[nichomachean]

I will throw in my two cents and tell the story of my adventure as a level 6 barbarian rogue attempting to get a Mask of Deception.

My very first character in December 2000 was a barbarian rogue by the name of Kreshaer. I had settled on this character after a number of real-life friends of mine playing on the server (The Seventh Hammer) convinced me of the barbarian rogues virtues, namely his awesome strength (neglecting some other key areas, such as night-vision). Having spent my first six levels stumbling around Everfrost and dying endlessly to orc troopers and marauding vengeful lyricists, my friend Khorinn, who at the time was level 40, and a dwarf paladin, convinced me I needed a Mask of Deception to help with my constant night-blindness issue.

He arranged a druid port for me to Western Commonlands, and met me at the Halas tunnel entrance with said druid to go. Being a total Everquest noob at the time, he implored I wait at the rings when we landed, and so I did. Eventually, after a number of perilous encounters with rampaging sand giants and orcs crossing the Deserts of Ro and the Oasis, we landed in Innothule and followed the wall south to Guk. I managed to get lost no less than 10 times in the labyrinth of Upper Guk (Khorinn wasn't satisfied waiting on me) and I'd estimate the total journey from EF to the Lguk zoneline was near 2 hours. Anyway, here we were in Lguk.

Khorinn waited until I managed to pull off a successful hide/sneak combo then proceeded to massacre everything on the way to the assassin camp, which was mercifully open (I would not have known otherwise). Again I managed to get lost close to a dozen times.. Anywho, we manage to get to the ghoul assassin camp, who of course isn't up, and Khorinn slaughters the area. After camping for about 3 hours, the assassin had still not popped, and Khorinn went linkdead. I patiently waited, hoping he would return, knowing I would barbarian paste if he didn't, when I received a phone call saying his internet was out. Oh shit.

I'll speed up the story from here. Essentially, not 3 seconds after I hung up the phone, the ghoul assassin spawned and turned me into aforementioned barbarian paste. I respawned in West Freeport, logged for the night (knowing I'd never make it back there alone). And here is where the nightmare got fun.

Neither Khorinn or I knew about /consent at this point, and so he and I spent the next 8-10 hours of game time performing an infinite corpse run. He ran me back from WFP the first time, and hide/sneak having failed, I promptly died again. Which of course meant he had to run back and fetch me. No fewer than 10 times did this occur, before we successfully retrieved all my corpses (thank God he knew about the /corpse command and I could drag them to zone line). All in all, about 30 hours of game time wasted, and no mask to be found.

I still to this day do not let him live down our "adventure" together. And my rogue got his mask more appropriately around level 32, when I had learned much more about the game and had brought backup.

C'est la vie!