Adrian, a paladin of Lyris.

Adrian had spent nearly three months playing Enchanted Embrace. After a week or two trying the various game environments and servers he had concentrated his game time in the world of Magium in the city of Lyris. The city was a standard medieval setting, demihumans though they existed were fairly rare and his time had been divided between social advancement in the city itself and questing in the wilderness and dungeons outside to level up his character. His avatar was by Enchanted Embrace standards not so different to his real life body. Taller by a few inches, younger, far more toned in muscle and handsome of course, but still recognisable as his thirty seven year old real world self. A paladin by class, he had concentrated on the martial rather than the spiritual path of character developement and built his avatar into a powerhouse able to deal out and absorb impressive amounts of damage, a tank in game terms.

Lyris was considered a vanilla server. Non consensual sex was prohibited and mods limiting the free action of players were banned. That is not to say there was not PVP conflicts in the server, but these were in the form of political intrigue and consensual duels in designated zones. Adrian had fought such duels in the arena himself, winning most of those. The rewards of such duels beside the experiance gained was scant though and your defeated opponent would be back on his feet within a minute of being "slain".

The problem facing Adrian now in the game was the cost of establishing his own stronghold, a castle in the relatively safe habitated zone around the city. To fully equip said castle and hire the NPC's to staff it required large amounts of gold and the vanilla settings of Lyris limited the rewards from quests, it would take days of grinding to amass the wealth he would need to build an impressive fortress and fill it with the hired NPC's to bring it to life. Other servers though offered much higher rewards, for much higher risks.

Adrian looked again at the list of bounties. There was no escaping the fact that Zyrsu offered by far the greatest rewards for bounties in the Magium world. This was of course because of the in game risks of adventuring in that server. Defeat in Zyrsu resulted in the winner being free to loot the defeated, and loss of high level equipment was the least of the dangers. Capture was an option rather than slaying, and rumours of a flourishing trade in defeated player characters were rife. The few established safe cities of the server attempted to combat this, offering large bounties on the slavers but were unable to enforce their rule beyond a bowshot of their walls.

Finally reaching a decision Adrian left the guidhall he called home until he could construct his own castle and headed towards the portals that connected to other Magium servers. Eventually he hoped to install a portal of his own in the castle he was constructing, but these were extremely expensive so for now he must use the city of Lyris portal for a moderate fee.