Demortia
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« on: 2008-06-08, 09:48:53 » |
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Hi, I would have posted something sooner, but I had forgotten my password! As luck would have it, I tried something by chance and it worked! So here goes...
Hmm, where to start...
I first bought Vamp soon after it was released but only ever played the single player game. I was involved in other online games at the time so the multiplayer side didn?t appeal to me until a year or so later.
After a few months of dropping in to random games, I stumbled upon relatively few that interested me, most notably the games where people actually acted "In Character" and brought the game to...well, Unlife.
At that time, I have to admit, the only thing I knew about the WoD was what I had learned from the game so found many of these Role playing groups a little out of my depth. Add to that the constant bickering in the lobby, the fighting, the threats, the hackers, stackers and crashers, the clan wars! I wanted none of it and became a little reclusive and avoided most of the other regular people.
I began to research and study the WoD material and remained only in my own Vamp room and Vamp game, but welcomed others to drop in. I attempted to discourage any kind of Anti-Social behaviour. And so I found an area of Vamp that I felt comfortable in. Over the course of several months, there were others like me who wanted only to play Vamp, to have fun, to not be involved in abuse and conflicts. And so a regular group developed. Soon after, someone suggested I take it to the next level and form a proper gaming group or guild. And so, after some weeks of organising a story behind the group identity and our purpose, the Crimson Keep was created.
At that time, Vamp was beginning to show signs of less frequent use, but was still populated by up to a hundred people. The Crimson Keep prospered as other guilds faded away, yet we remained out of the "public eye" we knew many people but were known by few, Like the Nosferatu, the Crimson Keep lurked in the shadows and watched as the Vamp community gradually disappeared.
After all these years, we are still here, our CK WoD still lives and still grows, even now many people contact us looking for a return to the glorious old days of Vamp, as well as many people entirely new. And that's a very condensed story of how the Crimson Keep began.
Over the years, in an effort to bring new things to Vamp, and something that was undeniably CK, I began to experiment in making maps. I found the Embrace Map editor a little strange to begin with, the interface clumsy and not very intuitive, and a number of usable, but not very impressive maps were produced. It took about a year of experimenting with the various functions, scripts and templates and eventually I developed my own style of architecture and themes, but all were based upon producing an effective role playing environment.
Over the last couple of years, the CK was forced to go into hibernation while the majority of its members attended university and was unable to join games. So, I turned my attention to Neverwinter Nights ( 1 ).
From the tools available I became adept at customising the NWN world, I rewrote hundreds of scripts and turned a world of fantasy and dragons into a world of horror and terror.
Looking at the huge list of game servers, it is evident that there is more than enough AD&D servers, and another one wasn't going to encourage anyone to join yet another "lets kill all the bad guys" type game.
My expedition into NWN customisation began as an experiment, to see how far I could take the NWN engine, to turn NWN into another WoD.
What I had achieved brought a truly frightening realm, a blend of Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft.
I had managed to re-script everything, I had found a way to enable a Vampire player to burst into flames in the sunlight, to allow players to change into Werewolves ( all without requiring extra mod files or resources, anyone could join the game instantly and without the need for expansions! ), and had spent 4 months building a huge continent sized world.
Alongside this world lay one of pure darkness and evil, I had been inspired by Legacy of Kain and added to that world another one that players could pass through and journey to the depths of the Abyss, or to simply bypass obstacles in the "Real World".
I began this ambitious project with a specific goal in mind, to make a world where a character can live, work and try to survive the horrors, the goal of my world was not to win, not to reach the end and not to kill the big bad guy, it was simple, the goal was to live.
In no time at all, the server was running almost 24 hours, and players constantly demanded updates ( as well as bug fixes ), new additions and new work opportunities. The workload was immense to say the least.
And then University ended and Vamp games started once more, so my NWN world was shut down, and never returned.
These days, I'm running a business which takes almost all of my spare time, I no longer have the time to make maps for Vampire, and rarely get the time to host a Vamp game. I have plans to produce more maps however, when things with the business calm down to a reasonable level.
And that's a very short summary of the last 8 years of my life in the world of multiplayer gaming.
Demortia
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