Necronium Griefing

Years and years ago, my buddy and I used to play a MUD called Necromium. Necromium was, like most MUDs, hella grindy, but it had some really neat features that kept us coming back. I wasn't terribly high-level, but I still got up to a lot of craziness because my friend's main character was a notorious, hellishly powerful PvP juggernaut and he liked to drag me around on adventures. One of our favourite asshole tricks was to go into a PK zone (Player-Killing zone, an area where you can freely murder other dudes) where I'd dither around in plain sight while he hid, and when someone came along and murdered my wimpy mage, my friend's invincible deathlord would come flying out of the shadows and annihilate them with maximum prejudice before resurrecting me. Sometimes we did this in CPK (Chaotic Player-Killing) zones, which allowed us to steal three items of our choice from the body of the victim. We got some pretty fucking sweet loot and generated a ton of powerless rage while "fishing" this way.


Clanships And You: the coolest game you'll never play

The best and funniest of our Necromium griefs, though, involved a ship. In Necromium you can join a Clan, which is basically a player-made team that can gain access to rad special features like unique shopkeepers, a custom-built clan fortress, and best of all, a clanship. There is (or was, I dunno if Necromium still exists) a huge, in-depth naval travel system in this MUD, complete with detailed ship-to-ship combat where each player has to man a weapon or handle the navigation or whatever, along with multiple extremely cool hidden islands that you can only get to by exploring the world's (fucking massive) oceans. However, clanships are massively expensive, so the majority of players only ever ride on NPC ferry ships that go between the handful of main continents, and a lot of clans are disappointingly protective of their clanships to the point of never wanting to do anything fun with them.

My friend and I thought this was bullshit. He'd been a top-ranking member of a relatively small but quite successful clan for some time, but a bunch of drama had recently caused most of its membership to defect and its leader to quit the game, leaving him as the boss of a clan with a handful of underlings who were never on. He booted them all and invited my shitty mage, sold off absolutely all of our clan assets, and bought a speedy little clanship, making us the smallest clan in the game to own a seafaring vessel larger than a rowboat. For a couple of dudes to share private ownership of a clanship capable of intercontinental travel was unheard-of, but not as unheard-of as what we did next, and infinitely less unheard-of than what we did after that.

See, my friend had frequently been invited to ride on the biggest and most expensive clanship in the game at the time. The clan that owned it was the top-tier experience- and gear-grinding clan, and they were the first to discover the affectionately named Hell Island, a secret zone full of demons which were the most difficult enemies in the entire MUD. Hell Island had never been fully breached, but this clan was trying its best with frequent invasions incorporating all the strongest characters they could recruit. Because they were elitist dicks, this clan was also steadfastly refusing to divulge the slightest hint of Hell Island's coordinates to anyone else. Given how gigantic the ocean is in Necromium, this basically gave them a monopoly on what was then the biggest and coolest mystery in the game.

While riding on their giant clanship, my friend had realized that the clan's navigator was using a macro of some kind to reach Hell Island. It could take up to an hour to sail a course that you knew well, and involved tons of coordinate checking, course adjustments, and occasional doubling back. This guy was nailing the journey in exactly the same time, every time, which was impossible without botting... which was very much against the rules.

So, for the next few weeks, we would spend our free time exploring the seas. He navigated and I manned the single ballista mounted on our piddly little ship, ready to pew pew at any passing sea monsters to keep them at bay until our little boat could escape using its blindingly fast travel speed. It took a fair bit of math and guesswork to give us a potential target area based on the macro's travel time, and a lot of trial and error beyond that, but we eventually found it. We, two idiots on a rickety fishing boat, found Hell Island. We recorded the coordinates and kept our discovery to ourselves. We had a plan, you see.


The men who invented piracy

Anyone could ride on a clanship if they were granted access by the owning clan. However, you could only crew a clanship if you were a member of that clan, were given express permission by the clan leader, or were in a group with the navigator, the person currently or most recently manning the ship's wheel. This made it almost impossible to steal clanships. Almost.

We waited until the big clan was organizing another Hell Island invasion, then quickly sailed out to the secret zone. My buddy then left my group, stripped naked, and had me (slowly) kill him while he was still on the boat, causing him to respawn back at the main continent. This is important because there was no teleportation magic in Necromium except for the Teleport spell, which was completely random and could only move you around the continent you were on, and the Recall ability, which sent you directly to the main city of the continent you were on; dying at sea, however, returned you home to the continent you embarked from, making it a perfect improvised teleport for our scheme. I then moved the ship out of vision range of the dock.

After returning to life, my friend signed up with the Hell Island group and boarded their clanship. A little before reaching Hell Island, he manned one of the cannons and started fooling around, firing out into the ocean and generally being silly. Nobody suspected a thing when he, still manning the cannon, mentioned he'd be AFK for a couple of minutes as they pulled into the dock. The rest of the group piled out of the ship and waited for him to join them.

The instant the last of them was gone, my friend immediately changed his position to the ship's wheel (making himself the navigator), left their group, and pulled away from the dock, stranding them. I sailed our little boat over to the massive warship we'd just hijacked and started following along behind. After an initial period of confusion, the Gossip channel (basically OOC) boiled over with fury and disbelief. It wasn't like the ship was permanently ours or anything, but we'd stranded most of their clan on Hell Island, and until they could retrieve their stolen ship, it would be a goddamn nightmare working out some way to get them back home without giving away the coordinates to their super secret clan hangout island. And, because the island was CPK, anyone showing up to "rescue" them would be equally likely to try to kill them and steal their pricelessly rare endgame equipment.

This was the first time anyone had ever managed to steal a ship in Necromium, and man, did we ever make our debut in style.


The men who invented terrorism

Now that we'd stolen the ship, we were stumped. What the hell were we going to do with it? As soon as we abandoned it somewhere, we'd be unable to get back onto it; in fact, as soon as my friend left the ship's wheel he'd be unable to crew any part of the ship again. On top of that, ships left unoccupied and adrift would periodically respawn back at the docks of the main continent. We had to figure out something really fun to do with this thing. To start with, we returned to the main docks and I moored our own clanship (after slightly damaging it by crashing directly into the fucking docks like a giant idiot, much to my friend's amusement), then hopped out and boarded the stolen vessel.

It didn't take long for us to decide that we wanted to sink one of the primary NPC ferry ships, cutting off travel between the two biggest continents for a lengthy time, simply for the sheer Joker-ish sadistic glee of it. What we didn't realize was that the ferries, despite only being staffed by a single NPC Captain, automatically returned fire with all weapons if attacked. And they had a lot of weapons.

After barely scratching the ship - I think it was called the Cutty Sark - with my one cannon shot, we hurriedly limped away from the docks in somebody else's incredibly expensive and now severely damaged clanship. It now seemed that sinking the ferry was impossible, which of course meant we HAD to do it - hijacking ships was supposed to be impossible, too. So we did the only thing we could think of.

"Hey, anyone on the Cutty Sark?" Gossiped my friend.

A fair number of replies popped up. Lots of passengers. Good

"HAIL SATAN" I Gossiped, as we rammed that motherfucking Cutty Sark at top speed, sinking both it and the monstrously valuable clanship we'd stolen, instantly killing ourselves and about a dozen innocent lowbie players, severing contact between the two primary continents for about an hour, and leaving most of the MUD's biggest clan stranded in the scariest zone in the game until their clanship respawned (which took several real-life days and required a huge payment out of the clan's coffers for repairs).

"Oh god, what the fuck did you do this time, <friend's character's name>" Gossiped one of the game's administrators (immortals, in MUD parlance).

Then my friend told the entire story over Gossip, enormously embarrassing the victim clan in the process, and proceeded to rub salt into the wound by sharing Hell Island's coordinates with the entire playerbase. The immortals thought it was funny as hell, banned a few dudes from the other clan for botting, and did precisely nothing to us. Our caper was a bit of a legend amongst Necromium's players for quite a while afterward.


In short: we stole literally the most expensive thing in the entire world and destroyed it to blow up a schoolbus in Satan's name, and got away with it.