Where it begins

My main is a gnome warrior named Greeble on the Argent Dawn realm. I started playing last October at the behest of two of my friends. One of them gave me a free ten-day trial which allowed me to play, but prevented me from trading with other players or accessing the auction system. After two days I was hooked and upgraded to a paid account.

At some point, WoW helped me to achieve a new rank of geekitude. I've never been a roleplayer; even my high school DnD playing was mostly tongue-in-cheek. When I heard that one of my friends had created a backstory for his WoW main and had purchased a set of clothes to wear around town when he wasn't questing, I thought he was nuts. But within three months I had gotten into the habit of taking off my armor whenever I entered a city, wearing only my shirt, pants, shoes, belt, and tabard because it seemed slightly ridiculous to perform a bunch of business activities (smelting, crafting, selling vendor trash, starting auctions, etc.) while wearing a full suit of heavy armor, a sword, and a shield. It got worse: I started putting my cape on whenever I left Ironforge (after all, it's cold in Dun Morogh), and I'd switch between my guild tabard and private's tabard depending on whether or not what I was doing seemed to be official Alliance business.

Cementing the new apex of my nerdiness, I concocted a backstory for Greeble, based on his in-game adventures. So here's Greeble's story:

Born in Gnomeregan, Greeble was very young when the troggs invaded. Greeble's father was corrupted by the ensuing radiation accident, and now runs around Gnomer terrorizing adventurers. Greeble and his mother escaped to Coldridge Valley, where they lived in a refugee camp. When he was about 17, Greeble's mother was killed by a trogg. Rather than declare a blood feud with all of troggdom, Greeble took his mother's death as one more of life's screw-jobs. With his mother dead and his father zombified, he had nothing to live for, but lacked the initiative necessary to contemplate suicide. With nothing better to do, he decided to live as a vagrant adventurer. The path of least resistance seemed to be warrior training, so he logged a few training sessions with a bored dwarf warrior before setting out for Khranos. There, he slept in various corners while subsisting on the meager rewards from menial quests. A number of unpleasant run-ins with yetis at this point led Greeble to develop a rather unsettling bloodlust for the hairy critters, which he hasn't been able to shake.

Khranos was a pretty unpleasant place, so Greeble moved on to Ironforge fairly quickly. Ironforge isn't, however, a great place for an unskilled, penniless gnome to hang around, so he moved on to Thelsamar. Loch Modan was very good to Greeble; it was there where he began to learn his first profession; the local dwarves were much friendlier than those in Dun Morogh, and gladly shared their mining techniques with him. He also began to make money there, thanks largely to the ample wildlife and the rudimentary engineering training he had picked up in Ironforge. Loch Modan was also where Greeble made his first friend, a paladin with a bit more experience who happened to be a skilled and generous blacksmith. Of course, ambition and the desire to learn more about engineering eventually drove Greeble back to Ironforge, which he found much more hospitable with a little silver in his pocket and a few hundred notches on his shield. Though Greeble continues to reside in Ironforge, he considers Thelsamar his home town, and intends to retire there to fish when his adventuring days are over.

Once established as an adequate, yet unimpressive engineer in Ironforge, Greeble began to prosper. Though economic and social circumstances conspire to keep Greeble's career as a warrior at the center of his activites, he considers engineering to be his vocation. Early in his engineering training, he found a major hole in the auction house economy: a certain cheap-to-produce engineering part was needed by various adventurers, and very few were available. Greeble gradually drove the price of this item up from 20 silver to 1 gold, 35 silver over the course of a few weeks. This item costs 90 copper to make, so it was immensely profitable, allowing him to buy a mechanostrider as soon as he was qualified to train in piloting one. In recent weeks, however, an explosion in the number of working engineers has flooded the market. A new cash cow has yet to emerge.

Shortly after moving back to Ironforge, a guild of likeminded adventurers invited Greeble to join them. A few weeks later, the master of this guild, the lotus assasins (motto: the last 's' got assassinated), instituted a weekly meeting. When Greeble arrived at the arranged time, he found only a single guild member there. Even more, the guild master had fled, taking more than half of the guild's membership of about 60 with him. The new guild master happened to have been present when this unexplained schism took place, and so was promoted. Since then, the lotus assasins have remained a small, but active and loyal guild.

In search of new ways to alleviate his boredom, and to seek out new sources of ore, Greeble traversed Azeroth, visiting almost every region, and enjoying extended stays in the Wetlands, then Westfall, then the Redridge Mountains, Duskwood, Hillsbrad, Arathi, Altarac, the Badlands, Desolace, Stranglethorn Vale, the Hinterlands, Feralas, Tanaris, the Blasted Lands, and Un'Goro Crater. Somewhere along the way, Greeble volunteered his services to the Alliance on a few occasions, fighting in Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin. Finding direct war distasteful, Greeble never reached a rank higher than corporal.

So that's Greeble, and what he's been up to. Nothing terribly exciting, just standard, boilerplate leveling, like everybody else in World of Warcraft.