Stories from 90s-era Armageddon

[nauta]

Hi everyone, I've taken some interest in the history of Armageddon, and I was interested in hearing some stories that you might have about the 'early' years.  I did a little preliminary research to help jog some memories:

April 2, 1992, Armageddon was announced, and opened to playtesters on July 5th, 1992.  However, its official opening was planned for May 1, 1993, although it seems to have opened a little earlier, as it first surfaces on March 26th, 1993 on a famous mudlisting at the time.  It is hosted first at gauss then at iboga in stats.uiuc.edu, and then two machines at Marquette (carie and studsys) over the summer and fall of that year.  In the spring of '94 it was moved to thrash on the ISCABBS system at the Uni. Iowa, where, after a crash, it was officially relaunched and re-opened on July 5th, 1994.

You can check out a VERY drafty work-in-progress here: https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/share/HJ3ndZutG
(This mostly documents my usenet research.)

I'm especially interested in fun stories about what the game was like back then.  Here are two I found on the gdb:

Halaster & the Gaj:
https://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,31486.msg907165.html#msg907165

Mine was I think in 1994.  ArmageddonMUD wasn't really a role-playing game yet, it was a heavily modified DIKU MUD but had a cool page that talked about some of its features.  They had just removed the ability to see your stats and specific numbers.  A buddy and I created Shadow-dancers which were like a mix between assassins and clerics.  A backstabbing, sneaking healing-magic badass.  This was the days when you typed "cast 'heal' me" and none of this Vivadu fancypants stuff.  So Allanak was just built and we started wandering out west of the city into some kind of tower.  In the top of the tower was a gaj, but we had no idea what a "gaj" was.  We just ran in typing "backstab gaj", "cast 'heal', me", etc.

Kelvik, one of the staff at the time, showed up and started playing the gaj fighting back.  My buddy got killed and so while I was running around the tower hiding and fighting the gaj back and forth, he quickly made another character and ran to me and we defeated the gaj.

This was the days before sdesc's, too, so it was shit like "Frank arrives from the west".

A few days later I applied to be on staff.  Kelvik was stoned and recruited me without talking to me first.  It was a different game... 

Nessalin & the Drow Village
http://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,52336.msg988030.html#msg988030

This was before either of us were on staff.

The game had just rebooted so I logged in with my character (a warlock) and Kelvik logged in with his (a shadowdancer) to go get the wagon.  There was only one wagon at the time and its location didn't persist through reboots, so when the game crashed it was a mad dash to go get it.   We were too late, it was already gone.

Being a warlock I turned us both invisible, being a shadowdancer he turned us both ethereal (which at the time was really just another kind of invisible, requiring a different kind of detect spell to see).  We bolted west out of the city to the grasslands hoping to catch up with the wagon (which moved slower than running) and did manage to catch up to it.

We boarded it but the driver had already picked up the key, gone into the pilot's chamber, and locked themselves in.

Kelvik dispelled his invisibility and ethereal spells and I followed him as he went outside and started moving ahead of the wagon, hoping whoever was piloting it would see a lone traveler on the road and come out to attack them.  Which they did.  But...it was a half-giant, which were just brutal, back then.

As soon as they stepped out I hit the wagon with the invisibility spell just as kelvik backstabbed the pilot (a half-giant).  Even if he killed us he wouldn't be getting that wagon.  Once done with that kelvik fled and I cast blind on the guy.  It wasn't hard for Kelvik to chase him down, after that, and cast sleep on him.

At which point we started stealing all his gear rather than killing him on the logic killing him would just see him back in the game sooner with a geared up newbie (probably a half-giant) heading straight for us.

Once he was robbed of his gear we went back to the wagon & started driving towards the drow city - which was a cake walk in an unassailable wagon since the game didn't (apparently) have room flags blocking wagons yet.