Dranven / Lo Kahn

Dranven lasted a week in Sawato. That was about as long as anyone with sense stayed inside the walls of a town on Darktide, where every character on the screen was a threat and the only law was whoever happened to be standing at the lifestone. He walked out of the gate a player killer and never really walked back in. After that, towns were places you went to kill people.

Out in the grass he found Son of Boar Child doing the same thing to the same road. Neither of them flinched. They became friends instead, and then the most constant raiding pair on the server, and stayed that way for three years. Boar's page has that part: the tusker camp, the year in the dunes, The Gimps. It was Boar who walked him into Og's tree.

Dranven II was an Og Mage, specialized Life and Creature, the build the DNN's template guide named after the monarch and credited Dranven for. He knew it well enough to correct the guide in its own comments. It was a mage that didn't burn you down. It took you apart.

Then the Smurfs. Dranven was riding with Pappa Smurf's people by the end of 2001, and he had an idea. A character that never tied to a lifestone came back wherever it died or logged out, and the game would never move it. So they rolled new characters, walked them deep into an Olthoi dungeon where nobody came, and left them there macroing. By the time anyone noticed, the new Smurfs were in their mid-90s, and every one of them was wearing Greater Shadow Armor.

Lo Kahn was his. A Sho, rolled on the 14th of December 2001, built to a template Dranven pitched to the others himself: specialized Creature, Life and Magic Defense, and no War Magic at all until somewhere around level 80. The server called it a Grief Mage. It didn't kill you, not at first. It took your strength, your speed, your armor, your will to cast, piece by piece, and shrugged off whatever you managed to throw back, until there was nothing left of you that could fight. Later he respecced to Magic Defense and War, a Battle Mage, the build of a man who had stopped worrying about what you could do to him and started thinking about how fast you would die. -D- gave him the Greater Shadow Armor, and he wore it nearly every day, on a server where you dropped what you wore: the pre-patch Greater Shadow Amuli, PPGSA, for a while, under an Olthoi helm, purple or green, or a Virindi Mask, the pale face in a black hood or a red one. Later he went to a white Celdon top and Celdon sleeves over black Amuli leggings trimmed in white, under a black Heaume, the helm he wore more than any other; for a while it was the green Ice Heaume of Frore.

Lo Kahn was the name people knew. He did not die. Two on one was a weeknight, three on one wasn't much worse; he rebuffed in the middle of it with people still hitting him, and walked out. He took the Aerlinthe Recall with one partner, a quest built for nine, and the whole server got the announcement. He never ran PK Hunter, so every one of his kills on the ladder was a witness kill, somebody else's plugin catching him in a crowd. It counted 1,654 of them anyway, and put him 8th on Darktide in September 2003. He raided under a fellowship he named Im A Princess, and most nights it was a fellowship of one. Anti Parazi, the character of Byron "Reckful" Bernstein, went from server to server challenging the best and beating them. When he challenged Darktide, Lo Kahn answered and won. It was the hardest fight Dranven ever had.