From LSWiki

An old-new player. Started playing Lost Souls sometime -94 or -95, played for a while (couple years?) and came back only occasionally, until after one long break the atman was gone. Now I'm back with a new atman and new characters.

Characters

Half-elf

As a tribute to the "old times", will have a character to imitate my old "main" Bugi as similarly as possible. This will unfortunately have to wait, since the guild does not exist now (White mages) and the replacing guild is not ready. Also, some of his old associations are no longer around.

Bugi's "mark" was to always "ice" (i.e. encase the target inside a block of ice for a while) Bill whenever he passed through LH[]. We shall see if that spell will be found in the new guild.

A moment I remember somewhat well was the "lesson" for a jerk player I gave with Bugi and with the help of some higher heros. The higher level players helped to scry out his location (was a bit harder to do back then). Then, using the powers of certain cloak, I took enough time and care and made myself look like "the ego of <the name of the jerk>", including all the way down with the details of his outlook (with tiny crucial difference to give him a hint). And then I entered the same room, gave him enough time to notice me and examine me... and then I icecubed him and left, reseted the cloak and started whistling innocently.

Now, this jerk was enough of a newbie that he didn't first realize it was just tricks with cloak, and he didn't even realize it was a white mage (and I was the only such online at the time). And icecube prevented all actions, and iirc even quitting. So he was sooo angry and puzzled and uncertain, rambling on OOC... the icecube of course melted away in minutes, but he did quit. I think he didn't come back.

Evil me. Though I did get some applaudes from other players ;)

Faerie mark 1

I also played quite a bit of a tiny faerie azure mage, which was quite fun character even before joining azures, so I went made faerie character, too. But... Seems that faeries haven't taken that well with all the changes in the game mechanics (or maybe time has smoothened my memories). So, I was afraid to zoom into a mage guild before being able to at least survive as an adventurer. And instead of these new "azures" of OZM, I was considering "reds" (or OIA).

However, after those difficulties, I am now thinking of trying to play it in a "physical solo" way, just to see how viable that could be now. That leaves physical or at most mildly magickal/whatnot guilds and assocs to choose from, or rangers with such a familiar that is weak in itself but enhances the faerie to do her own fighting better.

I will continue with that test later, when I have better understanding of various guilds, associations, skills, game mechanisms... and mainly, what to not attack yet.

... Okay... remade it with a minor adjustment towards more physical (in practice, constitution from 40 to 50), and made it aisenshi. And maiden. And fallen. And attuned. No true combat testing yet, I have to train up some skills first, but judging from the faerie mark 2's abilities, this one should do her defenses ok. Just, without the extra damage from pets, the damage output will be limited, especially since finding even a half-decent weapon for tiny faeries seems to be something comparable to a super-quest worth of 30 QPs. I'm hoping the aisenshi "powers" will help a little bit with damage.

Devoted it to unarmed. Gets slightly better benefit from maidens that way. I know that for aisenshi the increase in max specialty can be ignored (unarmed gets +5, while dagger get nothing; aisenshi get 100 max!), in other guilds the difference can be more significant. But all in all, seemed that finding decent daggers was just as impossible as finding decent unarmed things and someone mentioned there should be some decent unarmed things in arborlon (though I have no idea on their size), so then why not pick the skill that gets better bonus from maidens. I can always (well, almost always) change the devotion later should it prove beneficial.

Faerie mark 2

After learning a bit from that tiny faerie, I made couple more tests, compared some values, and ended up making maximum size faerie, with lots of constitution, and decided it is still not good enough. Solution was found with something else taking the beating in the tough cases, so I ended up to be a ranger with this one. After pondering different familiar types, I decided to limit them to flying types, with decent fighting ability. In the end, it was a choice between drake and firelizard. Firelizard's benefits seemed to fit better with the idea of the character I am holding to, even if it isn't as much of a "tank" as a drake would have been.

... So far, it is certainly not a powerhouse, but works. The firelizard is even smaller than the faerie, but is kicking butt.. or better yet, headbutting its way like no tomorrow.

This faerie also joined maidens, and has recently acquired a dragon follower. No idea how that dragon will work out, shall see.

... So I took it to some testing. Couldn't find my previous "mark" of group of dogs, so tried anything random coming along in the wilderness, including a bear and an ogre. And they all seemed to give 0 xp or something really insignificant, and that includes the xp the pets were getting (i.e. none). I was already thinking I have to ditch the dragon for messing my xp so totally, but finally ended up trying Togrek. Orc children and villagers gave nothing, and priest suprisingly just a little (I remember these were harder than other stuff before).. but guards and wargs were okish. Although the xp varied weirdly. Finally Kham found me and from that mistake I learned it is a wipe. For Kham. Dies even faster than some other orcs, let alone a warg, and still gives a lot more xp. Which is still not much.

Nevertheless, it got proven that I could continue with the dragon should I want to. The real bad side from the dragon follower is that I can not control it. I can not make it stay in place while I go kill something, or to command it to attack first, and its stubborn enough to not even tell me if it is hurt somewhere or how tired it is. When it is following me, I can not do skill training by staying in defensive combat and letting mobs (try) beat me; the dragon would immediately roast them. The trick for the training part is to simply use only sewers, as the dragon is too large to fit through the sewer entrance and must stay behind outside while I go looking for trouble.

Oh, and the funniest thing is, that it is smart enough to try to first aid me after combat if I'm injured. Alas, it was so quick to do it that I didn't manage to treat me first, and the dragon isn't skilled enough in first aid and ended up doing more harm than good. Bleh. I wait for the day when after a tight victory the overeager dragon ends up killing me with its good intentions.

Another annoying part of not being able to control it is that it often eats (some) of the corpses I am trying to skin - now that I have finally found that ability to be doable even with very low skills.

Dracon

I decided to make something into a mage guild, and since I have never had red mage, i.e. OIA these days, I wanted to make one. First I thought about phaethon, the de facto for fire mages... but then I started thinking of trying some less "weak" race, as long as its stats somewhat fit in OIA scheme (mostly int and cha). Ended up with dracon, knowing that its initial charisma is not that high, but its nothing that can not be "fixed" quite quickly with leveling up. Dracon has overall quite a bit less stat points than a phaethon, but nevertheless, here I am with a dracon OIA.

The first "sewer test" was rather hilarious. The previous toons have, at the first fight, needed to flee; faeries almost immediately, nyloc after a while of missing (while rats were hitting). Now, this dracon... he was not hitting at all, while rats were hitting about all the time - harmlessly. And not even having all of armor, just breastplate and something for head.

A little bit later (during exploration) it got revealed that the natural armor, while quite good, is not to be overestimated. Something tad bit bigger than a rat put him into stun in the first round (and first hit) and after three hits it was already time to flee. That is, if it had been possible, as being stunned made him just watch in awe as he was being beaten a new. Did survive it though. Barely.

So now he flies around with a paralemnos. Perhaps an extra layer of something tough will help.

After finally learning a big bunch of skills, went to spell-combat testing. With rats, of course. Again, somewhat hilarious results. This time missing with spells. The most easiest attack spells are about the only things he can make to hit with any usability, but needing to toss them almost as much as normal adventurer would make sword hits, while using quite a bit more of sp (and other energies)... But at least the skills are growing at decent rate. Perhaps few days of that and he will start reaching his current skill limits, and can try something that would give xp.

Others

Nyloc reaper. With this one I noticed how low reapers were with specialty access. A while later another player checked it out and agreed. Chaos heard it and jumped in. Some minutes later reapers had received decent increases in all their specialty maximums, and iirc even one more skill to play with.

Plans

... for many others, but I'll taste the play with the above ones before dividing my time too much.

I will likely some day push myself to legend, if for nothing else then just to get an amberite. It was sort of weird to play one back then. It was amberite kensai (and couple assocs) and while at times it felt like a tank, fighting overly big monster, at times things hurt just like they would at equal level lesser race. Kept me always on my toes in fights.

Wiki

I have recorded the specialty info (and some other stuff along with them) about all the guilds and associations I am joining, and then add the data to Wiki. So far this covers: Rangers, Reapers, Maidens of the Spear, and the ranger familiar type firelizard.

While doing those, I noticed that the capitalization for the article titles for skills were a bit messed, and decided to fix those. While doing that, noticed some of the skills were not properly categorized either, so did that, too. Also found a number of "loose" skill pages, not categorized as a skill at all. So added those as skills.

Some more affiliations I've touched: Aisenshi, Fallen Blood of Chaos, and The Attuned.

Plans

• Record specialty data for some more associations and perhaps a guild or two.
• Fix skill links as they come up in my eyes to directly point the new capitalized page.

Maps

Mapped Cimbra fully (well, 5% of exploration still missing, but visited all ground floor rooms). Also large part of Ebiria is done, since that was easy (it seems to be mostly plains (or desert camouflaging as plains)) and had some business in there (looking for the nomad camp).

The prototype map of Cimbra is now added to maps page. I have found many problems with the way I did it (but I also expected to have those problems.. thats what prototypes are for), but I've also figured solutions to those problems already.

But the amount of work is so huge, especially with the planned modifications to the way I intend to draw them, that manually drawing them (even with select+paste operation being the majority) is not feasible. Thus, I'll try and do a tool to help with it.

I'll add the map "base" to wiki, though, so that others can use them to help with collecting the data. Even if the map graphics is now "sucky", it still helps a lot and contains most of the data.

Plans

• Finish Ebiria. Add to wiki.
• Add map base to wiki.
• A tool to help with mapping.