Welcome!

Yes: it's yet another World of Warcraft blog.

You may be searching for detailed strategies, tales of epic conquest, or a how-to guide to leveling to 70 in two weeks. Maybe you're looking for the best build for your rogue. Perhaps you're searching for a good strategy for leveling your Engineering to 375 as efficiently as possible. In other words, you're looking for 133t info.

You won't find that here.

In short, Passport to Shandris is the story of Cisko, Eric and DK. We're not your stereotypical WoW players. We're all older, working adults, with mortgages and jobs. Two of us are married. We have fairly busy social lives. Oh, we're geeks all right. And we're pretty caught up in an exciting and interesting game. But we're not the stereotypes you hear about playing WoW.

What we are is a refutation of the myth. There is some truth to the myth, of course. There are a good number of WoW players who have no social lives and devote dozens of hours per week to the game. And there are a lot of teen (or pre-teen) kids running amok around Azeroth. But with 8 million players, there's a huge number of relatively normal and balanced people playing WoW.

Maybe more importantly, we're doing everything the 'wrong' way. All three of us have started a large number of characters. I have 15 characters started on four realms. I don't know for sure about Eric and DK but they're probably getting up there too. None of us are paying a lot of attention to the 'best' Talent builds or the best strategies for leveling or professions or anything else. If there's a right way to play WoW... we are doing it wrong. And with our laid-back approach, and our reasonably limited time to play, we may never get into the endgame content.

And we're pretty OK with that. If you want to get from point A to B as fast as possible, there are good ways to do it, and more power to you. But we're taking our time and enjoying the journey. We do a lot of reading online -- it's almost essential to understand what's going on and how to some things. But none of us are obsessed about finding the absolute most efficient way to do anything.

As the three of us have been playing, both together and separately, we've shared our stories with one another. This blog is designed to give us a good way to share a lot of those stories, and to keep up with what we're doing. But I'd also like to write down some observations about WoW from the perspective of a casual player.

So that's the plan. We'll drop some more posts out here soon, especially because I'll be away from the game for a week or so. (eek!)