#16 - Magmus - Born 3 May 2003 - 12 Days 12 Hours

I said I was going to finish this 25th Anniversary feature and I will, although it might take until the 30th to do it. So, where were we when we left off?

Out of sequence, that's where. The last entry was for Shonki, the gnome cleric I took over from Mrs. Bhagpuss and ended up playing as my main for more than a year. That post went up back in October last year and naturally, when I decided to write another, I'd forgotten where I'd got to. 

Surprisingly, I did make some notes for the project back at the start and I still have them, so I was able to check who was up next. I looked at the last post and saw Shonki was #14 so I looked down the list for #15 and found it was... Shonki. My Shadowknight, Timblewoot, was actually #14, as it says in the title of his own post.

I thought for a moment maybe they'd both been created on the same day. I do have a couple of  characters ranked 17= for just that reason. In fact, they'll be in the post after this one because, as you can see from the title, I'm up to #16 now. But no, I just got the numbers wrong. Shonki is really #15.

That leaves me with the dilemma of whether to go back and edit the title of a post that's over half a year old, something I'd never normally do. I've kind of solved that problem by writing about it here, though. If I did go back and change it, this introduction wouldn't make any sense any more (That's assuming it does now..) so I guess I'll leave everything as it is.

Which brings us, at last, to the true subject of the post: Magmus. It's just as well I had something to vamp with up to now because I don't have an awful lot to say about him.

Perhaps the most interesting thing, from my perspective at least, is that he's the original Magmus. I have a whole load of characters of that name now, scattered across a bunch of games |I barely remember, but he was the first. 

I didn't specifically pick "Magmus" as the name I was going to use for throwaway characters but that's what it ended up being. Later, when I was starting to feel a little tired of making up a new name for every single character I rolled in what was an ever-increasing number of games and servers, his name came to mind as a useful generic. It had three very attractive features as far as I was concerned: it was short, I could remember it and no-one else ever seemed to want it. 

When I came up with it the first time, though, it was just another in an  ever-increasing liturgy of one-offs. And anyway, the original Magmus wasn't even supposed to be called "Magmus". I wanted to call him Magnus (God knows why.) but to no-one's surprise, I'm sure, that turned out to be taken. So, employing all the wit and subtlety David Walliams has become famous for, I changed one letter of his name and voila! There he was. 

Magmus was the first character I created on the exciting new, non-transfer server, Stromm, which came online on 3 May 2003 and which was the first what we'd now call "fresh start" server we'd seen in the game for quite a while. I had to fact-check those dates for this post but I'm pleased to say I found a very authorative source to confirm my memory of the event:

 

It's hard to say whether that gives me more or less confidence in AI. 

Magmus is a cleric, currently Level 63, making him my second-highest of that class, only three levels behind Shonki but with a quarter of the time played. He must really have gone hard at some point but I honestly can't remember much about it.

Not to pre-empt a couple more entries that will be coming later in the series but Stromm eventually became a server on which Mrs Bhagpuss and I spent a good deal of time duoing. That was later, though, when we came back to the game after a year or two away.

When the server was new, we were still heavily into proper, old-school EQ grouping. We started on Stromm on Day One, knowing no-one and yet in a matter of days we'd made acquaintances who soon became friends and then became a guild. It goes without saying I can rememember none of their names now.

On our first run on Stromm, none of that lasted too long. Two or three months, maybe. And Magmus didn't feature much in any of it. The day after he was borne I gave him a sister called Magmia (He's a Dwarf, she's a Gnome. Don't ask how that works...) and she pretty much shunted him into the shadows right away.

Magmia, however, deserves - and will get - her own post, so she can wait to tell her story then. This is Magmus's biography, such as it is, and I'm pretty sure he doesn't want to share any of his time in the sun with his annoyingly bumptious little sister.

It's just a shame I have so little to say about him. I have no idea when or how he got into the sixties. It sure as hell wasn't back in that original run, when I think he'd have been lucky to have made it into double figures. Maybe he was one of the featured players in all that duoing we did a few years later. A cleric is always good in a duo.

I can see, looking at his bags, which are, of course, full, that he's been out relatively recently. He's carrying several rabbits from the Pride events and they haven't been around that long. That may well turn out to have been his final outing, though. I think his chances of doing much more are extremely limited. He's probably retired already, if I'm going to be realistic about it.

So that wasn't much of an entry in the series, was it? Never mind, Magmia will make up for her brother's shortcomings. Like she always does.

Also, since I'm here, I'll just mention one other thing that happened when I logged in today to take some screenshots for the post. 

They've just added a button to server select that lets you see the names of all your characters on each server without having to log in. ABOUT TIME!!!

The time and stress that would have saved me last year, when I was doing the background research for all of this! That'a  few hours of my life I'll never get back. 

Still, at least it encourages me to carry on with the rest of the series. You can thank Daybreak for that.