Lost Souls is a MUD, a free text-based multi-player online RPG (role-playing game). The theme of the setting is medieval fantasy, with elements drawn from a wide variety of sources alongside entirely original content. Your character in the game battles monsters, develops skills, advances in ability, pursues quests, and explores the wide, detailed world. Lost Souls was founded in 1990, and has been under continuous development for nineteen years. While many MUDs regard themselves as essentially finished works, Lost Souls takes pride in always working to improve its technology and design, reinventing the game experience continually.

Lost Souls is incredibly complex. That complexity, in fact, is what brings many of us back year after year. Even those of us who have been playing for years still are finding new things. So, my first advice would be not to let it overwhelm you. Enjoy it for what it is -- and worry about figuring out pieces at a time. If you try to absorb the entirety of everything at once, you`ll probably explode. With that in mind, I`d suggest picking one thing you want to try. This is even done by us long-timers...you`ll often see in OOC something like: "I want to try an Amberite Sentinel and see how high strength I can get..I think that might really work." You can`t do everything with one character, (although if you have fun trying, I`d say go for it)! But you`ll probably have a more rewarding sense of accomplishment if you just stick to one thing...see the section on Skills/Specialties for more about this. Once you have in mind what you want to try, create a character (don`t worry too much about stats and such yet) and read the help once you begin the game. Read, read, read (this is a text-based game, after all!). Don`t feel that you have to read everything, but you should at least read up on the basics.

This isn`t (really) a level based game. You get far more mileage out of increasing your skills, which is why you just read about them. Skills and specialties are probably the most important thing to understand about your character. If you`ve read up on speciaties and still don`t "get" why, ask someone. Skills are your "power". Being good in particular skills are what are going to increase your effectiveness in combat. Since your stats influence how many specialties you get, you should be thinking of how many specialty points you need per attribute, in general... Or, more plainly, if you need lots of dexterity specialties for your guild, you probably shouldn`t have an extremely low dex. You can overcome this somewhat with levels: at 5 statistic points a level, that`s 245 by the time you hit level 50...and so you can make up for choices that aren`t perfectly min-maxed. So everyone asks "What to get?". Well, combat is mainly how you get experience in the game, so you need to make sure you can survive that. With some exceptions (and there`s always exceptions in LS) you should probably stick with one weapon class. Put a decent amount of specialties into that. Then pick a way to defend yourself. You may count on parrying with your weapon, or if you`re tiny and/or fly, dodge and flight may serve you better. Some guilds are going to rely heavily on special skills for combat effectiveness, so now it the time to start thinking about that as well. With the rough idea of what you what to have for statistics and skill specialties, think about what guild and associations you want to be in.

Your guild is going to dictate what attributes you want, and so are the associations you want to join. Also, it is usually going to decide your alignment, are you good? Evil? Ordered? Chaotic? Or maybe some or none of all of those?

As you can see from the guild, ELF like to have WIL, CHA and luck, which faerie get some of, so that`s a nice bonus. They`re pretty big in all of those, and they have a good amount of INT too, which I`ll need for guild skills. On the down side, the low size and con/str means I can`t really take very much in the way of punishment. I decided to max my STR, WIL, INT and CHA. My reasoning was STR to carry things, WIL/CHA for invocation power, INT for guild skills. That meant I had to minimize DEX (an uncommon faerie choice) and size. I figured I`d just have to live with not having the most fighty ELF, but that`s OK! Small size actually gives some minor bonuses to dodge (harder to hit) which I figured may help a little. Of course, if I did get hit, I`d hurt badly.