23 | November | 2018 | The Ancient Gaming Noob

Back to TorilMUD and maybe the final chapter of my Leuthilspar Tales series.

Out on Evermeet, the island of the elves in TorilMUD, at the end of the long path that leads from Leuthilspar, maybe three score rooms away, one comes to a dead end, a clearing with a well. The room description, like so many in the game, gives little away.

A Clearing
The path opens into a beautiful clearing. A well with blue, sparkling water, reflecting the sun’s light, is surrounded by a ring of young silverleaf trees. Mats of lush moss and grass grow around the well. Flowers, orchids and small bushes full with red berries add to this pleasant and peaceful scenery. A gentle wind breezes across the well and makes the trees whisper a silent song. The path ends at the well and it might be a good idea to fill your drinking containers at it. The only way back is the path leading south to the forest.

The well has water in it. You can drink from it or, as the description suggests, fill you flagon or water skin from it. Otherwise there isn’t much more to see.

But long trails that end many rooms in are suspicious by their very existence in a MUD. So of course you search the room, and if your intelligence is high enough, or you persist long enough, eventually you will find something.

You find a secret exit north!

A secret exit. Some bushes you can… um… open… MUD syntax, sorry… allowing you to pass north into the zone we called Castle Drulak.

On the list of zones in the credits it is just called “Drulak.”

Drulak ————————— levels 25-50

That is an odd level range for a zone on Evermeet. As with the Sylvan Glades, it wasn’t a zone to solve the most immediate problems facing a young elf or half-elf. It wasn’t a place to level up so you could get the hell off of Evermeet. By level 25 most elves were long gone from island. With a group of level 17 to 19 elves you might venture into the zone to hunt for experience, but you were better off in the Elder Forest or at Anna’s.

Leuthilspar and Vicinity

And despite its name, the zone isn’t just a castle like, say, the zone Ice Crag Castle is. There is a castle in the zone, with the right name.

Outside of Castle Drulak
A large and dark looking castle towers before you. Its walls look very grim
and uncomfortable and sometimes dark figures walk on top of the castle’s walls.
What is truly amazing of the whole buidling is that it floats in the air. The
only way you see leads inside the castle through a large double stone door, of
course there is another way too, but then you had to fly through the clouds.
From where you stand you can look downwards and all you see are little houses
and a lake far below you. The wind is very cold outside the castle and seems
to blow from each direction. Surely it is much warmer inside the castle. One
or the other way.

And you can go in and explore it. It has guards and towers and a cook and a librarian, but isn’t otherwise all that spectacular. It seems like a side show in the zone.

Well, that isn’t really fair. The castle is about as big a deal as most things in the zone. But that is the issue, there are a lot of disparate things in the Drulak zone. Let’s look at the zone.

Drulak Zone Map

You might need to click on the map to blow it up to full size in order to read everything on it. The chaos of font sizes was going to have some meaning, but then I forgot about it half way through and now there is no meaning. If I had done the text as its own layer, I could have fixed that easily, but I am old, from a time before layers, so I often forget to do that.

You can see Castle Drulak there in the upper left, with the distinctive castle shape, towers out at the corners.

Just south of it there is the gypsy camp. There is a vendor there, but they carry no stock, so I imagine the camp is there to let you clear inventory.

To the east of the castle is Turtle Lake, infested with dragon turtles. But they are not aggro, so you can move about on the lake freely if you have a boat or a spell of levitation or fly on you. Boats are just something you carry in your inventory in TorilMUD and not a vessel you might actually sail about with.

On the lake there are two points that go down. One leads to an old sorcerer whose purpose I have forgotten. The other needs water breathing, which I lacked when I went to explore. Something is down there.

Then there is the cave of Ferentybylynxaferix the dragon. He was needed for a quest and I was occasionally asked to go scout to see if he had spawned.

In the middle of the zone there is the farm. Out front there is the depressed elven farmer.

The way this elf is dressed and handles his weapons convinces you that
he has not been a farmer forever. An aura of strength seems to surround
him and as his eyes rest on you, you can feel it. But there is also some
kind of sadness in his eyes. His whole face is grimacing as if a great
pain would rest inside him. He is dressed with some soft leather cloths
and wears two longswords at his belt.
A farmer is a medium-sized level 41 Moon Elf.
He is in excellent condition.

<worn on body> a soft leather armor
<primary weapon> a silver longsword

He is down because his children are ill. They are in the house behind him. Though the fact that his description says he wears two longswords, yet hold only one might be getting him down as well. His leather armor was worth some platinum, so I used to make a point of putting him out of his misery back in the day.

South of the farm is a hollow tree that contains a bee hive. The guardian bees are aggro, defending their queen who wears a golden tiara.

South of that, and actually before the clearing that hides the entrance to the zone proper, is the bugbear caves. Grumtar the bugbear chief and Markor the bugbear shaman are the bosses in the caves.

Then there is the chasm that leads down to a camp. However, to get into the camp you need to have detect invisible cast on you as the key to get in is not only hidden, but invisible. I had to pass on that during my tour.

But the key location I recall in the zone is the Temple of Labelas Enoreth.

It has been abandoned and is overrun by ghosts of the former caretakers and priests, cursed to haunt the grounds of the temple. At the east end of the temple is a locked door. To get through you must obtain the marble stone head from the hag who lives below the temple. As in most thing, this means killing her. You then hand the head to the headless statue who gives you the crimson key that unlocks the door.

Behind the door is a lifesized statue of Labelas Enoreth. It lives, and when you speak to it, the statue gives you a quest.

The statue slowly turns to you and says “Have you come to redeem them?”

ask statue redeem

The statue says, “To redeem the people of this area in my eyes three things
must be done. A quest must be completed to banish the evil that this temple
has become.”

ask statue quest

The statue says, “Three items must be gained and brought to me. In return
an object of great value shall be given showing that you have redeemed
yourself and your people in my eyes.”

ask statue items

The statue says, “The three items shall come from varying parts of the world.
The first is that of a queen whose followers only duty is to her. The second
is the striped hide of a foul beast from far away. The third is an item worn
on the hands that has one of my beloved creatures worked into their make-up.”

And that is all you get. Again, questing in the age of MUDs was a bit more cryptic.

The first item, as I recall, comes from the queen bee in the zone, while I think the second is a drop from the displacer beast, which is found in the lands east of Waterdeep, near the Lava Tubes. I cannot think of what the third one might be, though I know our group did this quest more than a few times.

The reward was an elven blade which I had to query Katumi bot about several times until I got the right one:

Katumi tells you ‘a slender elven Moonblade (Wield) Dam:2 Hit:2 * (Weapon) Dice:2D6 * Procs: ‘labelas’ Protection of the Forest 1/week – Power Of The Stars * Magic !Dwarf !Evil !Halfling !Human !Neut * Wt:5 Val:0p * Zone: Drulak (Q) * Last ID: 2011-01-01′

Not a bad sword, though something I think we all went and collected for low level elven alts as opposed to using it on out mains.

And so it goes. I think I have covered all the major zones on Evermeet. I started this series back in 2009, so it has only taken me nine years to get there.

The whole series: