Chapter II: Opening Moves
(May 2001 - August 2001)

"Unity is impossible without something to be united against."
-Zion, Order of the Golden Shields

We were sure things were going to take off soon. I had designed a basic website and set up a large forum for the guild. Zion was already working on a story for the guild to use for recruitment. But the first hurdle we had to jump was the one of breaking into what was, at the time, a very closed minded Shadowbane community. That far prior to the release of the game the only community to speak of was the really hardcore fans. The only hardcore fans Shadowbane had in those days where the, mostly elven, role players who were worried that people who didn't role play would eventually become the majority and force them into the "retarded nerds" role they had to play in all the other MMORPGs out there. As a result when ever a new group of non-roleplayers appeared on the scene these existing guilds did everything in their power to discourage them and make them look bad every time they attempted to recruit members. Thanks to the efforts of one of the worst offenders, Lok-ri, this usually worked and many guilds never lasted more than a week. However, being the Golden Shields, this just made us more determined to be great because obviously we wouldn't feel bad about it when we rained hacking, cheating, stealing and deception down on such jerks.

The Flame weavers were only one of the many obnoxious RP guilds. They were pretty vocal... until I made this image for them.

Although Zion's "Diplomacy" and my short temper did a good job of giving the role players hell on the forums that never really paid off as a recruitment tool. The vast and wide majority of Shadowbane fans were either already in a guild or were looking to start their own. We developed and tried out the "bone picking" scheme of hunting down failed guilds and drawing any remaining members to join us but that didn't pay off until later on. Our first success really came from finding people who weren't aware Shadowbane existed and selling them on the game so they would join us. In a way I guess we kind of owe some thanks to Wolfpack and Ubi-soft here because one look at the website which hyped the game up to be something it wasn't was often enough to get people interested. But in reality they should thank us for helping them trick so many people into buying their shitty game.

Although one of our goals was not to make any enemies before the game came out there was at least one guild I would say that we were bound to have a conflict with sooner or later. I'm having a bit of trouble recalling what their name was because it was changed so many times but I think "Arcona" will probably do as that was what they referred to themselves as for a nickname. The leader of this guild called himself "Relic" and his arrogance had to rival that of even Lok-ri's entire membership. Although his guild had all of ten members at its height he still believed he could conquer every other guild in the game by making his members wear uniforms and travel everywhere in formations. Relic's theory was that if this tactic worked for the Romans it would work for him. What he forgets is that there were more than ten Romans and there weren't any video games back in those days. Pointing this out would only provoke Relic to post a 10 page essay about why your mother was a whore. If you pointed out that was somewhat immature of him then he would claim his little brother hacked his computer. If you pointed out it would probably be a good idea not to let his brother do that he would respond by reposting the essay for you. I think it goes without saying that I found this bit of information out the hard way.

Having made our first unofficial enemy we decided it was time to get our spying and "diplomacy" going right away. I applied for membership in every guild in the Shadowbane community that we considered to be of any importance to us. Guilds big and small were chosen as were guilds we didn't even have any official or unofficial stance towards. The vast and wide majority of guilds were so easy to infiltrate that we eventually gave up on even paying any attention to them and fell back to watching the guilds that actually took the effort to give some thought to who they let join and who they turned away. In the end these were the guilds that actually were active in the pre-release phase of the game so they were the only ones worth any attention anyway. So that Zion and I could both share information and talk about private guild matters I created an invisible forum on our site called the "Shadows of Gold" which as I said later became the name of the spy division.

Meanwhile Zion was putting his "diplomacy" to work to start getting us some allies. We started spy accounts in most of the guilds that we were planning to seek an alliance with just so we could get an inside look at what their reaction to our guild was. Two guilds, the Winter Blades and White Tower seemed totally honest with us and stood by us later on even when other people we thought to be allies betrayed us. Another guild, the "Leaders of Virtue" were acting a bit odd about an alliance right off the bat. However with a spy inside their guild we got the impression that most of their members of their guild had a good opinion of us and it was only the leaders who were giving us the run around. Knowing this we pushed them to ask their members if they wanted to forge an alliance with us. They resisted this but eventually their members voiced their overwhelming support of an alliance and the leaders had no choice. This had to be the first pay off from our spy division but we were still worried that these so called leaders of virtue were going to back stab us later so I took the spy efforts with them to the next level and even began to play Anarchy Online and Dark Ages of Camelot with them to make the spy account seem more real.

Go on to the Next Chapter: Ubisoft Strikes Back