The Staff of Dark Risings

Mark - Retired

Implementor

OOC: Mudding History
The first Diku I ever played was called "Seas of Blood". I left mudding for over a year until some local friends talked me into playing a MUD called Sanctuary. After logging on to try it, it became obvious that Seas of Blood had upgraded to ROM and became known as Sanctuary, a WOT themed mud. My most well known characters on Sanctuary were Tombesteres and the last Semirhage. Sanctuary went down because everyone stopped playing after a rumor got out that Sanctuary II was about to be put up and it would mean a pwipe. The pwipe never came, Sanctuary II never went up, and the mud died.

After that, Krystaline, who was a mortal on Sanctuary, started Illusions of the Mind. Many Sanctuary players started playing it from beta. My most well known characters on IOM included Marsarken, a Shifter whose role was customized to Krystaline's IRL image of me (my name being in his wasn't coincidence), and Paradox, guild imm for the JUSTICE guild. Paradox's most infamous law: Declaring Prima Noctum giving immortals first night with any new bride on the mud.

Yes, that really was just a joke. Some didn't find it as funny as others. Marsarken's most infamous act: Deleting because Krystaline felt writing a script to spam 'order all rem 1.' after charming someone was bug abuse because a) she had just had her coder disable 'order all remove all' and b) Marsarken did it to one of her pet mortals. To her credit, Krystaline did get the last laugh however, via character assassination after I left her MUD.

After leaving IOM, I started my own ROM MUD and ran it for about a year after it went live. It was called "The Cage" and was based on a strange mix of Rifts and Planescape. Hey, it sounded cool when I was that age. We were actually pretty successful all things considered, peeking at around 40 for the record on at one time and most nights being between 25-35 on. I say, "I" started that mud because this is "my" bio, but I should mention that it was more of a "we" project with my gf at the time, Jenna, who I met on Sanc and who also played IOM as the first IMM of Blue Rose. I finally took The Cage down after realizing that an IMP never reaches a point where he can play often enough and anonymously enough to ever have any real fun.

A couple years later, my significant other talked me into showing her what a MUD is, since the same IRL friends who dragged me back into mudding years before kept bringing up old MUD stories and made it sound fun. So, after logging onto the original "Rivers of Mud" and finding it boring and lame, I tried the last MUD I had played that was still up....IOM. Thankfully, one of the staff members from DR who played there pointed me to Dark Risings as a good place to find old faces. Or names. Whatever. Anyway, I made Domicellus, a drow mage that couldn't even push an Ogre out of safe and got back into PK a little bit. Domi eventually joined Vermillion. Then I started playing Vexius as a co-imm for Vermillion with Kimball. Eventually they made the silly mistake of making me an IMP on DR. Because of some IRL issues, my significant other and I left DR for a bit over a year. Then we came back.

Education:
Doctorate level

Employment:
Usually self employed, computer networking and consulting

Favorite bands:
Rush (still), Alice in Chains, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, Cypress Hill, Led Zep, Stone Temple Pilots, others

Favorite movies:
Bladerunner, Conan the Barbarian, Highlander, Natural Born Killers, Fight Club, The Wall, The Matrix, Prince of Darkness, Repo Man, "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly"

Likes:
The Louvre, Amsterdam, Macallan 10 year old, Cuban Cohibas, Porsche 911s, Barbuda, RPGs, fencing, diving, hunting, good knives, finding old stuff

Dislikes:
Corrupt politics, working for anyone but me, rust, senseless violence, most modern religion, Scooby Doo, pop-ups, manipulators