I've been playing Achaea for close to 13 years, but never took the time to check out its twisted sister, Aetolia.  From what I know, the Achaea servers became too populated in the early days, so a branch-off MUD called Aetolia was created, and was originally a straight up clone of Achaea. But over time, Aetolia was taken in its own direction and while many of the areas are familiar if you've played Achaea, they've been given a darker, more morbid makeover as Aetolia's plot deals primarily with vampires and the city of Bloodloch.

I went with a Xoran for my race, lizardmen are always badass IMO and their stats are pretty buff too. Aetolia presents you with artist renderings of the different races as you create a character, ironic because the game itself is a MUD. But it's a nice touch to the HTML5 client :)

I picked the Bloodborn class, which the game describes as follows;

"The focus of the Bloodborn is the skill Hematurgy, by which they tap into the mystical powers of blood using arcane rituals. As vampires, they also command the skill Corpus, by which their bodies are imbued with supernatural strength, speed, and resilience, and Mentis, giving them the power to sway the minds of others."

After putting a few lessons into the skills I'm getting the feeling the class is primarily focused on a combination of DPS + affliction spells, and all the tanking stuff is the Corpus skills. So it's like a magic-casting vampire monk. That's pretty cool, I wish MMOs in general would experiment with alternative type classes.

The guild for the Bloodborns is small so far, I'm seeing 4 - 10 people on average, but they've been friendly. A couple of people have offered to give me help, but I'd expect that from the MUD community.

Overall it seems like a great alternative to Achaea so far, the community is a little smaller then Achaea's (I see Aetolia peak out around 100 players where Achaea peaks around 300) but there is enough coolness injected to give Aetolia (un)life of its own.