Meg

Some thoughts on Meg-ness.
AAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! GET IT OFF GET IT OFF GET IT… wait… wait… sorry, just my old beat-up black felt fedora.

Thought it was a Lurker Above for a minute there.

I’ve been doing this WAAAAAAY too long. ;) Which is to say, most of my life, and not nearly long enough. I was born in the shadow of a total solar eclipse on July 20, 1969, on the observation deck of Tower 1 of the World Trade Center. From there, I quickly enlisted in the army and went to serve my country in the jungles of SouthEast Nevada. Charlie was hard. Charlie was fast. We never saw Charlie, just these 3 hot chicks he sent on all his missions, without any brassieres. They were tougher then than the ones in the movie. Consider this: In the movie, they only used kung-fu. On TV, they had guns. Just imagine what they had 10 years earlier off-camera!

Man, those Angels were tough to beat. But we eventually outsmarted them, and nuked the jungles til there were nothing left but sand! And we called it ‘New Mexico’, cause we figured it was about as nasty a place as the original. Then, in 1974, my life was changed forever when I was attacked by a group of goblins under the command of the great Orc leader ‘Castor LeFid’. My trusty companions, Bobo the Elf (his parents were both dwarves, but he didn’t wanna take over the business) and Mike the Cleric, and I fought them bravely, but we all died.

Swearing eternal vengeance, we decided we were gonna get really good at this ‘D&D’ shit, and soon we were playing at the seventh level! Then we all went nuts, hid in a bunch of caves, and finally only barely got talked down from throwing ourselves off of a building in downtown Manhattan.

Ah, the good old days.

I actually started playing D&D in the summer of 1976. And no, I wasn’t born in 1969 during a solar eclipse at the moment of the Apollo 11 lunar landing on the top of a building that wouldn’t exist for another 8 years. I’m not saying –when- I was born, but let’s just say that I was playing D&D long before I was playing doctor.

For a long time, D&D was, really, it. All there was. I mean, I played some Star Frontiers, looked over Gamma World and Boot Hill, but the industry was really, for a long time, just TSR. About 1986 or so, I was first exposed to the ‘rest’ of gaming… Traveler, Paranoia, Toon, Car Wars… and the initial, inobtrusive product known only as the ‘Generic Universal Role-Playing System’. It really wasn’t much to look at then. Quite honestly, it’s still not, but I understand it’s become kinda popular. I had a blast w/Paranoia & Toon, couldn’t find players for Traveler, did the occasional Division Unlimited game of CW… and had bad experience after bad experience w/GURPS.

By late 1988, I’d tried most of the games out there, and was playing almost exclusively R. Talsorian’s ‘Cyberpunk’, West End’s ‘Paranoia’, and Palladium’s ‘Robotech’ games. One bad DM too many, with adventure after adventure sending the group down strangely vertical mine shafts that went down all the way into the Abyss had just gotten too much. I was primed for something that tasted of High Fantasy, but offered more than ‘go in the dungeon, kill the monster, get the loot’.

I know, I know, there were a lot (a LOT) of good AD&D modules out there. I owned a bunch of them. But there weren’t any good DungeonMasters near me. Much as it sucked, all the good gamers in my area were as burned out on it, from the same experiences in the same group.

That’s when Shadowrun happened along.

There it was, all at once: High Fantasy meets Dark Future. Epic adventure in a possibly doomed attempt to save the world from the all-powerful corporations who owned it. We came. We saw. We kicked mucho ass. And somewhere along the way, I learned the art of how to make the rules scream in pain without ever once breaking them. I’m good at that. I admit it: I know Twink-Fu. (Say it in that ‘woah’ kind of Keanu Reeves voice. You know the one.) However, mostly, I use my powers for Good. I do what I can with every new system I get, and try to push it to the limit, so I know where the potential problems are. With a lot of them, it’s hard. Chivalry & Sorcery’s very well-built. With some, it’s ridiculously easy. White Wolf had to release an entire sourcebook just to cover the rules loopholes created between Vampire and Mage, because let’s face it: The games of the WoD are not meant to be played together, but everyone knows they are, and White Wolf makes more money that way. (A sign of corporate corruption, I’m sure. Neither White Wolf Magazine nor Lion Rampant were terribly worried about the money. It’s a shame, too. Lion Rampant was great. Ars Magica kicks ass. White Wolf Magazine, back in the indie days, was also quite a quality product. Now? HAH! The only quality to the in-house WW products is in the book bindings! Their distribution stuff, though, the Sword & Sorcery Imprint, that’s VERY nice.)

So, we ambled through Shadowrun. At one point, some corper gave our party an unlimited expense account to ‘get the job done at all costs’, as long as we got receipts.

We bought up most of Manhattan. It was great. Twinky as hell, and silly to boot, but FUN, and that’s what matters, isn’t it? Well, like most other people, I eventually migrated to WoD. By 1995/1996 I’d largely burned out on it. Too much stupidity in too many products that claimed to be a cohesive ‘World’ but weren’t. Feh. So, I went online. Pretty soon I was playing on what was then simply ‘ShadowrunMUSH’. Now, it’s ‘Shadowrun: SeattleMUSH’, because Detroit, Germany (Berlin, really), and Denver have cropped up. And that’s where I started down the road that leads to our humble MUSH.

After a while, my first character was gone, and my second was a ganger. The person running the Builder for the area of the grid we ran was retiring his PC, and leaving the BLDR. So, I took over ‘ElfieBLDR’. Another PC in the gang took over the BLDR for the gang itself, AncientBLDR. Why we needed two, I do not know. Anyway, it turned out that he had the PW for both, and was logging in to both at the same time, occasionally. This pissed off the head of CodeStaff, and both BLDRs were set inactive. I’d offered to code up some additional melee weapons (many of which, under different stats, eventually showed up 3-4 years later in Cannon Companion. Not my work, just stuff happens), and so I got ‘PointyBLDR’, to indicate both the weapons and my maintaining of the the Elven (pointy ears, y’know) District and gang’s code.

Within 6 months, I was codestaff. I still am. Seattle’s a great place, with a lot of great people, and a smaller, but louder number of total gits. Now if only we could get all the code cleaned up. (I know, I’m a Codewiz, why don’t I just DO it? Well, the problem is we’ve got about 8 years of slowly-built-up code systems there, and MOST of them rely on one another. No-one, I think, knows at this point precisely what plugs in where. It’s icky. But we do our best) I started playing on Treyvan in January of 2001. I died. It was cool. Eventually, when they went to betatest, I cashed in all my ‘thank you for alphatesting’ points, and got a REALLY lucky roll on the percentile they used to award their little extras, and ended up with enough points to play a gnoll.

Gnolls, my friend, are fun. Gnolls are great to play. Especially if you don’t expect people to like you, or to want to be around you. I make no apologies for Formendraug, my gnoll paladin. (Yes, a gnoll paladin. Yes, there was a story behind that.) He eventually multiclassed over to Ranger, taking, as a Favored Enemy, gnolls. (The rationale was: He’s not evil, but the race is.) All in all, great fun.

I enjoyed playing there, for the most part. I went through a few characters, as different ones retired for different reasons, but it was all fun. Unfortunately, a difference of interpretation resulted in me leaving that game in January 2002. I won’t sugarcoat it, I was sitebanned. Shit happens. I won't go into details, but they're out there on the net if you really want to find them. I think they speak for themselves.

All in all, however, I still do recommend that anyone interested in a D&D game that claims full compliance w/OGL give them a shot. There a lot of good people there, and they can create a lot of enjoyment for a lot of people. Now, in October or November of 2001, Rune had come to me, during a brief stint while I was on RPStaff on Seattle, and asked me about helping out with the code on what was then the recently-rechristened ‘Winter’s Edge’. I agreed to help out as I could, part time. Oy vey.

Everything’s humming along fine until the guy hosting the game (for free) has a falling out with his parents, and moves out. He leaves his computer, however, and 2-3 weeks later, suddenly it’s down, and repeated attempts to get his hard drive from his parents (he moved a hundred or more miles away) prove fruitless. So, our mush is dead. Winter’s Edge fell off the side of the world. That’s early January, before I was banned from treyvan. We all gather on Treyvan and talk. We work things out, we decide what we’re gonna do. We start setting up a new mush. This time though, all the old code we had is gone. We’ve literally got to rebuild from scratch. January 10, 2002, I back up the work-in-progress.

This turns out to be a saving grace.

1/12/2002 – The database is corrupted beyond recovery as a permissionning error on the new site manages to devour much of our work.

1/16/2002 – Rune, Sslira, and myself convince Swift that the game needs to be hosted on a professional, reliable site. Even if this means paying for it. The money is there, I’m not saying who pays it. Suffice to say, nails’ hosting on Mushpark has been phenomenal, and I heartily recommend his service to anyone looking for reliable and affordable hosting. And I’ve done so to prospective clients more than once.

Well, after we install the very luckily backed-up database (and I’m not taking any credit there, I have no idea why I’d backed it up), I go on a mad coding spree. No joke, 16-18 hr days until Swift pops up with ‘Hey! I wanna open Alpha on 3/11. Whaddaya think?’ We weren’t ready. Looking back, we should’ve waited another month. But open we did, charging boldly into an open Alphatest while those Angels I fought in SE Nevada when I was a toddler looked on saying something about fearing to tread there.

And it’s been a slow, sometimes brutal road since. But we’re still here, and hopefully, we’re getting better as we gain experience (hey, it’s D&D, that’s the idea, right??).

I can’t wait until we get to the seventh level and we can go hide in caves again.

-Meg