Chapter I: The Founders
(March 2001 - April 2001)

"I don't know how it happened. One day it was this obscure game concept, the next day people were interacting on message boards and IRC as if it were already out. Forming guilds, recruiting members, arranging alliances, guild politics, shit talking, roleplaying, analyzing game mechanics, declaring war."
-Deyth, The Combine

A man who was once a friend of mine, his name was Vince although the guild would later call him Zule, and I were very bored one night, about two years before the release of Shadowbane, and we were looking for a new MMORPG to play. Asheron's Call had been fun for awhile and Anarchy Online would have been good if it hadn't driven us away with its many bugs at launch. We had both tried Everquest once...ONCE. We had seen other MMORPGs in the distance like Horizons but we didn't buy into them because they didn't sound like they would ever make it off the ground. That was probably a good guess considering the number of times that game has been canned and then totally reinvented for no apparent reason.

We saw Dark Ages of Camelot but weren't really interested because it was more of the same elves and giants and such that had already been done. Asheron's Call had appealed to us because it did something new and innovative on so many levels. We wanted to see someone do that again. That was when Vince, over the phone, directed me to take a look at the Shadowbane website.

Simply put, it had everything we wanted. It had guilds, the races weren't new but had new history at least and most importantly of all it was based on something other than killing 100 rats so you can get to level two and afford a rusty sword. But one more thing struck a nerve with me and that was the element of strategy the website claimed the game would have. It really reminded me of something...

Back when I had played Asheron's Call, Vince and I had spent a good deal of time messing around on the PvP server and had a good many stories to tell about it. I told allot of these stories to Terence Klugman who many of you know as Zion. I told him about the time Vince harassed this HUGE group of people by picking off one or two with his bow and then running away before they could find him. I told him about the time we killed a guild leader in the middle of a guild meeting and his corpse ended up on the roof of a building. I told him about the guy we killed twice in a row but on the third occasion he led us on a chase that went through several large battles and finally into a mountain range where he was finally punched to death by Vince.

But no matter how zany or outrageous the story was it was never enough for Zion. He always had to make suggestions that simply would not work or would have no purpose. His ideas involved hundreds of level one players wandering into the most dangerous parts of the game world or doing senseless things in the forest for no reason other than to confuse people. The problem with Terence is that he is a casual gamer and didn't really understand anything about MMORPGs or many games at all for that matter.

But when I looked at what Shadowbane was hyped up to be I thought that maybe, just maybe, some of Terence's crazy ideas could serve a purpose here. A three way call was made and soon Terence was looking at the website and trying to decide what race his first character was going to be. Never mind he had never played an MMORPG before that for more than a week, he was already hooked on the idea of starting a Shadowbane guild. And so it began...

But Vince and I weren't convinced so easily. We wanted to start a guild too...but with Terence? It wasn't so much his reputation as a liar or that he wasn't really into video games. Terence's biggest problem, in our opinion, was that he never had any free time. When he wasn't out drinking and partying, he was working or going to school. He spent more time in his car than he did in his own home. He barely ever found time for eating or sleeping, how the hell was he going to devote anywhere near the amount of time it would take to be the leader of a guild in a video game he just heard about five minutes ago? I made Terence PROMISE that if we were actually going to go through with this then he had to devote enough time to make it work. He said he would but I guess I should have remembered who I was talking to....

Vince was a good guy to hang out with but he was notoriously unreliable. Neither Terence or I really expected him to be any help so he was ruled out as leader. I didn't exactly want to be leader either, I consider myself to be an intelligent and hard working guy but I see charisma as one of my weaknesses and I figured a leader should have allot of that. Terence didn't know much about games and obviously isn't the sharpest tool in the box if you know what I mean but charisma was something he had in spades and and that "diplomacy" of his could be damn effective when it was called for. So it was decided that Terence would, on the surface at any rate, be the head leader and I would be his second in command. Terence's jobs would be "diplomacy" and recruiting new members(by way of "diplomacy" if need be). My job would be, at the start anyway, EVERYTHING ELSE, to include website designer, forum admin, graphics designer and a wide array of other things I didn't really know a whole hell of allot about. As the guild gained more members who were skilled in those areas, and could prove they weren't spies from other guilds, I would pass off these duties to them which would allow me to focus on my two real jobs: to give Zion advice about MMORPGs and guilds(something I actually knew something about) and running our secret spy division which was formed later called the "Shadows of Gold" and being overseer of those less than honest things the spy division would do. All Vince had to do was be our first member and not disappear before the game was released. Like allot of our other members he let us down big time on that count.

This was Zule's favorite store. Can you guess why we didn't make him leader?

The guild was officially founded on Friday, April 27, 2001. The first few weeks went well... after a few initial disputes were worked out. Zion wanted to name the guild "Order of the White Shields" but I wasn't having any of that. I suggested "Golden Shields" because, although I agreed the guild's true nature of lies, stealing and doing anything else needed to get ahead had to be kept a huge secret even from our members, I still felt our name needed to secretly reflect our true purpose. "Golden" could be read in more then one way, it could be good, it could be bad, it could be neutral or it could just plain be greedy. There was no real evidence to support any case which fit our guild perfectly because in the end evidence was something there was a very short supply of. Terence eventually caved and did it my way but only because Vince was on my side and knew Terence was dumb. The same thing happened later when Terence wanted the website to be white despite the official color of Shadowbane being black.

(FYI: From this point on, Terence will be referred to by his better known name of Zion.)

Go on to the Next Chapter: Opening Moves