YOU SHOULD START WITH CHAPTER 2

If you’re going to ignore the rest of this About page and just dive in, the most important thing to know is that you should probably skip the Prologue and Chapter 1. I’m leaving them up for archival purposes. I don’t think they’re very good because I was trying to sound like the Twilight Zone narrator and it turns out I can’t really write that voice very well. Despite being about 40% expository info-dumps (which is why they suck), the information in the Prologue and Chapter 1 are brought up in the natural narrative flow starting at Chapter 2 on.

The short version of what this blog is is a story about mirror universe Guild Wars, where the lore has been edited so that all the good guys are bad and all the bad guys are…Well, sometimes good and sometimes worse and sometimes about the same, really. There’s familiar faces, but they’re distorted, because the mirror you went through is one of those funhouse mirrors and everything went all pear-shaped. I try to update every day, and as of the writing I have been successful for four days and am beginning to build up a buffer. The goal here is to write at roughly NaNoWriMo pace, so that you’ll have about 1700 words of new story daily. This means very little editing gets done, but I do generally know where the plot and character arcs are going.

The long version? Starts with the fact that my Hall of Monuments seriously sucks. And you know why? Because I am absolutely obsessed with doing everything in order. Prophecies first. Complete every quest. Sorrow’s Furnace before the Ring of Fire. Titan quests after. Then Factions, including Urgoz and Kanaxai, and then Nightfall. And so on, and so forth. Every bit of content has a certain order that it comes in and I hate doing things out of that order, so much so that it ruins my enjoyment of the whole game. The problem is, since I don’t get to Nightfall until so late in the progression, I don’t get any heroes but MOX until way late in the progression either. And after I’ve been gone for a while I always feel like I have to restart. So I start a new character in Pre-Searing, I get through the game until I hit the Gang of Four snags: Sorrow’s Furnace, Titan Quests, Urgoz’s Warren, and the Deep. These are the four parts of the game that I can’t accomplish with just MOX, and which come before I get the rest of my heroes in Nightfall (people asking why I don’t go to Nightfall just long enough to grab the heroes do not understand the depth of my OCD). The first two, sometimes my guild can help me through. The second two never, ever get finished. Eventually, I get bored of waiting to find a group that’ll get me through the hard parts, and give up. A few months later I want to play GW again, but it’s been so long I don’t want to pick up where I left off (especially since really, what are the odds I’ll find a group now that I’ve been gone for three months as compared to before, when I’d been around consistently for at least a few weeks?). So I start a new Prophecies toon and the cycle repeats.

So what the Hell does any of this have to do with this blog? Well, the goal here is threefold. Firstly, I always tell myself bizarre little stories when playing this game, and I thought I may as well write them down and share them with people. Secondly, I’m hoping that by putting the story down it’ll set it into stone somehow, be like “this is finished and I don’t need to do it again” instead of restarting all the time. And thirdly, if this gains traction with the GW1 community (what’s left of it), maybe a few helpful players will be around to get me through Urgoz and Kanaxai when those cards come up, and I’ll finally break through into Nightfall, and then I’ll have heroes and everything will be rainbows and unicorns.