Your initial entry into the Lost Lands

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Candelori
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Joined: Thu Sep 07, 2017 5:29 pm

Your initial entry into the Lost Lands

Post by Candelori »

I thought it might be enjoyable for some to recall their real world situation when they first discovered or entered the Lost Lands, be that in CLOK or COGG.

I still remember it quite clearly. I was in the foyer of a church waiting for a service to end so that I might talk with a family friend who was in attendance. Wishing to pass the remaining time, I decided to open the Blowtorch app on my phone and give this CLOK game a try. A friend had mentioned trying the game once and I had little idea what the world was like, but the Viali people sounded interesting, and I thought I might pursue a knightly type of character who ventured into the darkest of places to combat the evils within. My location in the real world may have had an impact on my character's design concept.

I hope others will be willing to share their own stories.
My COGG website: https://candelori.neocities.org
You think to yourself, "I am tempted to henceforth refer to this as the Bicker Board."
You experience a sudden flash of insight, as though you have an increased understanding of who you are.
merin
Posts: 25
Joined: Wed Dec 22, 2021 12:58 pm

Re: Your initial entry into the Lost Lands

Post by merin »

I saw menchen of a little game called Clok advertized on the VIPMud mailing list. Months later, when I was fed up and done with another game I played, I thought hey. I should try and find another one. Low and behold I remembered the list having mentioned of one that sounded cool so thought I'd give it a try. Anyway, after dying probably 20-30 times that first weekend, I got a taste of how wonderful the CLOK community was back at the time in...I want to say 2015 or 2016. I stuck around and created a gigantic alt army for another year year and a half and then I got busy with a job and college graduation and just general frustrations with CLOK, and went through a year there where I just flat out didn't play MUDs.

Anyway, I don't remember when but I got word that Rias was creating another game so I'd always kind of creep it and look at the changelog. I remember popping round a time or two when COGG was Somnium and then when it was COGG way, way back before you could buy handcarts or even make them (i specifically remember that, for some reason). Over the years I'd still poke around CLOK but it never had the magic it did in the early days. Over the summer, I got back on Cogg to see where things were as I had some time and low and behold it was a grand time.

Fortunately life has settled down quite a bit so I have had the time and opportunity to stick around. That and a great desire to. I've grown more choosey about how I express my opinion and a little more quiet on the ooc front, but my heart still belongs in the Lost lands It has accompanied me through a lot of neat life journeys. My at the time long distance girlfriend and I used it to be together. We couldn't be together but we could play characters that had all of the opportunities we couldn't. As that distance shrunk and we graduated college, got our first real big boy/girl jobs, and settled into home ownership for the first time, I have always returned here to the lost lands.


TLDR: first time in lost lands was cause I was bored, never left.
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Lexx416
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Joined: Wed Sep 06, 2017 6:14 pm

Re: Your initial entry into the Lost Lands

Post by Lexx416 »

So, I started playing CLOK in 2011, I think. There were way more MUDs back then, but most of them were all pretty much derivatives of some very commonly used code bases, and even the ones that claimed to be "really unique" generally were just reskins. I'd been playing a couple of games steadily with someone else that started playing CLOK when I did (Evelyn, for those that remember her), and I believe I was browsing the Mudconnector, and saw this really new game, CLOK. I remember logging in and it being just Shadgard and a few rooms outside of it, and thinking this was pretty cool.

I think I then came back a few weeks later with Evelyn and Nootau, and we each decided what kind of class we wanted to play, and more or less based our characters and guild selections off of that, and that's how I got started on CLOK. I don't think I was doing anything particularly exciting at the time - I was still working at PetSmart back then though, and still living at home, so I was likely just browsing Mudconnector for the Newest Thing to try, and stumbled onto a cool little custom made game that I had no idea would grow the way it did.


For COGG, I can't remember exactly how I discovered it. I know I was playing the Somnium project pretty frequently (and I genuinely couldn't say how I found Somnium - maybe someone playing it messaged me, or something like that), and then I was taking breaks off and on, and sometime during all of that COGG happened.
"You hear the Woses, the Wild Men of the Woods... Remnants of an older time they be, living few and secretly, wild and wary as beasts."
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Jaster
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Joined: Wed Sep 06, 2017 6:38 pm
Location: Kentucky

Re: Your initial entry into the Lost Lands

Post by Jaster »

AHH!

yes.

I was still in undergrad and working towards becoming a Paramedic when I first discovered CLOK. Actually, I found a listing for it on the Mudconnector and saved the connection details into my GMud world list - but didn't get around to playing it for (what?) months.

I'm not sure what finally made me log in- the Mudconnector listing was honestly not very promising. I was used to bouncing from listing to listing and playing games that were basically all derived from the same old MUDs, which I love (don't get me wrong), but as someone who started MUDding as a pre-teen I was definitely looking for something... fresh.

I was literally trawling the Mudconnect and topmudsites looking for MUDs with listings that seemed to indicate unique features - and typically even then they were never what they said they were.

Anyway, I logged into CLOK for the first time, and immediately knew it was something special. Even in its early form, the mechanics of the game were different than anything I had seen before.

I knew that I wanted to play a stealth character - so naturally the first thing I did was join the Church (accidentally) as a monk. I didn't want to play a healer (never do) because my real life was already so focused on taking care of others (it's exhausting, honestly). I asked Rias if there was a way to leave a guild - he said NO. So, I immediately retired that character.

Jaster was born - 5 lbs 8 oz... no wait. Sorry, wrong kid.

I created Jaster as my second CLOK character. I used the name because I liked the way it sounded and I had nearly been banned from a Star Wars Reality MUD for using the name (apparently Jaster is an obscure Star Wars comic book character, who knew?) so I had an attachment to it in that weird way you grow attachments to things people tell you that you can't keep, all like EH ERMA GER ITZ DA RULEZ UR BANNED - BAAAN' BAAAAAAAN'.

Since I was a busy college student at the time (gawd, I had so much time then), I set up an elaborate set of triggers and timers to pick the pockets of unsuspecting Shadgardians while I wasn't even home.

Rias caught me - he said EH ERMA GER ITZ DA.. just kidding. He said I couldn't do that anymore, and then he worked some code-wizardry and made it so that angry NPCs would spawn when I had an unsuccessful pull. This made it impossible for me to continue these shenanigans, but it was too late. I was hooked on CLOK - and I was now a notorious thief in Shadgard.

Pretty sure he let me keep the riln. I was like - thanks. He was like - Yer welcome. This is the way I remember it anyway (You're my Huckleberry, Rias).

Now, here I am - one undergrad degree, one MUD crush, one MUD marriage (not the same person), one real life marriage (not the same-same person), one freakishly fast growing Sceptus-baby MUD child, one master degree and PA certification, two beautiful real-life babies, and over 9000 CLOK memories later.

And all I have to show for it is this stupid T-shirt (but not really, because I left it on CLOK!)

For anyone wondering - I don't actively play COGG, but I am actively continuing my legacy of lurking the BBS (the COGGdoption papers have been signed).

Here's to the future, mates! May we all have many more memories together, textual and otherwise.
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nobody
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Re: Your initial entry into the Lost Lands

Post by nobody »

I found CLOK when I was working at a web hosting company call center and staring at a terminal for 35-40 hours a week. I remembered playing MUDs in highschool and was looking for something that wasn't a derivative hack-and-slash, and I was particularly looking for a levelless skill-system based MUD because I was interested in having a digital place to just exist and chill instead of running around and killing smurfs. I went to a bunch but most of them were focused around combat with very little for non-combat characters to do, and those that appeared to have a non-combat focus were either very early alpha with minimal documentation or too MUSHy and I wanted crunchier mechanics. I found CLOK and was delighted I could just be a fisherman hanging out in Mistral Lake. I tried out some other aspects of the game, but the fishing system is what had me hooked (pun intended). I played on and off but it was years before I delved into the game in more depth.
Howard
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Re: Your initial entry into the Lost Lands

Post by Howard »

I found CLOK in winter break of 2014. I was home from college, single, and bored. A friend sent the login my way (multiple times if I recall) and I finally logged in. That weekend I died doing something stupid, faced ic consequences for doing something stupid, had some great RP, and was off to the races. There is always going to be something about the forest around Shadgard, covered in snow, that brings me joy.

I played off and on, mostly as a solo/explorer/crafting build, until the summer of 2015. I was living alone in an on-campus apartment, doing research and taking a night class. I met some great friends through CLOK and honestly, since all of my other friends were home for the summer, that was my social interaction. I made a thief character my senior year of college, a goat-fearing berserker my first year of graduate school, and never looked back.

I found COG when I got a text that CLOK was closing. It broke my heart, because even though I didn't play as much anymore, and though my opinions and experiences had become a bit more mixed, CLOK had accompanied me through a lot of personal growth. As soon as I logged in, I started grinning. It was everything I loved -- the RP, the world, the brilliantly coded systems, the reasonable and deliberate direction from the team. I'm now an attorney, getting married this April, and thankful for this community, our GMs, and this world.
Bean
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Joined: Mon Jan 10, 2022 5:43 pm

Re: Your initial entry into the Lost Lands

Post by Bean »

Hi!

So my first time would probably have to be two years ago on this relatively obscure mud called CLOK. Maybe somebody has heard of it.

Anyway, I was on this Chatroom-like mud, talking to some people. I was about to go AFK, explaining that there was something going on on the other mud I was multitasking on. One of The people I was talking to asked me about the other mud, and I explained a little bit about it, as well as the fact that I had grown very annoyed with its community. Pretty soon, they were talking about their favorite MUD, and honestly I had completely forgotten about what I was supposed to do on the other window because their description seemed so much more interesting. Anyway, I looked at the information pages, read a bit of the forums, and just like magic, I was hooked the moment I stepped in. I will never forget the first day I spent on shadgard as my huec char. Some people were kind enough to help me get set up, and soon, we were out of town fighting infested.

That character would somehow grow to become a flamboyant brawler with a Jamaican accent, and after a few months, I had already assembled a team of misfits and weirdos, all of which I remember fondly. I can safely say, that was The best introduction to quality rp anybody could ask for, and I have the players and staff to thank for that. That's why it stung so much when I learned that it had shut off. I probably wasn't around as much as many other people, maybe just two years or so, but the rp, The sheer freedom of telling stories and experiencing them with other people really helped when life got hard. Still, I really hope everybody from there is doing well.

I did delv into COGG A couple of times on the side while CLOK was up, but it never really stuck until recently. When CLOK officially went down though, I decided to give it a shot. Well, 2 because I wasn't really feeling it the first time, probably because of lingering memories from the shut down, and that was also when the Sudanese Government shut off the internet for a month or so(don't you just hate it when your government breaks immersion?), but after some encouragement from friends, I got into it and woe it's really something. I have all of you to thank for the wonderful rp. :)
Ephemeralis
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Joined: Fri Oct 16, 2020 10:29 am

Re: Your initial entry into the Lost Lands

Post by Ephemeralis »

I saw one of Bonehead's posts on /r/MUD about the first Octum festival and figured I'd try it out after he described it as 'gaslamp fantasy'. Needless to say, I became very enamoured with it after realizing that it was essentially a modernized take on the old Play.NET games with a lot of the edges sanded off, and the rest is history.
Frisbee
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Re: Your initial entry into the Lost Lands

Post by Frisbee »

Oh boy, what a great question!
I first heard about Clok in the summer of 2019, I believe, after I had just quit playing another mud, primarily because it basically required a subscription to play, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the way it was implemented was. Anyway, a certain tiny Thai person mentioned Clok to a bunch of friends and me while we were chatting on a gaming platform. I specifically remember wanting to play a Hillfolk character, not sure why.
Fast forward more than two years later. My time on yet another mud comes to its end and I'm like, "How about I give this clok thing a try?". I created a Parren and I started walking around Haiban, bumped into a bunch of other characters and was basically instantly hooked. It was all magical. The theme of the game was exactly what I was looking for, and there was so much personality to the characters, so much complexity to the lore, that I couldn't help but keep playing. I should also mention that this was my first rp experience. I am usually a very quiet and introverted person, but even that did not hinder interacting with others, in character or not, which was a great relief. In light of that, I'd like to extend a huge thanks to the awesome clok community for being so welcoming to this novice rollplayer.
Of course, all things come to an end, and for me that end was abrupt. Not a full month after my foray into the lost lands, I wake up from a nap and try to connect, and then discover that Clok is down. That hurt infinitely more than I thought it would. To this day, I miss that world and its characters greatly. I think that the lost potential of character development and interactions was what was the most painful.
At any rate, I tried, as I'm sure a lot of us did, to fill the gap that was created when clok closed. One of the ways in which I did that was by making an account on Cogg and bringing back a couple of my old characters. Unfortunately, my first couple or so weeks of playing weren't particularly pleasant. I'd attribute that mostly to my own decision to cling to something that was gone. Both my old chars had stories and events and things associated with them, and it was perhaps a little cruel of me to just tare them away from one timeline and transport them to another. However, I'd also say that a lot of the time it was the reactions I got from other people that put me off, like someone just waving and going about their business, or not even acknowledging my character. I mean that's completely fair, but it happened with about 95% of people I met.
I put those characters away and created a completely new one, and slowly but surely my experience here became more enjoyable. I'm a couple of months into this now and I'm finding it to be different from clok, but very good in its own right. I'd still say that the rp here isn't as... Personal, or whatever the right word is, but this is probably largely due to a lot of people holding off till conflict is introduced, and that's fair.
Stop putting watermellons into the first thing you see that looks like it can hold a watermellon. It is most rude, because you'll only make them feel like they don't belong.
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