theworldofdreams.com

The richest man in WOD. That's right, that's what I was- although not for very long and a very long time ago.
Back in the dawn of the current version of WOD, skills were still learned by practicing them, and no one had any decent skill levels yet (Dundee set the learning rates VERY slow. Our combat skills were so bad, that we were incapable of taking on so much as a skelaton one-on-on, let alone anything as terrifying as a mighty orc. To give you an example, I was working on my tactics skills by fencing against a chicken armed with a newbie dagger. I dueled with the same loyal fencing instructor for five straight hours one night (well, at first I had to stop frequently to visit the healer)until she finally taught me enough challenge her mastery. She was with me at the graduation banquet, but I enjoyed it more than she did. Well, I was on-line alone most of the time, so I had no possibility of making a living by killing anything.
Of course, I wanted STUFF like a house and a boat and real metal armor (even if I couldn't wear it yet), so I had to make money from peaceful skills. From the beginning, I was a miner. Mining was boring in those days. There was only one color of ore (even if I had been skilled enough to dig anything else). The only things you could dig out of the mountains were iron ore, iron ore and iron ore. For a little variety, I would dig clay from mud and sand from -er- sand. If digging in rock was boring, digging swamp was stupifying and digging sand was just practice for death. I found this cool place to mine, where all three types of mining terrain were located close together- near the crossroads of the where the Britain- Vesper road intersects the road west to Yew.
As I experimented with mining, I discovered a strange thing. Sand was the most valuable substance in the universe. Dundee had multiplied instead of dividing when he calculated prices or something and the hourly earnings for an hour of brain-numbing sand mining was several times the earnings for ore. I immediately posted the information to Dundee on the message board, complete with all of the relevant statistics. He tweaked the market price for sand a bit, along with the yield you got mining (making it still more boring), but he corrected only a small fraction of the discrepancy. I tested it all out and published the results to the board again, but Dundee still under-compensated. I told him one more time, but at the same time decided to pursue a serious career in sand mining. Perhaps I was still guilty of exploiting a known bug, but if so I claim insanity brought on by too much sand mining. I soothed my conscience by splitting my mining time equally between the three types of terrain, even though I knew where the money was.
It still took many hours, but the money piled up in my pack. Not only did I amass the money required to build what I believe was the first player-purchased house in WOD, but it was a tower! Naturally, I built it near my favorite mining-spot. The first thing I did after erecting the tower and naming it Fellowship Hall was to throw away the key. I had determined that I wanted the Hall to be a place of refuge in the wilderness (remember how dangerous the countryside was to us in those days.)
Once I built the Hall, I gave up sand mining for a while (not out of guilt- it was just too boring). A few months later, Dundee got around to rationalizing raw material prices, including sand.
I was never the richest citizen in WOD again (at least as reckoned in gold pieces).

Thanks Homer. I enjoyed that a lot. It is good to know how the tower came about and a bit about how things were in the early days.

THAT's the story of my beloved Hall? I'm really honored that you took the time to write this bit of history for us, Homer. I use the Hall all the time for its incredible collection of runebooks on the roof and its small but very important museum on the ground floor.

It shows something about the type of player here (at least most of us) that gold earned somewhat questionably would be immediately (and without a whiff of remorse or complaint) spent on something to make life better for the community as a whole. This is the spirit of WOD, and I can surely understand why the oldbies would be horrified to see it erode over time. Maybe some more stories like this would prove inspirational to the total newbs and almost newbs (like me). Keep them coming.