Name: Alyssa Schnugg
Character Name: Skye Wolfbane
Shard: Catskills/UO: Forever
As a busy single mom struggling to make time for socializing, Alyssa Schnugg turned to the internet. Not only did she find friendship in chat rooms, but she also found a game called Ultima Online. It was in Britannia that Schnugg would make lifelong friends, and end up as the leader of a guild that soon would grow to hundreds of members.
A year or so after Schnugg’s initial pilgrimage to Britannia, the game returned to the forefront of her mind. Unable to get out and socialize like she wanted, she considered using the game as a way to make friends, relive the roleplaying adventures of her youth, and perhaps feel a little less lonely in the process.
“Most of my interneting was in Yahoo chat rooms or other social type forums,” she said. “UO looked cool, and it was a pretty new thing at the time. I was a single mom, and couldn’t go out often, so I liked the social aspect of the game.”
Entering the Catskills server as “Temptress Lydia,” a swordswoman and lumberjack, Schnugg quickly found herself on the pointy end of an orcs’ sword—except in UO, that orc was actually a player.
“I was walking in the game and saw orcs,” Schnugg remembered. “I thought they were mobs and then they started talking to me. I yelled out to my son, ‘What the hell? These NPCs talk? OMG! They’re killing me!’ My son laughed … a lot. And then he explained that the orcs were roleplayers. That got me interested in RP. I didn’t start roleplaying right away, but I started paying attention to them more.”
But if Schnugg was going to survive in the game—and get her revenge on those orcs—she was going to need friends. Luckily, Schnugg had always been the type to go after the things she wanted. If she was going to build a circle of friends in UO, she only needed to look several years in her own past for inspiration.
Read more of Alyssa Schnugg’s story in Braving Britannia: Tales of Melancholy, Malice, and Peril in Ultima Online!
BRAVING BRITANNIA 