Legend Lore

I was reading about Vanguard and I was surprised to find out that folks were all upset about these new flying mounts they got 'cause they didn't fit the lore of the game.

Well, they didn't fit the mechanics of the lore, either, from what I read, an Orc has to like, ruin his own faction with the Orcs to get his factional mount, and that kinda junk really sucks.

But at first I was all like, what the heck is this all about, are people actually roleplaying or something?

Well, at first I was actually all like, omfg somebody plays Vanguard?

And then I was all like, what the hell's up with the roleplaying stuff heh.

But whatever, it made remember that the Brad and all them were totally into the Lore of the game and stuff back in EQ1.

I know a lot of you guys didn't start playing EQ1 'till later but in the beginning it was super rare to find a Troll or an Ogre that didn't roleplay, and all the Dark Elves called each other "brother" and "sister" and stuff on my server, even if we didn't go around staging performances and "acting" or anything stupid like that.

Y'know, there weren't no "background" stories or anything, we just talked funny (well, the dark elves only did that "brother" and "sister" thing, but the Trolls and Ogres were godawful and hilarious) and responded to situations in comedic ways from our character's point of view if a situation made us think of anything funny to say about it.

I actually knew every single dark elf's name and who they hung out with up 'till there got to be about two hundred of 'em.

This was back in the days before there were any guilds on the server, too, y'know, so it was kinda like everybody was in One Big Guild.

Anyways those racial hometowns in EQ (well, at least for the bad guys) were all deep with cultural stuff to learn about 'em, y'know, like all these stories from the history of the place, and the gods they worshipped, the mythology of how each race came to be and all that.

And in the end, even when we strayed really far from our hometowns, we knew we could always ask somebody from any of the Bad Guy Races for help, if we needed it (and sometimes you really did need some serious help in that game heh).

Yah we could speak in our own racial language too so that everybody else couldn't understand what we saying, although that was kinda rude and we only did that when somebody from another race was being an ass ahaha.

That's kinda weird when you consider how things are nowadays y'know but I'm glad I got to get me some of that.

Humans didn't really have it so good, and the Faydark guys were just okay, y'know, nothing special, although the Dwarves on my server had this huge (like 250+ people) guild of dwarven roleplayer guys who were totally awesome and their guildleader was one of my all-time favorite guys 'cause he was just one of those people that could keep you laughing even past the point where it had already started to hurt and rupture your internal organs and stuff ahaha.

Aazimar or something like that was his name, I think.

There mighta been a few more z's or a's in there or something.

I'm terrible with all that yaggedy-shmaggedy roleplaying name stuff, I seen so many of those kinda names over all these years that I can't even remember the names of half of my own characters heh.

Oh holy shit here he is man ahaha.

Anyways sometimes folks say things like "you just want to reproduce stuff you saw that was really great" and that's the one thing I always think of when folks say that, the way that a little Dark Elf guy could always get help from a Big Dark Elf or a Troll or an Ogre as if we were all in one big family, warts and all, that whole thing where mebbe the way the game was dangerous and full of adversity and the lore (and definitely a huge amount of the credit has to go to all the really awesome and entertaining roleplayer guys who made us Half Life dudes feel like dummasses and mouth breathers for not trying to do it better, in the case of the Dark Elves it was this English dude called Thaddeus who was a totally killer showman, and for the Trolls there was Bogmu and Korak) somehow combined to create this really cool and entertaining environment to be a part of.

And I think about how it fell apart and how could you fix that and stuff.

But I don't really know how to do that, it's very dependent on the luck of having dudes like Aazimar and Bogmu and Korak and Thaddeus around, y'know, the guys that like, made us want to do it too, or at least not screw it all up so bad ahaha.

Nowadays people don't even know what the OOC channel is for but back in the beginning everybody actually roleplayed in /Shouts and hardly anybody ever used OOC ('cause it was sorta like admitting failure or something) and everybody hated merchants coming along and trying to sell their shit heh.

And when I say merchants, I don't mean gold sellers, I mean regular players wanting to sell their loot and stuff insteada making hand-me-downs and gifts-to-newbs out of it like all the cool guys did.

That's weird huh?

The merchant-hatred and generosity is even weirder 'cause we were all dirt poor in that game, we seriously couldn't even afford half our spells, and we needed advice from the bigger guys on which spells we could skip 'cause a lot of 'em were broken or not that useful, and most of 'em had names and descriptions that didn't make any sense, and all this stuff like that.

It was cool though, man, it was actually really easy to get into it and nobody ever yelled at anybody for not doing it good or anything stupid like that (I sure as hell didn't start out doing it good, since I had just come from crowbar murdering people in Half Life ahaha).

I think it takes folks that can set really good examples for that to work though.

And a bunch of other environmental and mechanical stuff that helps it work, too, like the way you could lose your corpse and all your items (so you couldn't even fight at all if you weren't a spellcaster guy), and you might need a Necromancer to help you find it, and so the Necromancers ended up being like some kinda Ambulance Drivers that everbody came to when there was a terrible accident heh.

And if they were your size (or bigger) you knew that you were going to have to go into some godawful freaky place that you were too smart to go to that had gotten this guy killed ahaha.

Y'know, I'd lose a nice big "old school" chunk of my exp for helping you get your body if I got killed while trying to do it, too AHAHA.

The humans had it bad, though, there wasn't nothing interesting in their environment to draw on that would make it easy and fun to get into it, y'know?

Well, wait, the barbarian guys had it pretty good, actually.

And when a human came to the Dark Elf Woods he got some of it, 'cause all the Dark Elves could see in the dark but the human couldn't see his hand in front of his own face and all us Dark Elves knew we could stand just outside the light of his torch and whisper junk at him and freak him out and make him doubt we were gonna help him find his way out of there and stuff if he got lost heh.

Yah, see, that stuff was entertainment man ahaha.

And it was all situational and stuff.

That's the kinda thing I'd like to see again, that was some cool shit.

Yah, no, our server wasn't a Roleplaying Server, that stuff hadn't been invented yet either back in them days when folks still called the things MMORPGs, that's just how it all worked out.