Two Moons MUSH was my very first MUSH, and the game where I’ve had the most characters over the years. Here is a quick summary of all the things I did there.
character data
Hands down, I had more characters on Two Moons than I did on any other game I played after.
tribes
lostholt
Lostholt would have been recognizable to Elfquest fans as the original tribe of Wolfriders, the one where all the major Wolfrider characters from the books resided. On Two Moons, it was merely one of many Wolfrider tribes, but the one from which all others descended.
I didn’t actually run the Lostholt tribe, but was the keeper of its web page for quite some time, since I did have several characters that were tribe members–most notably the healer Ynderra as well as the alts I’d played at Willowholt, who lived in Lostholt after Willowholt was destroyed.
scattered tribe
The Scattered Tribe was an offshoot of my main character Rillwhisper’s original birth tribe–which was in turn an offshoot of the original Wolfriders, breaking off from them in the time of the chieftain Freefoot. They got their name from an event called the Scattering, during which their last true chieftain, Birch, forced all of the tribe to scatter to the four winds to relieve the burden that their great numbers laid upon their lands.
On Two Moons, the Scattered Tribe were one way by which new players could set up a wandering Wolfrider character, handy for joining other established ‘real’ tribes.
the seafarers
The Seafarers were more a roleplay group than a proper tribe–because they were a group of human sailors from a civilization located to the far south of the continent on which Two Moons MUSH was set, and I played their leader, the ship captain Vardeus. We brought them into play on the MUSH to try to see what would happen if more advanced humans were introduced to the culture of elf tribes already in play. A cross between the ancient Greeks and the ancient Celts, the Seafarers–or, as they were better known IC, the sailors of the ship Windrider from the distant land of Vrae–had never before encountered elves, and had a great deal of roleplay trying to convince the various tribes they meant them no harm. Ultimately they headed south once again on a quest to find their homeland, led by my Willowholt character Wayfound.
willowholt
The Willowholt was my very first and longest-running tribe on Two Moons, which I founded pretty much from day one once I started playing there. Led by my character Rillwhisper, who along with her lifemates Trollkiller and Woodhawk and her brother Sweetleaf had been originally created in an offline Elfquest RPG campaign, it became known for being one of the more reclusive tribes on the game as well as one of the most diverse. We had tribe members with blood ties to the Wolfriders, the Gliders, the Go-Backs, the Cat Elves, the Cavedwellers, and the Underworlders, and this diversity of bloods among our numbers led us also to try to be one of the few tribes on the game who tried to maintain diplomatic neutrality with all other groups. Even the controversial ones–the Underworlders and the Gliders. We even had a semi-decent relationship with Winnowill, which was unique among all the ostensibly Wolfrider groups.
We destroyed the Willowholt via severe floods in late 1999, when I began to grow weary of running a tribe and no one else wanted to take it over from me.
miscellaneous plot points
doreel
Doreel, the mad son of a High One who was originally created as a scenario character for the Elfquest RPG, was incarnated on Two Moons back in 1995. He went through several players and several plots, most of which involved my characters: he held Rillwhisper and Strongbow captive; he tried to convince my character Trouble that she was really his long-lost daughter Niriah; he held my amnesiac character Aureole captive, and drove her mad by convincing her she was really a transformed tree. Ree escaped from his clutches, but at the sacrifice of the life of another character of mine, Thicket–whose soul then inhabited Ree’s body and drove her out of Doreel’s grove.
But that wasn’t the last Ree saw of Doreel, as her madness was not healed. She eventually stumbled back to the Grove to demand of him that he heal her, only to fall under his spell anew as he strove to change her into a tree in truth.
When the character Zalehrin was active on TM and unleashing transformed monsters on the populace, I had Rillwhisper–who believed Doreel might be responsible–lead a party into his Grove to investigate. She discovered Ree held captive there, and immediately had her followers capture the Mad One and take Ree into protective custody. This led ultimately to the healing of both Ree and Doreel.
Ree ultimately found peace by conveying Thicket’s soul to the Palace of the High Ones–and being reunited there with her own long-lost lifemate Briarcatch, who had changed his name to Rumor. But Doreel, bowed by the weight of returning sanity and the knowledge of what he had done, began to wander the world–and finally reached Blue Mountain, which was when he passed out of my RP experience.
noonwalker’s valley
A remote valley infested with magically shaped flowers whose pollen drugged elves into heavy sleep and which was inhabited by a band of seven Preservers, Noonwalker’s Valley was another semi-regular plot device of mine. In the backstory I’d written for it, it had been created by Noonwalker of the Scattered Tribe, a treeshaping daughter of my character Rillwhisper’s brother Sweetleaf. Noonwalker became unbalanced by the strain of the Scattering, and once she reached that remote valley, slowly transformed it into a place where elves could stay… forever.
The seven Preservers who made their way into the valley were all too eager to go along with that, and made regular habits of capturing unwary elves who ventured into the place. I ran plots involving my characters Starwing and Talek getting ensnared there, and Rillwhisper’s Recognition with the hunter Lonehowl, which brought Wayfound into being, was set there as well.
Other characters in other tribes sometimes used this place as a plot device as well whenever they needed a reason to explain a character’s unnaturally long absence from the game.