A New Beginning

The jungle morning was dank and wet as expected. Salty wind gently rocks the hut high in the tree. Zu is awakening with the dawn. This Tumerok village of Zu was built on the remains of Tou tou. There is even a tale that the alluvian's had a community there before that was lost to them. Only two warriors are about and they are down the road at the ruins. From her perch she could see the lighthouse of Asheron's people, source of many amusing stories from the ancient ones. Warriors whose living essence was bound by the life stones would jump off to their death for amusement.

How much the land has changed from the maps the ancestors had kept. Many things loom ready to be re-discovered. Already there are reports from the ruins of Hebian to. Someone found excavations of old Cragstone. The findings are all cautiously optimistic. There is a foreboding that our incursion into this, which was once our lands, will not be without grave reprisals. The Vaults have passed on much knowledge of what was and what our hopes should be. People speak of Asheron, the Shadows and Dominion with almost religious fervor. Already there has been some infighting for some of the more precious commodities. This bodes of the ancient Sho curse, 'May thee live in interesting times'.

In coming to Zu the warrior maid has fulfilled an very old promise to a great grandmother. To seek out the town that once walked the warriors of legend, Tex the Warrior, Cyricx the axer, Donna the arch-mage, Akagi Kagerou the archer and Lougattz the mager. These where the ones that fought by her ancestor, the same antecedent who's name was bestowed upon her as she left the undergrounds such a short time ago. There is much to do and the day is summoning her to discover this land. With her newly made bow in hand it is time to begin, again.

With a flourish I made it into Osteth with nary a problem. I choose a female human, Sho features and blond hair in three ponytails, using my established name of 'Grasp' I left the magical vaults that have been the Derethians home for ten generations to reclaim the land as our own. With my EoB experience (End of Beta) I knew that the first thing to do was to get a decent weapon. This means crafting and that means looting. On the starting Island there are some nice non-aggressive spawns that are designed so you can try out your basic attack and your meager skills. I quickly made it to level four and got five tier one bows made, this opened up my tier two 'bow recipe'. My crafted bow made short work of the wasps and at level 6 the XP provided was dropping. With a group coming in it seemed prudent to move on to the Vermin. By level eight I had a tier-two bow and some tier-two armor made. Grasp was looking quite fetching if I do say so myself. I killed off some beetles to top off my level at 9 and hit the portal. Levels 1-10 are very quick in AC2 and designed for learning what the various skill trees are and the basics of combat and crafting. Some of the skills many human characters start with are the healing, vigor and encase spells. These really boost your survivability at the cost of firepower. From my AC1 experience I prefer to have a strong offense so I immediately worked my way up the Missile tree and the mastery skill there.

After hitting Osteth the first three vaults were my goal. The vaults unlock ancient secrets and provide some nice xp boosts. In order to get inside the vaults you need a glyph. Various creatures drop them, however the quickest way to obtain these is to do the ringway quest. The portal system on Dereth I can divide into three groups. One is a town-to-town portal. These take you to the 'main town' of each area, analogous of the capitol city of a state in the US. The second group is the local portal rings; these take you to smaller outposts for each capitol city. As the name suggests as you run through each successive portal and you'll end back where you started. The final group is the island-to-island portals.

At the starter drop I did a quick run-around looking for the stone ancestor head to receive the quest from. This quest is done by going through the portal ring and 'using' (double clicking) obelisks on the other side of each portal. At the end you get a set of three glyphs and some xp. There are three of these quests. Upon completion I headed to the Arwic vault. Noting the portal ring locations makes it easy to get a ride close by. A short run later and there was vault. I find the vaults impressive, carved out of the side of a cliff the temple like opening maw leads a short distance to a portal inside. These are best done with a group; the boss creature at the end can be tough to solo, you have to kill the boss to get into the vault. It doesn't matter if you kill it solo or your fellowship gets the kill, so a fellowship is highly desirable. My group was keen to get the first three vaults done so we stayed together. Soon we where level 13 and heading to the next two vaults. In beta I had succeeded in getting from beginning to end of all but one vault, Prosper. This was due mostly to the lack of creatures I could find that dropped the glyph.

As the evening closed we had hit the level of 15 and had done all but two vaults, the Drudge Citadel and Prosper. I headed to Cavendo, which will be my LS (Life Stone) point for now. Cavendo has a portal to Omnishan (15+) and the Drudge Citadel. Seeing as how I was level 15 now and on AC1 my main lived in Tou tou, I took a late night portal run and logged in Zu, which is where Tou tou used to be. It seemed a fitting end to my first day in the land of Fallen Kings.

The next login I met up with an old friend and we hunted the areas around Zu. I got to meet the LS for the first time and learned the Portal Recall spell to assist me in my travels back to hunt. I was able to make level 18 when I heard of a group heading on the slave taker quest. Because I was starting late I ran to the spot on the Shoushi loop and was ran to some Drudge Heretics. One of them asked me to get the head of a Burun Slavetaker, unfortunately with speed being important I feel I missed out on some of the essence of this quest. So we did a Banzai run past some drudges and crones to a nasty Life Stone.

Along the route I decided to try out the /follow command. Its actually quite nice for laggy computers (I need more RAM) you select someone who knows the route (with broadband) and quickly type /follow suddenly your dogging his footfalls quite nicely. With the group taking the brunt of the attacks and not having to use the keyboard to follow I decided to make a quick run to the fridge to snag a cola. BIG MISTAKE! My unknowing guide, Nightwolf, had chosen to attack a Gloom Drudge (nasty hits from these) I dutifully stood by his side as the monster took swipe after swipe, by the time I could hit the Q (quick run) key it was too late. Another death and into Cavendo I go!

Nightwolf offered to LS portal me to the group, which saved on runtime. This time I did the follow command but stayed perched at the controls. We ended up on a river inlet with an odd looking building not to far away. On an island there was the spawn. With my double strike arrow and my high mastery I was hitting a good 90% of the time and the Burun dropped quite nicely. We all where kept busy with the Crone's and Drudge mystics. I was then told that each person needed get the kill on the Burun in order to advance the quest. While a goodly number of us had the Burun heads by now not everyone had the kill. The group held together well then something odd happened. The fellowship chat went out. This made anyone who died isolated from the group, so we did not know if they where going to head back to us or not. At one point our group was down to four people when we had to retreat to a safer spot. Eventually everyone seemed to have that portion of the quest done, the only thing required was to recall and collect the booty, a magical ring!

Next I went exploring. On a run to Shoushi I came across a glowing light at the end of a bridge, it was a spirit asking for some information on the three kingdoms. I know two of the kingdom shrines are not to far a run from this point and the third should be close by. so I went to do the quest. Along the way I joined up with the Kingdom of Order. This was an all-running quest with very few monsters to impede my travel. As with all the Osteth Quests it is geared specifically to lure you into the lore of Dereth and the game mechanics.

I should make a better note of the people whom I end up questing with. I'll endeavor to do so in the future.

I am close to level 20 now. This is important to me due to the skill tree I am working under. I have chosen to be a Ranger and at level 20 I can get a summon-able Pet Lasher. Because I tend to fight solo a lot a Lasher is a great companion for a bower. She will attack the same creature your attacking and take the brunt of the assault. My one regret is that I cannot dismiss her after summoned. One of the Quests I have working currently is Rashan's revenge. This quest is a list of Drudges that you must kill to prove yourself to a ghost who will then grant you a favor. I hunted a lot at the Drudge Citadel during the EoB and decided that would be a good spot to finish off level 19. I hit the portal from Cavendo and started along the gloomy trail. Until I realized I needed to go one more stop on the ring. So I took the loop back around and headed up the hill toward the citadel, at the fork in the road the server decided to crash. Ah well. 20 will have to wait.

-F