Darkfall Day 8 - Part I

On Sunday, a clanmate and I decided to make the trek from the Human starter area to the city in which our clan is based. Valucis is also a Human and we have a similar focus on magic (woe to us). He had tried unsuccessfully to get to the city once before, so we hoped that having two of us would improve our chances.

The problem is that the city is past Ork lands. The various races are arranged along the outer rim of Agon's central continent in such a way that every race has an enemy to either side. Go southwest from the human lands and you end up among the Alfar. Go north and you soon arrive among the Orks. This is a problem because we'd not only have to navigate past potentially hostile Humans (and, to a lesser extent, Dwarves and Elves) in our own lands and the open lands in between, but the last stage of our journey would be through a big area teeming with Orks for whom we'd be open season.

Our initial plan was to head east and travel along the coast, making our way north, then to take to the ocean and swim around the worst part of the Ork lands. We had mounts, so we proceeded fairly well, making good time and avoiding conflict. The coastal lands were fairly empty of players; we probably saw more monsters than people as we made our way north. We saw what we thought might be player hamlets, only to discover goblins of a tougher variety that we were used to. We discovered a toolchest sitting in a little shrine-like structure near the water's edge that we were able to loot for tools and crafting materials. Apparently these are similar to resource nodes in that they respawn over time? At any rate, we got to see some interesting terrain and watch the sun coming up and down over the ocean as we travelled.

At some point we took a short break to take care of real life stuff. We sat down on a high mountain, mostly concealed from anyone passing below, as I went AFK and left Valucis to twittle his thumbs. About the time I got back he experienced a lock-up of his computer and had to reboot. When he came back he said he'd seen Orks passing by below while I was gone. Seems we'd caught a lucky break there.

Heading into the sea now to swim around the Ork lands as much as possible, we came upon a couple of islands just off the coast that had structures on top of them. Some Alfar were swimming back and forth between the islands and we could see their heads bobbing in the water. Presumably they could see us as well. We decided to dive down under the water, but you can't hold your breath very long in Darkfall, so we had to come up for air quite a bit. At this point I guess we took diverging paths around the southernmost island. My thought was to go south around it and avoid the swimming Alfar altogether. If I had enough breath I might have tried to swim under them, but I knew I wouldn't be able to. Where Valucis got off to, I'm not sure, but soon he was in battle with the Alfar. He was killed, losing his mount and everything else he had on him. It was a bad setback.

Fortunately we had taken every opportunity to rebind to clanstones along our route north. These are scattered around the lands and provide a place to bind away from the starting villages. When you die you reappear at these stones naked with just your starting weapons. At that point we had to decide what to do. I recalled to the bindstone using the hideously-long-casting binstone_recall command. Seriously, it takes probably three mintues or so to cast, all the while bobbing in the water with murderous (is there any other kind?) Alfar nearby. Anyway, I showed back up at the clanstone where Valucis was waiting and we reformulated our plan.

To the northeast of the main continent is a large island/small continent called Yssam. We decided to swim up to it, travel along its southern coast, and come down to our city from the north, bypassing the hairy northeast of the main continent. It was a long swim, as it turned out, but fortunately we didn't encounter any sharks (as I understand can happen in deep waters). We made our way up Yssam's southeastern peninsula along the top of a high ridge looking down on verdant jungles. I expected to see some real "Land of the Lost"-type shit any minute and we wondered if you jumped from the highest peak into the ocean if you'd survive the fall or plunge so deep you'd run out of breath before you came back up.

As it turned out, it was neither lizardmen nor dinosaurs we encountered but some sort of earth elemental kind of thing, which we quickly dubbed Bigfoot. He came after us, so we did our magic thing, pelting him from all sides and maneuvering for better position. He hit pretty hard himself with some bleeding spells that did not-insubstantial damage-over-time. Unfortunatly he was a bit too tough and we scattered to get away. If I'd remembered to give Valucis (who was without gear, you'll recall) some sulphur for his Health to Mana spell, we might have beaten the thing. Not much you can do without mana and any protection to go toe-to-toe with Bigfoot, though. So after losing the big guy, we managed to head off further into the continent.

To be continued....