The Kindness of Strangers
stargrace 
[11/50]
For a few weekends now I’ve been taking my two priests (Oshi, Maivis) over to F26 on the Xanadu map for sermons. I leave them up for the entire weekend, and when it’s my turn, I run a sermon. If we have enough players (7 total, all have to be premium) my prayers get re-set from the 5-a-day limit, and I’m able to earn a bit more faith for the day. Otherwise, I just wait the 3h timer to sermon again. In order for sermons to work “properly” everyone should leave their characters online even when they have to go AFK. The characters don’t need to do anything, they just need to stand around. Unfortunately there are always a few who tend to log out right after their sermons. When you do that, it means the rest of the preachers (you can only preach every 30 minutes due to alignment gains) won’t get the gains from having you around.
When the sermons dipped below the .120 required for prayer re-sets, I sent them back home. On the forums the next day I received a message from the owner of the sermon deed, and she had an interesting proposition for me. She mentioned that her time in Wurm as of late has been strained, and that she was longing for other games. She didn’t want to see her two deeds fall into disuse (and thus become disbanded properties) so she was offering me two deeds completely free of charge, so long as I agreed to keep them running for as long as possible. One deed is the area where sermons have been held and there’s also a market in the same place, and the second deed is a maze that players can adventure through. Each place costs a few silver a month in upkeep, but are lovely locations that have a lot of history for the area.
I already own two of my own deeds, but I really dislike it when people leave (for whatever reason) and then seeing their deeds become disbanded. I get that it’s the nature of the game, but it still makes me sad. So, I agreed.
Maivis (my priest) would take over the sermon / market deed, and the mayor came with the deed to the maze, so there was nothing for me to do in that regard except make sure that there was enough upkeep paid to keep it running. No problem there. While I had three of my characters settled at the sermon location, a few more stopped by – enough for us to run weekend sermons with prayer resets.
Perfect!
It was completely unexpected, and I had no inclination that I’d be taking over these deeds. I’m thankful that the owner trusted me enough with her hard work, both places are beautiful. She also included a few champion pets, such as the wolf pictured above – I know it currently looks like a zombie, but that’s a left over effect from Halloween, and is actually a wolf.
The community is just part of the reason I love Wurm Online, and one of the major reasons I continue to play, even 6 years later.