the content can still be experienced within those confines and even the things you can’t make can still be seen on the lands of premium players.

Pictures are worth a thousand words so let me show you some of the things that my partner Vahkt and I have accomplished with only our free accounts. (I wish I had remembered to take “before” photos.)

Gatehouse

View from the gatehouse

Iron gate in the stone wall

Oven and food storage with stone wall behind

Forge

The spot picked out for our stone house, under a willow tree

This is only scratching the surface of what Wurm Online is. But it could never be covered in one post so more will have to come in the future. In the meantime, if you’re ever on the Freedom server, just look me up on the character Faeldray.

I suppose most kids who lived in the city, upon hearing that, would have gone off to the park to play with their friends. And children who lived on farms were never short on chores to do and vast tracks of lands to explore. I, on the other hand, grew up on a 2-acre plot in a rural area with little to no friends within walking distance. My only playmate the majority of the time was my younger brother.

Both of us grew up with healthy imaginations that must have grown out of a combination of fantasy books and having vast amounts of time by ourselves. From this also came a desire to build things, to craft whole worlds.

At home

Around the house, we would choose between two different worlds/games that we had created. The first involved a massive amount of plastic dinosaurs that were divided up into the herbivores and their allied carnivores-gone-vegetarian (the good guys) and the carnivores (the bad guys). We never played against each other but instead took on certain characters on each side and spend entire days acting out elaborate on-going storylines. My brother’s whole room would become our stage: the blanket on the bed would be ruffled into a rolling plateau, the floor would become the valley below, and every bookcase and dresser was a high peaked mountain riddled with caverns, perfect for flying dinosaurs to perch on top of or for land-bound ones to hide in.

The second world was made from a combination of Legos and plastic sea creatures. It too would consume the entire room once we had set it all up, with everything below the top of the dresser being underneath the water’s surface. There were about half a dozen submarine type vehicles, a multi-roomed Lego castle that was the human’s base of operation (and the home of one friendly dragon), and more sharks, whales, octopi, and squids than you could shake a stick at.

Destroying and dismantling our worlds was never something that appealed to use. We absolutely loved building it but to take it all apart? Where was the fun in that? It was for that reason that over time, these two collections would simply continue to grow as we’d ask for more Legos, more dinosaurs, more sea creatures. The dinosaurs filled up an entire drawer in my brother’s mate bed and began spilling over into other containers. Our refusal to dismantle our Legos resulted in the submarines lining the bookshelves and the castle becoming a permanent fixture on my brother’s dresser.

In the bush

The Manitoban winters can be particularly cold and to keep the high electrical heating bill down, our home had a wood furnace in the basement and plenty of storage for all the cords of wood we’d need. So my dad would spend several days a year out in the bush on his parents’ farm, cutting down poplar trees and splitting the logs. He would bring me and my brother along despite the fact that at that age, my brother and I were pretty useless for anything other than carrying and stacking the wood. So when we couldn’t help out, we’d spend the hours exploring the nearby area and constructing very crude forts. We’d set a dozen or so branches between some trees to create the “walls” and then roll a spare log or two into the area for our seating. We’d spend all of the time we could improving our fort, using more branches for support and of course looking for suitable “staffs” so we could properly defend it. When it was time to leave, it was always sad to know that by the time we came back weeks later, the weather and the cows would have taken down our creation and we would have to start all over again. It was a good thing that building was so fun.

The virtual world

It probably isn’t surprising that this desire to build and create carried over into my computer game play. I used to spend hours upon hours in games such as Pharaoh, Stronghold, Age of Empires, and Majesty, building and maintaining these vast empires. My favorite activity was always to choose the largest free-form maps and expand my kingdoms until there was literally no more room on the map. Those maps were never too big for me and I’d always want to build more, to trek further out and forge new settlements. Even while playing the campaigns, I’d always hold back from completing the objective until I had explored the entire map and placed all of my favorite buildings.

Continuing into new worlds

I had heard of the concept of sandbox MMOs before, usually in reference to popular Minecraft. I was intrigued by the idea but was somewhat reluctant to try Minecraft due to its 8-bit-style graphics and lack of a sense of an overarching world. It was through the MMO Melting Pot that I heard of Wurm Online just yesterday though. I didn’t even have time to finish the tutorial last night but I am already excited to get home from work and spend the entire weekend playing this game. Here is a world with a map that is much larger than any building sim I’ve played before, so I can explore to my heart’s content. I can craft my own tools, buy a plot of land, create houses and walls, grow crops and trees, raise and hunt animals, dig out a mine…the possibilities seem endless.

There was one part of the tutorial where I cut down a tree, chopped it up into logs, carved a wooden shaft and head, and put the two pieces together to make a mallet. It probably took me about 10 minutes to do because of the chance to fail (which I did repeatedly), but I can’t even remember the last time I was so proud of a virtual item that I had created. And that was just a simple mallet!

I think this is exactly the type of game I need as of late. Something that’s simple overall and relaxing, a place where I can mold the world in the way that I want, and it will stay that way as long as I continue to maintain it. My Legos and dinosaurs and sticks have come back to me in virtual form and I’ll be damned if I don’t create something wondrous out of them.

So I ended up losing some posts in the process. I had enough foresight to go through Google Cache and find the posts I had missed. Now it’s just a matter of reposting them.

Third time’s a charm…right?

I have been very impressed so far. There was an issue with my account creation but I was able to log onto their live support chat (which the first host didn’t have) and only had to wait a few minutes for someone to talk to me. The guy apologized for the mistake and fixed it promptly and courteously. I mean, I understand that mistakes happen, there’s no avoiding it. It’s how they are dealt with that shows the true nature of the customer support. And they handled it excellently. Of course, I’d like to have more experience with them (aka 3 months or so) before I make a final judgment on them. But so far I’m liking it. I haven’t decided if the Lair will move to this new host as well, I’m still pretty loyal to Fan St. It’s only their lack of reseller program that has sent me looking for other hosts.

What I’m excited about is that I’m already hosting a few people. Just friends mind you but you have to start somewhere, right? I figure that starting with these folks will give me the opportunity to get my feet wet while still having the chance to be forgiven if I screw something up. >.>

So having said that, if there’s anyone reading this blog who’s looking to get a website hosted/built, let me know through comments or email and I’ll see what I can do for you. Chances are you will get the low low price of free.