Tales Of Asheron's Call - An overview
So where to start? Every tale must have a beginning, but most do not start where they begin. There is a background and situations that bring about the beginning of the tale. So here we shall set the stage for the tale that we shall tell. Or I shall tell, you don't get to tell it, it's not your tale, it's mine 
A long time ago in the far away land of Dereth... (cue flashy music) Towards the end of 1999 this company called Turbine released a game called Asheron's Call. It was one of those massive multiplayer online roleplaying games. Well I had played the last week or two of the beta so I decided to buy the game. It was my first online game and I quickly grew to like it. My first character was "Dani the Crazed" a mostly worthless joat. But that was ok, I had fun and met lots of exciting people. And learned that it would be fun to be a mage.
Asheron's Call had an allegiance system whereby you could swear allegiance to someone and you would become their vassal and they your patron. From a practical standpoint this would give the patron free xp. In theory it would also help new players and form communities. Well as Dani the Crazed I gathered a handful of vassals but none lasted long, until Zapan Lee. He became my special vassal, because I then had my second character, "Psycho Mage", swear allegiance to him.
Sidenote time: while I am male, all of my characters were female. I had two reasons for this, first I wanted to be a girl. And second, if I'm going to spend hours staring at the same person I'd rather it be a woman then a man (even if it is a digital person). It didn't really matter from a game standpoint, you stood or fell by what you did, not what gender your character was. But back to my tale.
So I functionally retired Dani the Crazed and played with Psycho Mage. And play I did, by the time PM (as people tended to call me) was one year old our time, she was just over three months old game time. Which means I averaged 8 hours a day in game for that year. I met lots of people, people in Australia, Japan, England, all over America, and just down the street.
The allegiance system supported twelve direct vassals, each of whom could have twelve of their own and so on down the line. At my high point (numberwise) I had 250ish (I want to say 265, but I could be off) followers and my monarch (my patrons patron) had a little over 2000.
That was alot of people, and I ran around doing all sorts of stuff with them. Mostly quests and such in game, but I met a few of them in real life as well. One friend came over from Australia to visit a bunch of us, another drove to Niagara Falls with his wife and stopped by on their return trip. And another couple lived literally down the street.
The people down the road were interesting. What are the odds that I would play a game, pick the right server, run around the game world randomly, and meet two people that live that close to me. It was rather funny when we realized it. They said they were going out to dinner and named a local restaurant. I asked them if it was the one I thought it was and we laughed about it. We did get together and spent some time together, but that is a story for another time.
Well I played the game seriously for a year, not so seriously for about another year, and then let my account sit for another year or so. In the end I realized I hadn't logged on in months so I canceled the account, no point in paying for a service I'm no longer using.
As for why I left, I could name excuses, such as how they kept changing the game making it less fun, or how it felt odd to pay repeatedly for a game, but in the end there was one concrete reason I left the game. But in the interests of a true suspense story, haha, no answer for you. If you've been paying attention I'm sure you can figure it out. If not, I'll answer it next time I continue this story.
From here I can go two ways. I can continue more precise tales about my time in Dereth and what happened there. Or I can continue on with the people down the street. In time I'll likely do both, but for now here is some background to a story.