I've been working on the level quests, and I ran into some undead monsters that killed me very quickly in the quest areas. I died a few times in the statue quest from mummies that I assume were risen from the corpses of dead monsters. I also had to stop doing the St Patric's Island quest because there were two wraiths roaming about that were not mentioned in the quest description, and they dealt 60-70 damage per round, sometimes even over 100 damage (my max hp is 255), and I couldn't focus on the quest with them around. I unwittingly summoned one wraith while doing the quest, and another was already there and when I was in the same room as one I couldn't escape from it. Is there a reason why such overpowered monsters are around in newbie areas? It doesn't make any sense to me.

Hehe, welcome to Batmud mate, a game that detects lack of knowledge and punishes it real hard.
I guess most people would consider it part of the charm.

My recommendation would be to just ignore the quests until you've played the game for a while.
Get familiar with areas (especially those you can newbie transport to), learn where the bad stuff is, and keep trucking along.

And remember, always take care of the corpses as fast as you can.

Are the quests that bad? I love questing, so I'd like to do as many as I can.

Try more tankish(fighterish) reinc, nomad or evil_religious and get more hps etc... Perhaps then you can beat those wraiths.

You can bury corpses with shovel too.

I figure that you are from magical background as you have only 255hp. Batmud guildsystem tune is based on the fact that magical background can not solo (no combat skills and very little hp). If you want to do those quests you need someone who can fight melee with you or then reinc into some backround+guild that allows you to fight melee.

In all aspects magical bg is not really newbie friendly as the more powerful spells that do a lot of damage require some base exp and the first ones like acid arrow and magic missile do only equal or less damage to what a tank of same level could do. And as tanks have 1000 hp and you have 255 you can see why newbie mage is hard path.

Almost every area in batmud has out of depth monsters, so you need to be careful who you fight with, consider command helps with cheking. Often these monsters are not agro so you can avoid fighting them but not always. They can also block so that you can't even run from them.

My primary character was a tank in my last MUD, so I wanted to try a mage-type in this game. I should be able to do fine in BatMUD with my current character if I try hard enough even if I'm a newbie here, so I'm not going to reinc.

Soloing with a mage is quite difficult as Batmud has a very old school "glass cannon" concept of mages. At low levels mages are really just "glass" without much of the cannon thing. To do many of the quests you will need the help of some sort of tank. If you're willing to persevere then a big kudos to you :)

I found this link http://www.niksula.cs.hut.fi/~tiga/bat/NewbieMage.html to be very helpful when i was newbie maging it.


The infinitely wise Presence has much useful advice at http://www.megami.com/batmud.php, and no mention of starting out would be complete without mentioning the grand daddy of areas guides at Dryad's http://www.maroon.com/bat/.

If you need to get around without the newbie posts try Ooga's http://www.zerobelow.net/maps/ or Ggr's http://tnsp.org/maps/. The continents look cool and will give you and idea on how huge this game is.


Best of luck,
Askan

Thank you for the links. I don't intend to solo as a mage (I'm sorry if I gave that impression), but I'm trying to get as many of the quests done on my own as possible, and I'm exploring places to train my racial guild skills (elf). I thought the monsters seemed a little out of depth, but that's because in the last MUD I played for a while, nearly any race/guild combination could do the first ten or so quests alone with a couple exceptions and I had played like BatMUD was that MUD; there are a lot of similarities to both MUDs, which is why I was able to learn this one as quickly as I did.