While the rest of the group wasn’t looking, I nailed their boots to the floor. It’s the only way I can get people to stop moving long enough for a picture!

We’re here just outside the room in which is hidden the Seal of Shan-To-Kor. We were sent to retrieve the Seal and upset the local hobgoblin tribe enough that they would stop attacking folks.

A word about traps.

There was a frickin’ ROOM FULL OF FIRE down there. AND a hobgoblin village, looking as nice as you like. Plus, ROOM FULL OF FIRE. Who the HECK builds a ROOM FULL OF FIRE near their homey village? Think of the children!

I don’t care, really. I play a rogue, rogues have excellent resists. Mostly I survive the traps I can’t disarm. Mostly. There was one trap, though, that had me stymied — a fire trap on a ladder. With fire resist potions, I passed that fine, but hobgoblin clerics had me in a continual Hold Person bind while other hobgoblins cut me to shreds.

I’d run the module solo a couple weeks ago, so we had it open on hard. And mostly, we did okay. There were some major fights that saw twenty hobgoblins dead and us still standing. Traps were our biggest issue. It would have been much worse without a rogue.

I’m now in a guild — GAMERS! It was a random guild invite. Gleek and Ulan had already joined guilds, different ones, and were enjoying the guild airship and… the guild airship. I don’t think their guilds group, or something. I’d had the impression that we were all going to join the SAME guild, but it didn’t work out that way. Gleek took the plunge first, Ulan soon after, and I was just wandering around hoping someone would eventually invite me to their guild.

When I played my Hobbesian cleric, I got guild invites all the time, even though I was IN a guild, Massively’s OneDAwesome.

Anyway, I jumped at the first ninja guild invite that came my way. Nobody talks or anything, but they do have an airship. They also have a kick policy, nicely posted on their Guild Message of the Day: If you have not been active for three weeks, it said, you will be kicked. Great message. How are the inactive people ever going to see it? I wondered in guild chat. It’s now been changed to be a simple statement of policy. Something to do with guild renown.

Guild Renown — this whole guild leveling system — is such a ripoff from EverQuest II. You loot tokens which give renown to your guild; killing certain monsters gives renown. It’s just all too familiar. Aside from gaining an airship. I understand further renown and money will purchase guild amenities such as buff bots, but at the moment, all the airship really offers is instant travel around Stormreach.

Seems like you should be able to actually fly it, up in the sky. But it does look kinda cool, kind of like a Spellborn shard ship crossed with the engine room of the USS Enterprise. I swear that’s a warp coil.

Next week, we finally take on Three Barrel Cove. We’re almost past the point I reached with the Massively crew; I’m really excited to see what else DDO has to offer.

I understand we’ll be seeing beholders at some point! But what I REALLY want to see is a dragon. And not one like in the tutorial island, that you could just stare at from afar. I mean, one you can kill, or at least ride. When the Red Star shows through the Stone Eye, Thread will come. And when Thread’s in the sky, Dragons fly.

Loping Plains hasn’t seen THIS much action since the Freethinkers threw that Christmas party and the Pumpkin-Headed Horseman barfed seeds and pulp all over Mayong Mistmoore. Everyone was talking about that for months.

So anyway, Ettie and I head over to Loping Plains to see what’s up. Some goblin over in Freeport was talking up stuff about some “really cool” thing over there, “a lot of fun”. So I asked the gobber if, like, I was going to die or something. “No, no, no, you no die,” said the gobber. “Be fun, you. You just go graveyard there, fun time!”

“Well, fun is good. Nothing is going to come out and attack me, right?” I asked. The gobber looked kinda sly. “No, no no, it just fun. Candy maybe! Fat hobbit like candy, yes?”

Pffft. Of COURSE I like candy. But I wasn’t going to say so to the gobber. “Maybe,” I told the gobber. “Gotta go.”

I sent a tell to Ettie. “Candy.”

“OMW,” she replied. And we were off.

We headed off to the Loping Plains, ran to Somborn and its cemetery, where we were attacked by — SOMETHING — that did 5000 points of damage to Ettie’s wolf, and then everything went dark.

FRIGGIN *(&#*(&# GOBBERS! WHY did I pick HALLOWEEN to start trusting them?

Some merchant had found us — get this — CLEAR on the other side of town, and DRAGGED us to his shop on the OTHER side of town. Sure, someone dragging the bodies of two unconscious halflings may not be the most uncommon site in the Plains, but don’t you think SOMEONE would have said something?

He tried to sell us some knick-knacks, but we weren’t buying it. We hoofed back to the cemetery, ready for battle, where a smug looking Proctor informed us that what had attacked us had fled into this abandoned looking home. Obviously, he would go in himself and discover the source of the evil, but he’d stubbed his toe on the way over and it looked like rain and his arthritis was acting up, so maybe we could go in alone?

Norrath, dear readers, is a world of people who call in sick when the cat looks at them funny. So anyway, we were still hot to find out what tried to kill us, so in we went.

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Since I barely did anything to help with the guild hall, compared with Stargrace, Kasul and Ecor, I feel kinda embarrassed to be the first to blog about it, but there ya go.

If you’d been following Twitter yesterday, you’d have seen the drama as Nostalgia worked crafting writs so the guild could reach level 30 and be allowed to buy the smallest, cheapest guild hall. Even the smallest, cheapest guild hall is pretty expensive and perhaps 5-6x larger than the largest house you can buy. There is nothing small about any guild hall. They really are, large, stupid large, and omg wtf I need a map large.

Due to the heroic efforts of the Nostalgia crafters, the guild dinged 30 JUST before I got home. This was my first time home this week before 6:30; I’ve been trying to catch up with work and coming home later. The guild was parked in front of the guild hall, waiting for me :)

Since Dina doesn’t have good enough faction to purchase her loom, I had to switch to Dora, who has max faction with Freeport’s crafter society, to buy it.

We all donated status and some of us, coin, to pay for and maintain the hall. A couple of folks with too much status came by and donated some, and we now have enough status to keep the hall going for a very long time. Stargrace bought five amenities — NPCs and other features you can add to the guild hall. Five is all we’re allowed, for now. We got the druid who opens portals for you to any druid ring, an attuner that grants you a spell to port back to the guild hall, a fuel merchant, a rush order crafting writ giver, and a banker.

Because we are, after all, largely a guild of crafters, we went for the crafting things first.

I decorated my tailoring area a little; why not? After resizing the loom down to halfling size, I added a wardrobe for storing work in progress, a chair for when I get tired of standing, and a skull with a sword stuck in it resting on a small table because… well, because why not?

This is Buddy, the giant dog who roams our hall, keeping it prowler free. I wasn’t sure if he was really there or just my imagination, so I sat him right behind Stargrace as she was arranging books in the guild library. Her scream woke up people three guild halls away :) She said, “I was arranging the books when I heard some barking, and I thought someone had let their dog in here. Then I turned around and AGH!”.

Good times :)

Earlier, I’d been packing up Dora’s room when that STUPID FRIGGIN ZOMBIE jumped out at me from nowhere, so I’d already gotten my scream in. I need some Zombie Spray to keep those zombies away. Thank God my son wasn’t home to hear.

My guild room looks like front row center at a Spinal Tap concert. It needs a lot of work. I want to get a dungeon-y feel to it. Giant flaming pig heads are an interesting choice for any modern bedroom…

The hall is still pretty barren, but if I know Stargrace, it’s going to be something special in a little bit. You’re all invited to the open house, when we have one :)