We couldn’t quite get the group together Halloween weekend.
Earl, who lives in New York, informed us via the magic of iPhone that he was otherwise without power or internet connectivity. So we had to leave him to the hum of his generator along with the almost non-stop sound of breaking tree branches while we figured out what to do in Rift without him.
And the rest of us got on a bit late. There were pets and patches and updates to deal with. Jolly joined the rest of us in getting the collector’s edition of the game. Like Earl, he got the spider mount that now comes with the CE, as opposed to the turtle that was the previous reward mount.
Getting on late and being a player short, we needed something to do.
Being a fan of obtainable goals, I suggested we try to form a guild. Potshot and I had already gone through the usual preamble of silly guild names and had come up with one to foist on our unsuspecting future guild mates.
The question was whether just the four of us could form a guild.
It turns out that two people with enough alts can manage guild formation just fine.
Potshot logged into Zahihawass, one of his higher level alts (his naming theme for Rift seems to be “unpronounceable meets unspellable”), picked up a charter in Meridian, and invited us all to sign. This did not even require physical proximity, though we were one signature short.
However, I was able to log out and back in with an alt of my own, sign the remaining line, and there we were.
Guild Charter Complete
The Batsmen of the Calamari is both a Monty Python reference as well as a Rift reference.
Then we set about getting people set up at appropriate ranks within the guild. Rift seems to come with more guild ranks than I would imagine anybody might need by default.
We have many ranks from which to choose!
I am sure there are guild out there that need ranks beyond a default “recruit, member, officer, leader,” but how many guilds need 10 ranks?
And there was also a tab about guild perks.
Tell me of these perks!
I will have to go read up on those.
As we were doing this, I also got a whisper from Harbinger Zero pkudude99 who is also on the Alsbeth server. He sent Earl and I some armor he crafted, which was better than the quest reward items I had accumulated up to that point. So a big thanks goes out for that.
With the guild formed, we decided to run down the starter quest chain a bit. Earl had actually gotten a bit ahead, and he can be an MMO machine when he puts his mind to it, so we figured he would have no problem catching up if we got a quest hub or two ahead of him.
So we cleared out the quests from the first hub, which included yet another sample “here is how rifts work” event, calamari tentacles and all.
Finishing up the training rift
We pushed on from there and eventually ended up at the Kelari Refuge, where we decided to call it a night.
Kelari Refuge on the Water
But we now have a guild and a silly guild name floating above all or our heads.
Batsmen of the what?
Next week we hope to be stuck into Freemarch proper.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 