Beginnings — Draenei, part 1: Flight 815 from Draenor

NAANDIMIRA
Draenei mage
Level 1 
Ammen Vale 

The first surprise was that I was a survivor of a spaceship (well, planar ship) crash. The second surprise was that the crash had just happened — that, apparently, the draenei had only just arrived on Azeroth: my first experience with wibbly-wobbly World of Warcraft time.

I awoke — yes, I'll generally be using "I" and "me" in referring to the character; deal with it — in a valley studded with large red crystals; the crystals turned out not to be a natural feature, and indeed served to drive much of the plot that followed.

A confusion of choices

It takes a little while to download. Then it takes a further while to download, because it turns out the first thing you downloaded was the program for downloading the rest of it. I don't know how long it took precisely, because I set it going either before I went to bed or before I went to work, I don't remember now which.

The bewilderment of choices started as soon as I launched the game — actually, in a lot of ways, the most bewildering moment is when you start the game for the first time. A dozen races to choose from. Male or female? Alliance or Horde? Warrior? Hunter? Mage? Priest? Shaman? Druid? Warlock? PvP? PvE? RP? POE OPE?