Game talk

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  • HOOWAH! Player memorabilia

    Hours Categories Game talk
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    A Shadowclan shirt
    The Shadowclan shirt

    Today I got a Shadowclan shirt in the mail. The back of it says “Hoowah!”

    Shadowclan is, of course, one of those game guilds that crosses over multiple games, and it’s been around since the early days of UO. It got its start after an enterprising roleplayer decided to roleplay being an orc. I don’t think anyone quite knows what happened to that player, but for a while, he captivated roleplayers across the shard with his odd relationship with the players based out of Trinsic. He served as the inspiration for a lot of people becoming orcs, which we helped out unintentionally via orc masks and polymorph spells.

    Eventually the Shadowclan was born: a large guild that took over one of the few bits of static content in the game, the Orc Fort, and defended it against human players. They developed a pidgin language all their own, perhaps inspired to some degree by the Warcraft games, which eventually migrated over to EverQuest (no orcs there, but that’s where the trolls got their lingo), DAOC, and thence to SWG (Rodians… odd fit, but you make do), and then to WoW.

    This shirt is hardly the only bit of guild memorabilia that I’ve been given. Over the years, players have come up to me and given me all sorts of things. It ends up forming part of the tapestry of how you touch players emotionally, and they touch you back.

    So today I thought I’d give you a little tour of just some of these things, and tell you the stories.
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