Ride of the Twilight Dandies

Twilight Dandies.  That was the guild name we settled on Saturday night.

If you’re not sure what that name might mean or imply, go to Wikipedia and read the entry on “Dandy.”

I’ll get to the “how” and “why” of the name in a bit, but first the “who.”

We all managed to get into the game.  It turned out that the previous week Earl had quite a bit of trouble getting the game to run and followed the standard rule that after four BSODs, you find something else to do.  WAR was not settling in well at his place.  This week, though, patched, updated, and running in windowed mode, things were much smoother.  The starting group for the night was:

Denrohir – Archmage
Stardoe – Warrior Priest(ess)
Varsoon – Warrior Priest
Guff – Swordmaster
Chicken – Shadow Warrior
Earlthecatfive – Shadow Warrior

The first order of business was to create the guild.  Thus came back the name discussion.  We obviously did not spend a lot of time over the week thinking on the subject, so an odd list of names were proposed and shot down.  The list may have included some of the following:

• Twilight Milkmen Imperium
• Louis Pasture Memorial
• The Dave Clark Five
• The Pete Best Six
• 52nd Ekrund Rifles/Fusiliers/Dragoons
• The Hormel Boners
• Yolo County Regulars
• Jacobite Me
• Sigmar’s Briefs
• Britt Ekland Rifles
• Heretics for Sigmar
• The Angry Sonomans/Back to Sonoma
• Metamucil Regulars
• The Monks of Sigmar
• Althuman, Altelf, Altdorf
• Anti-Clockwise
• Anti-Pasti
• 77th Bengal Lancers
• Marat’s Bathtub

After all… or some… of those, in the end we decided on Twilight Dandies.

And not merely because it was one of my suggestions and I was the guy typing it into the guild creation screen.

I asked several times before I pulled the trigger on that if there were any other options.  In fact, I pulled the trigger on the name The Twilight Dandies, but then somebody did not like that definite article out front, so we reset and did it as Twilight Dandies.

I think we, as a group, were simply past the point of wanting to talk about guild names, so when we finally hit one that nobody really hated, it became the one.

Of course, there were issues in even pulling the aforementioned trigger and creating the guild, which gave us ample time to discuss names.

First I was sent off to Altdorf and had to find the Guild Registrar in the rather authentic sprawling medieval town that Mythic created.  Very nice.  Very Big.  Makes Darnassus seem the epitome of modern urban planning.  And it is all the more mysterious since you don’t really have a reason to go there for quite a few levels.

Once there, I tried to create the guild, but was told “You must be the Leader of a Party of 6.”  (What odd capitalization. I wonder if it is capitalized that way in the German version.)

Oops, I wasn’t the group leader.

We changed that.  I tried again.  I was told “You must be the Leader of a Party of 6.”

Well, now I was, but maybe it did not recognize the leadership change.  We disbanded and I invited everybody to a new group.

I tried to create the guild.  I was told “You must be the Leader of a Party of 6.”

Okay, we were scattered in different zones, so everybody headed to Altdorf.  When we all got into the city, I tried to create the guild.  A new error message at last!  It said, “Some party members are out of range of the Registrar.”  Progress!

Finally, we all hove into view of the registrar, I put in the name, we rejected it, then I put in the final name, we all accepted it.

We had a guild at last!  That only took us 45 minutes to accomplish.  You can see that we had plenty of time to discuss guild names.

Here we stand, the founding members of the Twilight Dandies.

Four surly elves and two humans in robes.  I think we might have an apt name.  We’ll be working on a guild logo next.  Something with Oscar Wilde I think.

Naturally, immediately after we finished up, we saw a guild called “Blood Bath & Beyond” and thought, “Why don’t we have a cool name like that?”

Such is guild life.

We then had to swap out characters because some of us were in the tier 2 level range, while others were tier 1.  That meant guild invites, promotions, and the like until we finally settled down to the actual play group for the night.

While we were swapping and standing around to group up again we had to have the weekly FALSE KENDRICKE SIGHTING!

This week’s False Kendricke was a High Elf Archmage.

Order of the White Candy?

He denied being the loquacious man from Minnesota. The brevity of the response again validated the denial.  In fact, it was the same “nope” as last week because, as it turned out, it was the same guy “not Kendricke” guy from last week playing another character.  We’ll be on the lookout for “Kendruk” this coming Saturday.

After all that, we finally set about playing some tier 1 RvR scenarios which, honestly, are beginning to wear thin with me.

Sure, we had some laughs.  There was a witch elf named “Thewife” in one scenario run that lead to some humor on Skype.  But how many flags must a man cap before he can call himself bored with the whole thing?  Judging from how early the group started to break up, the number is surprisingly close to 42.

We’ll have to work on getting the whole team up to tier 2 to get ourselves the hell out of Nordenwatch and maybe into something different, like the Altdorf sewers.

Maybe by next week the guild will have advanced to rank 2.  Then we will have a calendar to play with!