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Tour of Wyvren's Hell - Jan 19, 2015

This area tour was run by Dentin. A heavily edited transcript of the text with notes and additions is provided below.

Hell was an area created by the god Wyvren in the very early days of the game. It was huge, and had a lot of useful things in it for players, at a time when the number of areas on the server was pretty thin. It was taken offline and turned into a museum nearly a decade after its initial construction by request of the area author.

This tour starts from one of the old linkage points on the southern end of the area.

For a previous tour transcript of this area, there is a Transcript of Wyvren's Hell Tour 2013 which contains additional information and trivia.


Dentin: for starters, this was one of the first areas added to the game, about 19 and a half years ago

Dentin: it was built in pieces by wyvren in the summer of 1995

Dentin: Wyvren was the second builder ever, other than me. The first one was Loki

Dentin: Loki's mortal on hidden worlds was Thantos, which is where thantos the executioner got his name

Dentin: right now, we're at the entrance. This room used to connect south to the light forest east of ralnoth


Dentin: this room is one of the special teleport rooms on the game

Dentin: these rooms came later, but the basic idea is that if you're in a teleport room and you teleport, you'll end up in another teleport room

Dentin: this is one of two ways you can get into the area right now. The first way is to teleport at random and hope you land here

Dentin: the second way is to use a teleport room. The teleport rooms take about five minutes, wheras random teleporting might never get you into the area

Dentin: to answer slej's question, there are other teleport rooms scattered about the game

Dentin: the reason its so easy to get here using the teleport rooms is because there's only about a dozen of them. I'm pretty sure there's one straight north of the aozumi waypoint


Dentin: this black willow wasn't originally a black willow

Dentin: the reason it's important is because it too came from hidden worlds, the game I originally started playing muds on

Dentin: on HW, there was an area which had a black ogre in it. Wyvren added it here, only she changed the name to "The black ochre" instead of ogre

Dentin: eventually she turned it into a willow. to this day, im not sure why

Dentin: if you looked at the willow before it died, you'll see that it still carries the belt of ogre kind

Dentin: that's why it has that belt :)

Dentin: just to be clear, this area was not ported from anywhere - it is original, but it happens to have a number of mobs in it that were based off mobs we saw elsewhere


Dentin: the entrance to the area splits, with one path going east and one path going west. The west path leads to the willow and the lake. this path leads to the river of blood

Dentin: I always thought this was one of the creepier parts of the area. The river of blood flows downhill almost to the entrance and it's got wandering blood clots in it. Like eww man


Shryth: it doesn't exactly fit the common idea of what hell looks like

Dentin: yeah, this doesnt exactly fit the common idea of what hell would look like. That's because technically, this area was supposed to be about ten areas, and this section was really supposed to be the limbo leading in to hell

Dentin: there are some weird creepy thing in here, like the river of blood, but most of it is for all intents and purposes wasteland


Dentin: two things before I forget: the animal trap, and the wolverine

Dentin: for years, like a decade, one of the best low level items for neck was the spiked collars from the wolverines

Dentin: people would save them for their multis, or come here and get them for noobs etc

Dentin: but even before that, there was an animal trap of some sort in here that was leveling equipment. You could use the animal trap to lower your hitpoints, so that when you leveled you got more hitpoints per level

Dentin: that leveling system doesnt exist anymore, but its still pretty funny to think about. We had all this equipment for low level players but it was in high level areas like this where only high levels could get it

Dentin: it meant that if you didnt have a high level friend when you were staring out, your first character was guaranteed to suck

Dentin: I have to say I like the new system better

Xvordan: ha. yeah. never would've liked AA with that old equipment leveling system.


Dentin: so there's this big lake out here, and we're walking around the edges of it. There's some parts of the lake we can go across, but other parts we can't - the old areas were a lot like that, with blocking you off from things that should be obvious for no good reason other than we didnt want to build the paths

Dentin: if you have a map, you'll be able to see pieces of the lake as we map it out, but there's big sections that don't have any rooms there

Asuka: wow isn't there an under water section to this lake

Dentin: get this - even though you can't walk from one section of the lake to the other, you can swim underwater to get there anyway

Mathayas: did the concept of underwater already exist then?

Westie: wb wasnt properly around so no wb was needed


Note - the daughter is below the surface of the lake.

Dentin: this is another neat piece of equipment

You take a flannel nightgown from The ghost of the daughter.

Dentin: this nightgown on the girl was another piece of leveling equipment

Dentin: it had 2 intelligence on it, and I believe some negative mana

Dentin: that was an awesome piece of gear back in the day, because you got more mana with a high int and low starting mana

Dentin: later on, it just became an awesome piece of gear in general


Dentin: ok, so who knows what the wilies are?

Dentin: im guessing nobody. wilies are apparently ghostly undead dancers, doomed to dance forever when they die

Dentin: wyvren knew about them, I suspect from her ballet career. She was a dancer, so there are a handful of ballet and other dance related references in here

Dentin: ok, that was myrtha, the queen. She is apparently the evil spirit that has master control over the other wilies in the fairy tales

Dentin: this is myrthas throne. Normally she would be here, but we took so long wandering around that she got bored and left


Dentin: these devilkin trees and lost souls were always pretty funny to me

Dentin: so much of the stuff in this area was low level or cheesy and not hard

Dentin: but then you'd come across the wrong thing, and splat, you're toast

Mathayas: what's a devilkin tree actually, just made up by the builder?

Dentin: I think just made up by the builder mathayas


Dentin: so that druid priest that you guys killed was actually the high level druid teacher for a long time

Dentin: when we first added lethargy, it ended up here on this druid, along with a bunch of other stuff

Dentin: another thing of interest about the druid that was here before you guys murdered him

Dentin: he has the druid cloak, which for years was the number one piece of about body enchantable gear for ac

Rhorae: yep, I used to use that cloak all the time

Westie: this was also the location where druid lost near on a billion xp

Dentin: yeah, that too

Westie: he was half asleep and he cast c greater druid and dead

Slej: oh god

Kaden: rofl wow

Dentin: he only lost 500 million I believe, he had like 980 million on him at the time

Westie: nod i knew it was alot

Dentin: when that happened, something snapped in my brain and I said "thats bullshit" and changed it to cap the loss at 20 million per death


Jorah: when did leveling eq stop becoming a thing?

Mathayas: when ltype 2 was invented, which I think may have been around the year 2004 though that is just a guess

Note - ltype 2 came online in 1997 and quickly became the dominant leveling scheme.


Dentin: and that would be the wolverine and its collar

Dentin: these used to be I believe 5 ac, 2 hit, 1 dam or something similar. Level 18

Note - the wolverine collars were the premier hit/dam equipment at level 20 for literally a decade.


Dentin: the next mob was particularly dangerous

Dentin: coronado was also based on a hidden worlds mob, sorta

Dentin: soon after I started playing HW, a new area opened up called 'headhunters'. It wasnt so much an area as about 20 rooms with some high experience headhunters in it, a volcano, and a fiery phoenix which lived in the volcano

Dentin: somehow, we ended up getting the phoenix and volcano in here because it sounded neat

Dentin: but then wyvren changed the name to coronado, around the same time she changed the ochre to willow

Dentin: the bad thing about coronado is that it wanders

Dentin: jerks would come in here, open the magma, and recall

Dentin: that would let the phoenix out, and it would wander around all over the place until it found someon trying to get collars

Dentin: then it would crater them

Jorah: god you really could be such a jerk with this game then

Westie: used to leave the zone, killed me in dark forest

Rhorae: think I died to that on the way to the druid for a cleric spell

Dentin: between coronado and the bobcat, those two mobs were like 90% of the player deaths in this area

Lilmike: bobcat got me and rhorae a couple times when he was someone else

Dentin: things like this really help me remember just how much anti-griefing stuff has gone into the game over the years, and how impotant it is


Dentin: the screaming ice demon here is yet another HW mob. Keep in mind that for every one of these, there's three or four other original mobs which I dont talk about as much

Dentin: also, the HW mobs came from different zones, and are dramatically different here than they were there

Westie: [this bit] was unlinked for ages

Dentin: one of the more awesome weapons on the game was the ice whip that you could get in this area

Dentin: it was 5d9 plus some high amount of hitroll. It had to change later due to composite issues

Dentin: and the fact that it was low level


Dentin: this is the barrow wight region

Dentin: there's still a couple of unconnected places in here that have god-only doors on them

Dentin: there are wights and wight lords and I believe even an underground chamber of some sort, but I cant remeber the details

Dentin: this is inside one of the mounds. I havent really explored in here, so I'll just show it off and say have at it, for those of you who intend to come back :)


Dentin: and now we head to the castle

A set of wrought-iron gates
At the entrance to a drawbridge leading over a moat a set of wrought iron gates
accompanied by a rather large gargoyle block your path. The only way around him
seems to be through him.
A giant stone gargoyle sits here guarding the gates.

Dentin: that iron crowbar is a key. We'll need it

Dentin: the crowbar was used I believe in the lost spear quest at one point, but I'm pretty sure its not a key anymore

Xvordan: It still is


Dentin: we are now inside the castle proper

Dentin: when I was mid level, I would often come here, sneak into the castle, and farm the crap out of mithril equipment

Dentin: the mithril equipment is on the top floors of the castle, in the watch towers

Inside the southeast watchtower
Sitting silently in the alcove the man stares off into infinity.~O
A lookout is DEAD!

Dentin: there are four lookouts, one at each of the four towers, and four gargoyles, one at the top of each tower

Dentin: the lookouts would prevent you from tgetting to the stone golems with the mithril

Mathayas: mithril equipment apparently has some history to it. I recall mobs in other area refering to it


Standing on the peak of the tower
A giant stone gargoyle sits here guarding the gates.
The gargoyle blocks your path, preventing you from passing.

Xvordan: haha. they block you going back out

Dentin: yeah, that used to be a deathtrap if you were too low level

Dentin: I died many a time trying to take out a gargoyle and failing


Dentin: so, another piece of history

Dentin: on HW, old thalos had stone golems, and those stone golems had mithril equipment

Dentin: here, the golems became gargoyles, and that's where the mithril ended up

Shryth: I believe thalos in here has golems too

Xvordan: haha. yep. the old thalos stone golems that are part of every stock mud

Mathayas: it does have golems yes, but no mithril eq

Dentin: but there was a big, big problem with it at the time - when we built the mithril equipment here, I pretty much copied the stats from the other game

Bodmall: I like that stock area

Dentin: we used those pieces of mithril as a sort of reference for how powerful equipment could be

Dentin: and it just so happens that the first version of the mithril gauntlets was weight 2, ac apply 8, 3 hitroll and 1 damroll

Dentin: level 20

Dentin: You could maybe get those kinds of stats on an artifact these days

Shryth: could we get those back please? :P

Dentin: heh no shryth. We honestly didnt know any better at the time

Dentin: there was no composite, we had to put down numbers somewhere

Dentin: I eventually pulled back the stats on them, until eventually they ended up more normal for AA


Mathayas: when did the actual working composite as we see it today come into play?

Dentin: there was an early version by 1996 I think, but I dont know for sure

Jorah: oh wow. Thought composite was a lot newer. Like at least 5/10 years newer

Dentin: funny thing about the object composite is that at first, the builders really, really didnt like it

Dentin: they said that it limited their freedom, they couldnt build with those kinds of constraints, and that it would never work

Dentin: again, we just didnt know better at the time. Building a mud is a learning experience

Shryth: you're doing a great job of that, even if we can't have 3/3 belts at level 10 :D

Dentin: there have been pretty substantial improvements to it over the years, every few years - for a long time, it wasnt very good at all

Dentin: it took us a long time to figure out that rarity was stupid, and that artifact flags were awesome


A black iron breech loading cannon looks out over the surrounding lands.

Dentin: this cannon weighs 500 pounds, and it's got a special composite exception flag that lets people wield it with only 26 strength

Dentin: for a long time, this was one of those screwball weapons that people would get just to do silly stuff

Mathayas: oh that cannon. lol I used to get that and spam gods with it. not maliciously of course. but I'd leap shit with it and gods would send me tells to stop it. lol

Shryth: level 29 , HUM NOSAVE , damage 1 to 99 slowest crush needs 26 str. , MOVE minus 100, hr minus 6

Shermanator: hadn't noticed the str needed for that. hmm

Mathayas: it used to be 1d127 shryth Dentin: the funny thing about the cannon is that people would have to offload basically all their equipment to pick it up

Dentin: it was right at the limit of what you could pick up with an empty inventory

Rhorae: even now you only have a 20 pound buffer

Mathayas: yeah remember that was what you could get with max str back then


On the flat deck
A keen-eyed archer waits for an opportunity to practice his skills as a marksman.

Dentin: these were just exp mobs

Dentin: if you knew what you were doing and were just strong enough, you could basically run this area indefinitely killing stuff and waiting for it to repop

Dentin: and hardly anyone ever went in here either

Dentin: before instances, farming an area like this was a lot of how people leveled without a group

Shryth: good to know for the 95 port

Dentin: the cannon master though, he used to kill me a lot. Dangerous guy, stay away from him. If you're level 20. ha ha

Mathayas: wow I didn't notice the cannon master was here before now


At this point, the tour went from the roof to the lower floors of the castle.

Dentin: the first floor is a big ring of tunnels inside the castle walls, with a number of rooms in the central area

Dentin: there's a hidden chamber on the first floor and a few other minor things, but nothing really noteworthy. If you want to investigate it later, look for rothgar


Dentin: the promenade floor took me a while to figure out. At some point, the promenade was supposed to be a raised walkway around the lowest floor

Dentin: but because we didnt have mappers in the olden days, and because we didnt know mapping was important, it was all kinds of nonlinear and linked stupid

Dentin: in the center of the promenade, there are four rooms that are a bit lower down. There are four mobs, one in each room

The Peacock Room
A temple dancer dressed in a chiffon hip-skirt and halter walks about the room, swaying to and fro.
Princess Aramin is in excellent condition.

The Gold and Burgundy Room
A beautiful tall slender lady in a burgandy robe sits by the fire and smokes a cigarette.
The Lady Emalphia is in excellent condition.

The Emerald Room
A six foot tall muscular female warrior in emerald glazed armor towers over you.
Shannon of the Celts is in excellent condition.

Dentin: of the four, this one is the most interesting:

A slender lady in a metallic silver jump suit sits in a comfortable chair reading.
Colonel Derring is in excellent condition.
worn on body - (rare) a silver spandex jumpsuit

Dentin: did any of you watch old 1980's and 1970's tv shows?

Dentin: so this mob here is colonel derring, who was the silver-spandex-suited girl in the buck rogers tv series

Dentin: I have no idea what she is doing in hell, other than perhaps after being in buck rogers, it was an improvement


Dentin: the altarian guards were another one of the dangers of this area if you were low level

Dentin: they didnt have swarm code, but it still seemed like they would swarm you at the drop of a hat

Dentin: same with the gunnery sergeant

Dentin: wyvren actually had a lot of interest in the military personally, and I think thats where she got some of the ideas for this zone

Dentin: wyvren was considering joining the military for a while, and she would have been good at it


Dentin: we are now on the bottom floor of the castle

Dentin: if you pay attention, you'll notice that the spiral staircases spread out as they go up into the castle. On the bottom floor, all four staircases are together, while at the top each one ends in one of the towers

Dentin: there's an indoor arboretum thats about a third of the lower floor, thats where we are now

Dentin: you'll notice that some of the mobs in here are dead or ghosts, but nobody else seems to notice

Dentin: this area was supposed to be on the edge - part way to hell, part way to reality, mostly in limbo


Dentin: the lass here has a very interesting weapon

Samon: the famous look of death

Dentin: that look of death was one of the first nonorm damage type weapons

Dentin: it would cut through all resists and saves

Mathayas: and it notably has no damage type

Mathayas: so if you wielded it, it'd be like, "You devastate it!"

Dentin: there are still a few of them that are truly old versions, and when I see people wielding them they post something like +20 on the weapons composite

Dentin: it used to have a much higher dieroll. When we updated the code and changed the weapon, there were only a few of the old ones in existence

Dentin: I only know of two of them right now


Dentin: something else you might have noticed here is that you can knock or pick most everything, and that there's a lot of doors

Dentin: that seems to be uncommon in modern areas

Coffeeking: the door descriptions are a little strange too. One words are comon here


The chef's kitchen
A bizarre machine of torture hangs from the rafters.
A man in a blood covered uniform wanders about with a cleaver.
The chef is DEAD!
Rubi gets Yan's Ultimate Cleaver from the corpse of The chef.

Dentin: take a look at the eggbeater

A three whisked hand crankable egg beater fashioned from the modern unstainable steel.

Dentin: thats the bizarre machine of torture

Dentin: one of the things I always liked about wyvren's areas was the long descs. They usually weren't very long, but the words she used and the way she strung them together almost always elicited a specific feel for a room or place

Dentin: a lot of the time the descriptions would be grammatically incorrect and full of typos, but you'd still see something cool in it

Slej: I've noticed the typos but they are still pretty neat


Sliding through the dumb waiter
[Exits: out ]

Dentin: this is the famous dumbwaiter

Dentin: this fucking thing didnt have an exit in the olden days

Dentin: and there were dumbwaiter exits all over the place

Dernan: rofl

Dentin: so you'd be exploring, do do do and bam, noexit dumbwaiter

Dentin: I must have walked back here a hundred times after accidentally falling in here


Dentin: this is just a background hallway for servants


Dentin: this is basically the end of the area, or very nearly so

Dentin: this machine, the wain, was added long after the original area. Wyvren had planned to add more expansions, and this was the link point

The great machine hovers above the ground in the exact center of the
meditation room. Massive rings, one stone, one metal, one fire, one blood:
rotate in a complex multidimensional fashion. Chords of equally diverse
matter gyrate within the rings. Gazing at the machine induces a fogginess of
the mind, and a sickness in the stomach. The machine is silent, yet you feel
it deep inside yourself, rotating.
You enter the gyromantic wain and become disorientated.

Dentin: by passing through the wain, you end up in the third official part of hell. The first was the plains with the lake and lost souls, the second was the castle

Dentin: I actually don't know all the stuff in here, so we're going to stop here. I've removed the keypass restriction on the doors, so if you guys want to come back and take another look that would be fine


Shermanator: removed what retrictions?

Dentin: there was a restriction on the wain door, I think to keep people out of this section

Dentin: its probably not finished, so explore at your own risk

Dentin: if you're going to explore the area, you might want to start from the beginning so you knmow you can get back here if you die. Or not, if you have death cards


Dentin: anyone got any other questions or comments?


Shryth: the guards in the castle, are their names related to the mud's own name?

Dentin: I dont think so shryth

Dentin: I recall asking wyvren and she said that no, they werent based on alter aeon


Vanzan: is there a deed attached to this?

Odi: killing the siege engine is a deed yes

Dentin: apparently so. it had to have been added fairly recently

Dentin: fairly recently being like 2002


Mathayas: any plans to link this up again?

Dentin: not right now mathayas

Dentin: it would require for all intents and purposes a full rebuild to make it usable

Flamestar: it would be cool to be rebuilt.

Newt: i like having some of the old areas stay old

Dentin: yeah, its kinda like the 1995 port, it gives you something to compare against


Note - the tour ends here.



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