Our adventures in the Sinking Sands continue apace. For the last  two weeks we puttered about not only in the open desert, but also braved the mean streets of Maj’Dul for the first time. It was a harrowing experience. But, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Doing quests in the Sands is interesting, because even more so than in Enchanted Lands we’re finding ourselves doing dissimilar quests. We’re all going for Blades faction (because it sounds cool), and the random quest-giver-guys seems to want to make sure none of us have the same quest at a given time. That’s fine, just means we tend to have lots of little fiddly quests to deal with at the same time.

Exploring the zone more I’m struck again and again by the contrasts between old world, Desert of Flames, and Faydwer content. I’m glad we jumped into Steamfont when we did, but I think it would have been interesting to see what my opinion would have been if we’d gone old world -> DoF -> KoS -> EoF.  As it is, I’m left feeling like the Sands zone is much nicer than most of the old world areas, but not as nice as Steamfont. (And definitely not as nice as .)

I don’t know why (maybe we’re getting punch-drunk), but the last two weeks have been the source of great merriment during our questing time. One particularly awesome encounter left our Necro lying on the ground, unable to find his feign death icon to disable it. So (displaying the tact and grace that any team leader should have) I teabagged him. Now, I’m not saying I’m proud of this. But I am.

We also had some hilarity ensue when exploring the Rujarkian Cleft. We’d just made a little bit of progress into the zone and encountered the big slave-workers area, which is jam-packed with mobs. We arrived at the door fresh, ready to go, and Brian pulled a nearby slave … who promptly turned and ran around a big rock through some sort of wonderful patching glitch. I can now say I know what an entire room of orcs looks like when they aggro. Thankfully Katie teleported us out of there before anyone other than Brian died, but it was an impressive sight.

Our experience in Maj’dul was a bit more serious. Those Coin guards really don’t like us. Vets, help a guy out: do we want to be gaining rep with all of these folks, or just our chosen Blades? Because if we aren’t going to gain rep with the other two factions, shopping in MD is going to be a bit exciting. Hearing Katie yell “They’re after me!” for the fifth time was just as funny as the first, though. Thankfully, we also stopped Brian from attacking one of the camels.

We’re not going to be playing this week, but next week we’ll get a start on Beetle racing and pull some more of the Maj’dul quests into the sunshine. We have to move onward and upwards … after all, we’re just a few levels off from carpet questing!