Where fantasy meets finance

For sale: Hobbit-like warlock named Ebrag with a white beard. Ranked 8 out of 14 in performance. Can summon demons.

Cost: $75, which also includes a troll.

Sound out of this world?

Well, it is another world -- the ''World of Warcraft," an online game in which warlocks battle creatures with help from their guild members in the virtual medieval universe of Azeroth.

Ebrag's real-world creator is Nic Lee, 24, of Quincy, who posted an ad on Boston's craigslist to hawk his character. Lee hopes that another player will pay $75 to adopt his online creation. If he doesn't get any offers, he'll go to eBay to auction Ebrag.

''I was pretty much done with the game and starting school," says Lee, who's studying nutrition at Bunker Hill Community College. ''I don't want it to go to waste just because I want to leave it. I invested my time into it."

In the never-ending quest to reach higher levels and rack up points in the shortest amount of time, many gamers are engaged in an online black market of trading, buying, and selling their game characters from their virtual universes.

When a player wants to join an online game, he or she must pay a fee, open an account, and create a character. Over time, the character acquires powers and skills, enabling the player to reach higher, more challenging levels. This is what would attract a potential buyer -- the ability to skip those lower, less challenging levels and leap directly to an advanced stage of the game. The buyer is essentially purchasing the time and effort that the seller has invested in building up the character's record, points, and powers. The companies that run these online games usually frown upon such transactions, in many cases threatening to terminate the accounts of players who have bought or sold characters.

This intra-world commerce is merging the fantasy world of dragon slaying, elves, Jedis, and pirates with the real world of ads and money. And it has sparked debate among gamers and academics alike.

As the Xbox generation spends more time online, immersed in multiplayer online games with thousands of other people, the value of their characters increases. So something that one can't touch -- a cute elf, a powerful warrior, or a butt-kicking ogre -- accumulates real-world value. Call it the world of Dungeons & Dragons and Dollars -- or, as one professor calls it, an ''illusionary economy."

''For the players, these characters are not without value," says Henry Jenkins, director of MIT's Comparative Media Studies program. His upcoming book, ''Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide," touches on this virtual commerce among online game players. He compares this underground character trade to buying your way into any coveted group.

''You are buying the power to participate," he says. ''The game world is kind of like a social or country club. So it's somewhat similar to buying access to some sort of entertainment or some membership to participate instead of building it from the ground up. For the people who participate, it's not just about the fantasy of slaying dragons but about the reality of forming strong bonds with other people around the world, and that's what gives real economic value to buying these characters."

Edward Castronova, an Indiana University professor and author of the recent ''Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games," offers another view. In his blog and his book, he explains how this commerce alters the ''synthetic world," arguing that trading characters takes the fun out of the game and essentially cheapens it. He compares it to playing Monopoly with real money.

''Imagine if every time you played Monopoly, you had to spend real money to buy the properties because that's what everybody else is doing, and if you don't pay too, you'll lose," Castronova wrote on his website. ''In that scenario, Monopoly loses most if not all of its economic and cultural value. . . . If synthetic worlds are not sealed off from the real economy, they will also not have much value at all."

For now, though, these characters are becoming a sought-out commodity. Prices run anywhere from $1 to $400 or more, and are determined by what kind of status and record history a character has garnered over time.

A 13-year-old boy from Milton said he recently bought a bard, a character that can cast spells or use music as a weapon, for $300 so he can play at a higher level in ''Dark Age of Camelot," a multiplayer online game that centers on the war among three realms at the end of King Arthur's rule.

A Jedi character in ''Star Wars Galaxies" was going for $150 in Canada the other day, while a resident of Antrim, N.H., was selling 10 characters -- from a warrior and druid to a hunter and ''undead priest," from the ''World of Warscape" -- for a total of $500 on eBay. On craigslist's Boston site, one player recently posted an ad selling a character from RuneScape for $300.

''You are buying the time and effort I've put into this account," the ad says.

Finding ads for game characters requires a bit of savvy. Since the game companies don't want their subscribers to pawn their characters, which are properties of the company, buyers and sellers try to conceal their pitches. So ads on eBay and craigslist use abbreviations such as ''WOW" for ''World of Warcraft" and ''DAOC" for ''Dark Age of Camelot" and the word ''account" for the characters so that those folks know where to go. (Other than Lee, none of the people selling characters on eBay and craigslist responded to the Globe's requests for interviews.)

As this clandestine trading has grown, websites have sprung up to meet players' needs. Besides eBay and craigslist are other sites, such as www.ige.com, that operate an online swap shop for characters. The Hong Kong-based company touts itself as the ''world's largest secure network of buying and selling" game characters.

Game companies have taken notice of the underground online market and responded with their own auction sites. Last summer, Sony Online Entertainment, which owns such games as ''EverQuest" and ''Star Wars Galaxies," launched its own ''Station Exchange," where players can broker their virtual goods on a secure marketplace, to prevent their players from falling prey to fraudulent sellers. In its first month, the Station Exchange sold one EverQuest character called an ''Iksar" for $2,000, while the average character price went for $185, according to Sony.

Lee, the gamer from Quincy, hasn't had any takers for his Ebrag character from ''World of Warscape." He spent three months building up Ebrag, but it was taking up too much of his life. He would play for three hours a day during the week and sometimes 12 hours on weekends.

''I became an addict," says Lee, who quit the game so he could focus on his studies. ''This is how these games are played. They require a ridiculous amount of time."

He understands the appeal of buying characters from the synthetic world.

''It's more of like a time management thing," he said, something he is trying to do better these days. ''You spend a little money to save a little time."

Johnny Diaz can be reached at jodiaz@globe.com.