The Kingdom of Loathing
Somehow I have gotten sucked into this online game called The Kingdom Of Loathing. It's basically a spoof of Dungeons & Dragons, which I was somewhat addicted to as a teenager in the 80s.
My character is a Pastamancer (pictured above), although I was sorely tempted to be a Disco Bandit, just because I loved the name. :D His familiar is a 4-pound mosquito named Buzz,
who helps him during battles by sucking blood out of his enemy. His favorite weapon so far is a pair of dirty hobo gloves, and he goes into battle wearing 
studded leather boxer shorts. He's also usually fairly drunk, since his favorite drink is "Mad Train wine." (His favorite food so far is asparagus, which he often hunts in the Haunted Pantry.) 
You get 60 turns per day, which lets you roam around and go on quests, fight monsters (beware the horrible Undead Elbow Macaroni!) and get your character very drunk. The artwork is all hand-drawn, and there's a lot of absurd, obnoxious humor in the game. I haven't gotten far enough to meet any of the other players yet, but I gather there's a bit of a community aspect to it, too, with various chat channels and whatnot. (For example, if you battle your way through the Haiku Dungeon, you get access to the Haiku chat, where people are ONLY allowed to post in haiku. :D )
I look forward to battling Knob Goblins and Possesed Cans of Tomato Sauce on company time. Heh!
posted by Lee H. @ Sunday, June 19, 2005
8 Comments:
Um... This is utterly ridiculous. And it has to be said that this eventually had to happen-- D&D has been ripe for "sarplay" (a new, just-now-minted word of mine combining 'sarcasm' and 'wordplay'). I love it. I don't have TIME to explore this, but... I love it.
You meet a zombie in the Spooky Forest.
"Need brains," says the zombie, "not fertilizer. Gaaaaaah."
He gives you some fertilizer.
You acquire an item: Spooky-Gro fertilizer
How could you NOT love it? :D
haha. I think I'm going to have to check this out tomorrow morning; I never really played D&D, though (for some reason, though all my friends and I were dorks, we weren't _that_ sort of dork. Or, at least, I wasn't; I think some of them played D&D from time to time, but mostly they weren't into it). (We more played Magic: The Gathering and that sort of thing, so, oh yeah, we're totally not lacking in dork-cred. And also lots of door games on BBSes like Legend Of The Red Dragon, Barren Realms Elite, or this one that I forget what the title was but it might have been Trade Wars, or it was a Trade Wars ripoff, I can't recall.
So, anyway, though I'll have to check this out -- it seems pretty amusing. (I would now, but I'm kinda tired; just got to see the Mountain Goats! Hooray!)
Heh, just played that one myself not too long ago; got an account and everything... so far it seems pretty neat. I'm gonna have to spend some more time with it. Looks like it'll be more long-lived fun than Nation States, which was fun, but didn't have enough different things going on, so after a while, it was just the same thing over and over and over, so...
DORK? Who are you calling dork, grasshopper??
Er, OK, I guess we were. :D Bear in mind, my D&D-playing years were roughly from 1979-1985, so the online variety was only a glimmer in some other dork's eye at that point. (At least as could be accessed by a bunch of high-schoolers from a small town in Georgia in that era...) It was all Jethro Tull on vinyl, and the occasional joint sneaked into the house when the host's mom wasn't looking, at that point. We thought we were SO DANGEROUS. :D
And of course, walking around our school with REAMS of hand-drawn, graph-paper maps hanging out of our backpacks gave us a certain amount of cachet, we thought. We even managed to get a couple of girls interested in our game sessions, which the other guys found very gratifying. Heh heh...
But as for KoL...
In the Sleazy Back Alley, you are attacked by a completely different spider than the big creepy spider that you may or may not have already been attacked by. Yikes!
How can you not love it? :D
Hehe, well, hey, I'm a dork, too, so it's all OK...8) I'm trying to recall, and I think the only dorkly pursuit we could get Actual Real Live Girls interested in was the Anime club, and that was just one or two. And there was the occasional one in Chess Club. But that was about it.
(Did I ever tell you about the one and only Chess Tournament I went to? I'm a tremendously bad Chess player, and after playing really erratically (well, as viewed by someone who knows strategy), and finally losing, the guy I was playing against says to me "MAN, I was getting really scared, I didn't know what I was in for, I couldn't figure out what you were doing!" and I was all "Yeah, well, you know...heh heh..." and I tried not to let on that I wasn't some sort of Psycho Chess Genius Who Just Happened To Lose That Time, but rather just an Idiot.)
I tried not to let on that I wasn't some sort of Psycho Chess Genius Who Just Happened To Lose That Time, but rather just an Idiot.
This story cracks me up. :D No, you'd never mentioned it before.
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