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Interview
with who?
- Larnen Skyfire
Larnen is God of Elephant Mud.
He has created and delivered for the last 7 years, and spared us some of his
very limited time to discuss anything we wanted to know. Read on..
Larnen's workroom is
a place only some have seen. Even the immortals rarely go in there,
choosing instead to blow the head off guarding test monsters in their
own home environments. It has much elephant paraphernalia kicking
about. I waited patiently in a carved wooden chair, before the desk of
the man known as an 'elf in an elephant suit'.
He arrived,
apologising for lateness, and muttering something about having to go
and see Death about Indra and his frequent dieing miles.
I began.
How, why and when did
Elephant Mud start?
The idea of Elephant Mud started in 1992. At this point I was at university at Imperial College in London, and had been playing muds for a couple of years. After two
successive lpmuds (my favourite type) closed down, I decided to put one together that was
going to be stable. Also important was location - for UK mudders there were
practically no good lpmuds in the UK at that point. I had considerable experience both running role playing
games (AD&D in particular) and writing single person adventure games, so I felt I had an advantage
when it came to running an actual mud, which is, in many ways, a combination of the two made
global. As it turns out, it was a good decision. Elephant has remained constantly available for 7
years, and has prospered where many of its peers have faltered in part due to the sound grounding
I, and many others of its founders, have/had in roleplaying and writing games.
Why "Elephant" mud!?
You had to ask :) The easy answer is because I like Elephants, and something like 'Death On a Stick Mud' (or similar) are worryingly common.
A muds name can say a lot about it. Doom Mud says to me that the people running it
couldn't even come up with an original name - what will their areas be like! Elephant may well
be unusual, odd even, but its memorable :) I felt (and still do) that for every
person who decides not to play Ele because it sounds 'daft' there will be two who pick it
from a long list simply because it stands out. And as we know, once people log on, Ele's
unique feel is the best advertisment we could have.
The longer answer is 'ok, so why do you like Elephants so much?' Well,
part of this is to do with conservation, part due to their unique social interactions
which are extremely similar to humans (eg unlike just about every other creature
on the planet, they will mourn their dead). To be honest though, a lot of it stems from
an, err, incident that took place at Azazels house about in about 1989. Azazel,
along with some friends by the names of Fink, Liz and Justin, were, shall we say,
'under the influence' when Fink looked up groggily and said 'Trumpet'. For about
five minutes our muddled brains tried to work out what we were missing (as you do) and
make sense of this clearly profound statement. Fink then looked back up again and said 'A
common Elephant saying'.
Ok, you had to be there, but much laughter followed and 'Elephants'
became a common reference thereafter. :)
Interview
with Larnen: Part 2
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