Mom the Explorer.

Mom and I have been having some trouble "meeting" in game recently, so she's been doing some solo questing and general running around. Her learning curve is steep, but she's interested and wants to keep going. Which is great!

Anyway, in a phone conversation she admitted to me that she had gotten Jolynne lost. "Whereabouts is she?" I asked. "Uh... some place with a guy in green and a fiery chimney," she replied. This didn't ring a bell (yeah okay, recognition fail, but I usually play Horde and I don't know the dwarf lands off the top of my head). So I asked her to log in, take a look around, and send me an email telling me the place name of her location, and any NPC names nearby. The plan was that I would look them up, locate her and tell her where to go next.

Today I got the email. Somehow, she'd managed to get herself from Coldridge Valley to Amberstill Ranch in Dun Morogh. Don't tell me how she did it -- I still don't know, but I'm kinda impressed with her exploration ability!

Fortunately she didn't run into any trouble on her epic journey, which was good, as I'm not sure she'd know how to resurrect from her corpse yet...

Seeing as she was way the heck out there, I logged onto another Alliance alt I'd made to help her quest. This one is only level 6 (so far) but she's a paladin, which is handy in case Mom needs heals. Also my baby pally can buff her and tank for her if needed.

I ran my pally out to Mom, explained how to put me on Follow, and led her back to the safety of Kharanos. On the way I explained about the friendly Mountaineer patrols, the safety of sticking to the road, and how to read a signpost. Yep, today was a big learning day!

I showed her the Thunderbrew Distillery Inn and explained how to set her hearthstone. She had to log out right away because she had to take a phone call and wasn't sure how long it would be, so I explained how to log out properly. Before this, she'd simply been closing WoW and leaving poor Jolynne out in the snow.

Based on this, I decided Mom needed to learn some basics that I might not have the opportunity to explain properly while we're busy on the game. So after getting her permission, I'll be writing her some lessons and sending them through email. Some will simply be explanations, others will have "homework" so that even if I'm not online, she can log in and familiarize herself with how the game works. I'll post these on the blog as well.

And with the hearthstone set, hopefully she won't get lost. Handy things, hearthstones!

By the way... the "guy in green" was a passing Mountaineer guard, and the "fiery chimney" was the light in a stone fence at the side of the road. Yeah, that wouldn't have helped much. ;)