Talien's history begins in one of Swordquest adventure books, "Quest for the Unicorn's Horn." The quest involved one Talien, a young Kuven (whatever that is) and leader of one hundred men. He gained his position after the premature death of his father at the hands of ogres, and he soon finds that a position of power doesn't make his life any easier. Because I ran my own Dungeons & Dragons campaign at the time, Talien didn't often get the opportunity to adventure. Since the books were compatible with the game system, I ported Talien over whenever I got the chance to play. Which is sort of pathetic, I know.

Still starved for adventure, Talien was then ported into the Temple of Apshai game. What was great about the Temple of Apshai was that it used Dungeons & Dragons statistics, and you could enter your character "as is" into the game. So Talien continued his adventuring career, solo, from game book to computer game.

By the time Talien was actually given the opportunity to be used in a genuine role-playing game, he was 12th level. Since Temple of Apshai didn't have classes, I was faced with the challenge of making him as versatile as possible (because in Temple of Apshai, you read scrolls, fought, cast spells, and basically did it all). He ended up a dual-classed Thief/Ranger, able to read scrolls and cast spells, but still capable of going toe-to-toe with a monster or three.

Talien finally got to play in a role-playing game. The details are fuzzy, but in his first adventure, Talien and his party were required to return a artifact of incredible power to a king. When the party found out that the king was not going to pay them for the return of this powerful, soul-capturing gem, they decided to teleport a rust monster into his palace and teleport themselves out. Considering his earlier career was a member of the king's guard (a position carried over from his novel of origination), this branded him something of a criminal for awhile.

It sounds decidedly unheroic, but this was Talien's high point in his career.

Then Talien died.

This was usually the way things went in role-playing games where I wasn't the Game Master. Back then, we didn't understand the concept of character continuity. Would-be heroes died a lot.

It was "Land Beyond the Magic Mirror":

It gets better:

By the time we got to this point, the very last part of the module, our party was more than a little distrustful of anything this bizarre. And of course, whenever you're playing in a module written by Gary Gygax, EVERYTHING is a trap. I was not disappointed.

This much madness was simply too much for Talien. He also has an astounding capacity for self-destruction that far exceeds his enemies capabilities. The battle devolved into immediate chaos, and Talien decided to move to the most sheltered part of the room -- a very large soup tureen. In an act of derring-do, he swung from a chandelier and dove straight into the innocent-looking tureen...

It was not an innocent-looking soup tureen.

It was a Bag of Devouring. If you're not aware of precisely what a Bag of Devouring is, it's a nasty imitator of a Bag of Holding, and it...well, you probably guessed it devours things instead of holding them. So Talien ended up being lunch for a soup tureen that acted like a bag that acted like a big hungry T-Rex. All without the help of the barbed devil telling Talien to hop into it.

Bags of Devouring do nasty things like make your character "disappear forever." Gary Gygax was, as usual, merciless in his assessment of my foolish fate.

No joke! The Game Master was fortunately much kinder than Mr. Gygax, and he let Talien be literally devoured -- all that was left was a few pieces of him floating around in the tureen, but that meant Talien could, at some point, be resurrected. So armed with Talien's finger, the adventuring party (who did survive that last battle despite Gary's best efforts) went on their way...

And promptly forgot about the finger sitting on Claven Mastherik's, an infamous necromancer, mantelpiece.

Years passed in game time and real life, and Talien was forgotten by most players and adventurers. Since I was Dungeon Master, nobody was really inclined to start me playing Talien again. So Talien languished and was sure to give everyone the finger who noticed him in a little glass case on the mantelpiece, because frankly, that's all he had to give.

Time passed, and Claven ascended in power as well as megalomania. He discovered nasty things like Defiler magic, and suddenly his advancement increased at high speeds. Then Claven realized he had the power to clone living beings from flesh, and all he needed was a small amount.

Like say, a finger.

So Claven decided to start regrowing Talien. Since his apprentice had died in an unfortunate lightning bolt accident on Welstar's moon, Claven also began cloning a new apprentice, Gabrielle Baker.

Imagine Talien's surprise when he woke up, months later, to find himself reintegrated and naked, next to a woman who looked equally bewildered. Claven wasn't very good about watching his petri dishes, and the cloning process just continued naturally, unattended, while the Gray Necromancer was away.

So Talien and Gabrielle decided to get the hell out of there, as quickly as possible. Claven didn't see either of them for quite some time, but he wasn't happy to discover his apprentice had abandoned him for another man.

It's about this time that I started playing BatMUD. Playing Talien seemed like a logical thing to do, since he was one of a handful of characters that represented me in a fictional universe (there's others, but this page is about Talien). These were the days of early Bat -- enough of my friends were on there simultaneously that Anipa, the administrator at the time, ran an event to get us the most levels as quickly as possible. I think there was nine of us.

For those of you who remember, and there seems to be no end to the number of crusty-old MUDders who will talk about Bat's "good ole days," this was the time when all you did was run around blowing up things to "tin their corpses." You had a tinning kit, which to this day I'm not entirely sure what it is (but we have them on Retro!), and we would then run off into the fields killing gophers and such. Gophers had the good fortunate of wearing shiny greaves, among other powerful items. It's all a little hazy, but suffice it to say you can do a lot with a random object, room, and monster generator. And that's what we did for a little while, but frankly we were all fairly unimpressed. Talien's class and race at the time weren't particularly memorable either.

Time passed and I found myself playing Ivory Towers. This time I played Lamech. But he'll have to wait for his own page too.

One day, Ivory Towers went down. As in, ball of flames down, the kind that many MUDs never recover from until decades later as a different MUD without any of the character files stored. So Lamech was forced to find new hunting grounds. During that time I wandered MUDs widely, including:

• LP Swat (now missing in action): Lamech existed as the dreaded and mysterious Red Ninja.
• PixieMUD: I played Talien here as a Druid. Never got very far, but a fun place to hang out.
• AmberMUSH: Here I played Deren Usher, who also will have to wait for his own page.
• BatMUD: It seemed like it might be worth checking out again.

We were not disappointed. The new BatMUD's systems were impressive, if somewhat unbalanced. The only thing it lacked was what a major player killing MUD like Ivory Towers had -- guild loyalty. I pushed for it frequently, but they were never able to quite capture those same elements. RetroMUD's not there yet either, but we're working on it.

I migrated from Ivory Towers with a high priest character named Delaron, who was something of Lamech's mentor. When I asked what I should be (forced reincarnations were being given out to convert to the new system), he suggested Abjurer. And so, Talien the Satyr Abjurer was born.

That lasted a whole week. It was very clear that Talien was utterly ineffectual as a defensive spellcaster, and besides, I wanted some flare, some style, some panache. Remember, this is the same character who dove into a soup tureen and thought it was a GOOD thing.

So I finally decided Paladin was the way to go. I liked the knightly ideal, and as I had a particular fondness for the fairer sex (well my character did anyway), Talien could be nothing but a satyr. This decision was alternately put down and praised a variety of times, mostly by people who were playing to get the funny little 0s and 1s next to LEVEL: to increase. I'm not a numbers kind of guy.

Life on BatMUD was never easy. Talien died a lot, usually due to stupidity, sometimes to other players. A group was formed to defend against the depredations of player killers, called the Guardians. Talien was initiated through brief association with someone else (I can't recall whom). After dying a lot, Talien sent an impassioned message to the leader of the Guardians at the time.

Talien's apprenticeship started with this kind fellow, whom I can't remember either. He stayed in his castle, used his chest, and gave Talien a fighting chance.

Eventually, he quit, before Talien was able to become powerful enough to survive on his own. Once again, Talien went back to his membership with the Guardians, and this time Tulkas adopted him.

Tulkas, and his comrade-at-arms Swashbuckler, provided a sort of family for Talien. They protected him, gave him equipment, showed him the ropes, and took advantage of BatMUD at every turn.

Over time, the attitude between the players and the coders gradually soured. Tulkas, and the Guardians in general, were seen as an unwelcome nuisance, usually centered around the American players (Guardians) and the Finnish players (Anti-Guardians?). Regardless, wizards took sides, and pretty soon simply being a Guardian was an unhealthy thing to be.

As Talien ascended in the ranks, the Paladin Guild got its act together. Originally founded by Zonni, who displayed nothing but disdain for the paladin guild in general (we had a glowing violet badge that identified us as paladins, it wasn't pretty), ended up having a rather powerful, organized force of Paladins on his hands. We were organized into three groups of Archpaladins, who then helped and guided the Paladins beneath them. We took on squires as apprentices, taught them social etiquette, and otherwise established a force of Paladins who were loyal to their guild and each other.

We finally had the guild loyalty and role-playing that Ivory Towers possessed. This was something of a novelty on a MUD where role-playing was generally sneered upon. But it worked.

For a little while anyway.

The Paladin leaders were very tight both on and off the MUD. When you have social groups of this nature, disagreements are inevitable. A very unpleasant situation erupted between myself and another player and friend in real life, and the social group was divided, taking sides with my views or the "other guy's."

This was the beginning of the end of Paladin unity. Once the Paladins were divided from those external pressures, it all started to fall apart. It all came to an end when Talien fought the one monster he couldn't not conquer with a sword...

Zonni himself.

The Paladin guild continued to be subjected to humiliating changes, not the least of which was a "glow" that they gave off at random times, which healed good party members, and harmed evil ones. This actually increased Talien's popularity for a little while. It was obviously too powerful, and to compensate, a very harsh alignment restriction was implemented. This made being a Paladin a living hell.

The problem was that it was a downward spiral. The Paladin deity, Faerown punished Paladins whose alignments were not exceptionally good. And boy was he a harsh deity: he covered you in scars, hit you with bolts of holy lightning, and otherwise reduced the Paladin to a 1 Hit Point, scarred, non-regenerating mess.

Since the only real means to get alignment fixed was to sally forth and kill things, this made Paladinhood fairly impossible. So I did what most players do when they find themselves unplayable, I complained on the Bat channel to Zonni.

Two zaps later, I realized this was not going to be productive. By this time, Tulkas and Swashbuckler had both since moved on, and BatMUD had become a very unfriendly place. Cire was starting up Retroactive, a new MUD that took the best of the good old days of Bat, along with Firefox, another friend of mine and coder at BatMUD. So all three of us left for greener pastures, in the hopes that we would be able to build a better, brighter MUD.

And thus ended Talien's MUD career, never again to step foot on BatMUD.

Talien returned to the Welstarian role-playing game. I combined facets of my experiences on Ivory Towers, BatMUD, and AD&D to create the sordid romance story, "Lamech and Ashley" (in which Talien and Gabrielle are major characters). The novel ends with Talien's marriage to Gabrielle.

Talien continued to contribute to the Welstarian campaign as the Captain of the Guard. His father, Gilgal Radisgad, passed that title on to him once has passed away (Gilgal was a player from BatMUD who adopted Talien as his "son"). How Talien died is also relatively unknown, although by all accounts he died of old age. When his spirit passed into the next realm, it was discovered he was a Changeling satyr -- this neatly explains Talien's dual personalities (a human Captain of the Guard in Keystone City, and a satyr Paladin in Faerwon). His service in the afterlife was exceptional, whereupon he met his soulmate, Maleficent. This also explains how Talien came to be an immortal (see the Statistics section for inserting Talien in your campaign -- c'mon, you know you want to!).

The Welstarian role-playing campaign and events on the MUD are considered to be the same universe. However, the events on the MUD take place about 10 years after the original role-playing AD&D campaign. I've since started up a new role-playing campaign set in Welstar using the World of Darkness rules.

Talien makes a guest appearance in my novel, The Well of Stars. If it ever gets published, you can read all about it!