I have a lot of very fond memor­ies of play­ing WoW but if I had to decide which one was the best I would say that it was the day when my female Belf-pally Sinthara died. Not because she died, but because of the way she died. But I am get­ting ahead of myself a little. Let’s start at the begin­ning, ok?

Sinthara was Kheldaris’s sis­ter, very holie-than-thou, haughty, con­des­cend­ing. I think Khel was the only char­ac­ter on the whole server who actu­ally kinda liked her — because I also played Khel which meant that the two never really had a chance to clash. He always defen­ded her against other player’s rants, while she wouldn’t tire to rant about what a dis­grace her little brother was in her eyes. Charm­ing, right? In short, with her I made one of the car­dinal sins of role­play­ing: I cre­ated a char­ac­ter that every­one hated. She was stuck, and play­ing her wasn’t a lot of fun. I was ready to just go and delete her when I found a post on the offi­cial realm for­ums that a group of troll play­ers were look­ing for a vic­tim. I lit­er­ally pounced on that oppor­tun­ity because it was a way to explain her sud­den dis­ap­pear­ance from the server.

I con­tac­ted the GM of the troll-guild and said that I had a dis­pos­able belf-pally and they were pretty happy. The even­ing prior to the event we “met” through par­tychat and hammered out the rules for it. I made clear that I wouldn’t tol­er­ate any form of sexual viol­ence (which they weren’t plan­ning to inflict any­way), and apart from that they could go wild. The com­mu­nic­a­tion prior and dur­ing the event gave me a really good feel­ing about play­ing out some­thing that was ripe with pit­falls. The whole group was corteous, and kept up a steady stream of com­mu­nic­a­tion dur­ing the grisly event: the hunt, and cap­ture. The tor­ture, inter­rog­a­tion and final behead­ing. It was a glor­i­ously bloody mess, one of the most elec­tri­fiy­ing rp-sessions I ever had.

*raises a glass of blood-red wine and salutes the most vicious troll guild Die Aldor ever had*

I really can’t stress enough how import­ant the com­mu­nic­a­tion before and through­out the event was. It reas­sured me that there weren’t things going to hap­pen which would make me uncom­fort­able. It helped my co-players to gauge how far they could go with the viol­ence, and how vividly they could describe what happened. It was also fun, because they were a pretty cool gang with a very dry sense of humour. Loos­ing these guys was one of the nails in the coffin of my former main-rp-server. It was also import­ant because I could reas­sure them that the death of my char­ac­ter was okay with  me (they had had some trouble with other play­ers who had got­ten cold feet at the last moment).

I remem­ber that I rather grudgingly agreed to try out this WoW  thing. I did not expect that it would suck me in like it did — I guess that’s an exper­i­ence a lot of people went through.

My first MMO I ever played was Guild Wars, basic­ally because I got the boxes cheap and there were no addi­tional costs involved. The monthly fees for play­ing WoW kept me away for a very long time. I dearly loved Guild Wars, too. Prior to GW the only time I had exper­i­ences multi-player gam­ing was back in the days when I dabbled a little with Diablo II — and it wasn’t an exper­i­ence that hooked me. I thought it was rather stress­ful. Guild Wars on the other hand was much more relax­ing. Don’t ask me why, maybe it was the people I met there.

The only thing that vexed me with Guild Wars was that all my real-life friends played WoW and wouldn’t come over to play GW with me. Instead they would keep badger­ing me to try out their game. For me this was a frus­trat­ing situ­ation because I didn’t want to leave GW, I had already inves­ted so much into this game: the boxes, the time, and met some very nice people. The most import­ant deterrence, though, was that I wasn’t will­ing to fork over cash on a montly basis for a game I already had payed for. *harumph*

So, I was sit­ting in my corner, being stub­born, and my friends sat in that other corner and were stub­born, too. It didn’t look like we would be online gam­ing together any­time soon. And then my birth­day rolled around.

The bas­tards had put their money together and bought me the WoW box, and gam­ing time cards for a full year. Hon­estly, with that type of friends, who needs enemies

So, I spent a big part of that day in August 2006 installing the game — all the while my friends who had come to my place secretly held their breaths that my com­puter would not simply show them the fin­ger. It didn’t.

And then I had to choose what kind of char­ac­ter I wanted to play. I felt like being mis­chie­ve­ous, and decided to roll an alli­ance toon much to the hor­ror of my friends who all had horde char­ac­ters. My logic was that I had made the step to try out their game, so they could make the step to try out the other fac­tion. To me it soun­ded only fair, and we would all be low-level char­ac­ters and could level together. My first ever char­ac­ter was a Night Elf rogue on Arygos. She was awe­some, tall, not a pushover, belonged to a race of kick­ass women.… wait, what did she just do? Was that a bounce? *face­palm* Thank you Bliz­zard. How could you?!

The first thing that really struck me was how col­our­ful WoW was. To me it seemed as if the world­build­ers had been on ser­i­ous crack. Finally enter­ing gloomy Dark­shore almost felt like a relieve to my eyes.

If I remem­ber cor­rectly I man­aged to level this first toon up to level 16 before real­iz­ing that I didn’t like play­ing a rogue (back then). The whole gather combo points to unleash them with a fin­isher thing was new to me and I didn’t like it very much. So I went and rolled a cute gnome war­lock. Her name was Min­malkin and she was the first toon I man­aged to level to level-cap — it just took me almost two years. I never was and never will be a pro gamer.

Shortly after the launch of Burn­ing Cru­sade one of my friends asked me if I wanted to join him and his guild on a roleply­ing server. They had just cre­ated an all Belf rp-guild. How could I res­ist? Belves and role­play­ing!!! I was so much in love with that. And so Khel­daris was born, hunter, con-artist, cat-lover, omni­sexual and a foodie.

I still go and play Guild Wars every now and then, at least in the gam­ing world, you can never really for­get your first love.

Basic­ally, because there aren’t enough rp-blogs out there. When I star­ted play­ing on a role­play­ing server I looked for blogs about role­play­ing and only found a hand­ful. Some of them have closed shop since I found them, some of them never really got rolling.

Even after all this time play­ing WoW I am still, basic­ally an rp nub. I blun­der, make mis­takes and I have to act­ively look out for any Mary-Sueism when I cre­ate a new char­ac­ter. Should someone like me write a role­play­ing blog, then?

I think yes. As long as I don’t pose as a big rp-know-it-all, but instead chron­icle my jour­ney with all its pit­falls and sur­prises, this blog might become a resource of inspir­a­tion and encour­age­ment for other rp-nubs like me.

But there is also another reason why I want to get this baby off the ground. In my time in SAN I got to know a lot of blog­gers, and wit­nessed their camaraderie, as well as their being at odds with each other. The com­munity of WoW-bloggers is a lively one, and I want to be a part of that com­munity. It took me quite a lot of time to finally get my ass into writ­ing mode, but here I am now.

If I ima­gined myself as someone like Lar­isa from the Pink Pig­tail Inn, I would say: Come all in and get some free drinks at the bar. Don’t mind that the place isn’t com­pletely fur­nished yet, but sit down and enjoy your­self while I try my best to entetertain you. Even if I still suf­fer from a bit of stagefright.

So, who is this per­son, Cleeyah, any­way? To be hon­est, I some­times don’t know myself. But I take pills for that.

Cur­rently I am a Call-Center agent (not the one who calls you and wants to sell you dubi­ous insur­ances, though, I work for a biiiiiiiig player in the teleshop­ping mar­ket), and believe it or not, I am actu­ally hav­ing fun at work. I get to talk to a wide selec­tion of dif­fer­ent people within a short amount of time, and the per­son­al­it­ies I some­times encounter are very enter­tain­ing. Some­times it is an old granny whom you’ll just want to adopt for your­self. Some­time it is the 40 year old male vir­gin still liv­ing with his mom, who imme­di­ately starts hit­ting on you. And some­times dur­ing night-shifts I get the feel­ing I am actu­ally work­ing for the whooping-cough helpline, if you under­stand what I mean *waggles eye­brows*
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