Recent Events!

I've decided to overhaul the literature on the website for my guild, and that means I don't have as much creative energies for my blog. So I decided to talk a little about some of the last events I've had with my guild, since that's a shade easier than a typical entry I do. I get the impression that talking about the events my guild has hosted is the internet equivalent of showing people photos of your grand kids while you tell boring stories about them; but we've had some pretty amazing events recently and I'm just bursting to write about it. The (great?) thing about these events is that I didn't host a single one of them, they were all organized and carried out by my officers or other members.

In-character Icecrown Citadel

Wrath of the Lich King had some massive plot points for the Forsaken, and as I've said before, the death of the Lich King is something that effected every Forsaken character at the time. I was blown away by how kind and considerate my guildmates were when it came to sign ups for this. A few of them offered to step aside when we had too many people to take, even though they had expressed a lot of excitement about the event. One member in particular gave up his spot for someone who had been having trouble getting in game due to real life circumstances, and I thought it was very touching.

Not leading this event was a real treat for me. The entire thing was planned by my newest officer, and him and another member who took down the Lich King back when it was cutting edge content explained the boss fights to us.

We wanted to clear the citadel in-character, so I presented the raid with two options. The first was that we could basically roleplay our clear of the raid as something done in a separate timeline, and our characters could experience the trill of killing the Lich King first hand, but then afterwards act like it had never happened. The second was that we could say the Lich King was long gone, and we were just clearing out the place of any lingering Scourge and treasures - being scavengers, so to speak. I put it to a vote, and in the end the first option won. It was a tough call to make. On one hand it's not a lot of fun to grow your character and then clear the board and act like it never happened; on the other hand, killing the Lich King is pretty darn cool, while ignoring bosses isn't so much. I think we made the right call in the end though, the in-character aftermath when the raid was done was fantastic even if we didn't get to take it with us.

We briefed everyone in-character before stepping inside, some of the boss fight explanations were roleplayed, and we had a blast the whole way though. We wiped four times (once to a bug on Blood Queen, and then three times on the Lich King while we learned his fight). We actually got Kingslayer titles, which I didn't know was still possible. When I tell people we did the raid in-character, the first thing I'm asked is how long it took us. The answer is four and half hours, with very in-depth boss explanations because we had a lot of people with us that don't raid and never saw the content back in the day. The atmosphere while we did it was amazing, it was by far one of the most memorable things we've done as a guild. 

Taking the Tower

This was a great world PvP event put together by another one of my officers. Basically we attempted to hold a small tower in Elwynn Forest while we were flagged. As you can tell from this picture, we got a little silly while we waited for the Alliance and just had to put out picnic baskets and don ogre costumes. Because let's face it, there are few situations that aren't improved by costumes and picnics happening at the same time. Screenshots to the contrary, there was legitimate roleplay to be had, we made the trip from Brill (where members of the Scythe were briefed on their mission) to Elwynn Forest in-character. 

The only thing that left a bad taste in my mouth was the fact that we waited an hour and half for the Alliance to engage us while we danced around them killing guards and flagging ourselves. They just stood and stared blankly at us until they had a massive advantage in numbers. We had fourteen people with us, some of which were low levels, and very few of us had any PvP gear to speak of. I actually have screenshot of sixteen Alliance members looking at us without being flagged; they didn't start fighting us until they had well over twenty five people. We obviously weren't a huge threat, and I think it would have been a lot more fun if they had tried to fight us while the scales were even. I digress, we had a ton of fun anyways, so I shouldn't moan about what is probably considered to be standard tactics in world PvP.

The most random thing that happened was when someone we had fought logged over onto a Horde character to speak with one of my members. I would have expected mockery of our dismal PvP skills or some comment that disparaged roleplayers, but this guy actually switched sides to tell us to disband our guild because we all had died. We had a good laugh about it, because that struck us as a pretty hardcore response to what was obviously done in good fun (ogre suits, come on). When I think about it though, I guess it's kind of cool that the only trash talk we encountered was roleplay related.

The fallout was tricky to roleplay, however. Normally with our combat oriented events we regroup in the Undercity and have a scene were our characters are patched up and healed - but we had to wait so long for the Alliance to fight us we didn't have the time. In the end, we just sort of shrugged our shoulders and broke character to recall our favorite parts of the PvP rather than try and wrap up the scene.

Fishing Lessons & Tournament

This was a public event I advertised here on my blog, and the atmosphere wound up being absolutely perfect. We had close to twenty people and roleplayed for a good hour or more, and the gathering was small enough that we got some engaging roleplay in with the non-guilded members who came. At first they were very quiet, but as the night wore on I think we were able to coax them out of their shells. That's one of the downsides of having a well known guild, sometimes other people are little intimidated and shy around you. As promised, the roleplay was a bit lighter and sillier then what people typically expect from the Forsaken. I think my favorite post was when one of our Forsaken hunters rolled out the entrails from his pet plague bear into the water in an attempt to catch more fish. Either that or when the Warlocks were complaining they couldn't summon demons to fish for them.

The guildmate who put together this event was incredibly organized, and it really blew me away. He had everything planned out to the last detail, and even spent some time fishing in the area he picked to host the event so he knew what we could expect to catch, and how often. He had a prize for twenty sickly fish, and the first one of us to catch a fish over ten pounds. He had told me he'd be providing the poles and prizes, but I was shocked when he gave away a crash prize of five hundred gold, and those adorable enchanted lantern pets. They don't come cheap!

I'm really pleased with the variety I've been seeing in my guild events. I think that's one of the big advantages to letting other people lead them sometimes. In my earlier days as a guild officer I was very strict about who could and couldn't lead them, but now that I've loosened the reigns I'm really pleased with what my members can do - and it makes my job easier.