How The Guild Began
One day on Tarew Marr I met two ladies in Oasis while playing Augustaes (who was 7th level at the time). These two ladies were a few levels ahead of me. And they were Meridian and her sister. We all loved to role-play and it was grand. And Meridian has become one of my best friends. I never played with Bayer a lot but he was already well into his crafts by then. It took us a bit but we got the guild moving along nicely.
When the Xev server came up I took the chance to move to a new server as did Ozy, Meridian and Bayer. Not many made the move from TM to Xev and most came from Povar the other server who had the option to split to Xev. As you could not transfer a as a guild we had to recreate the guild on Xec once we had transferred over.
I was asked about what I do as a leader. One of the most important tasks is to ensure you have officers who will share your vision. Having five people doing some of the work each is much better than having one person do it all. I am also the person who gets a tell when someone has a problem with a guild mate. I also try and listen to the concerns of guild mates that are brought to me. I may not act on every suggestion but if I do not I am happy to explain why.
Guild Vision
The guilds vision. What is it? Well we are a social guild. As EQ has evolved that has actually come to mean some very specific things. I think mainly it is that we are not primarily loot or goal driven. We mainly exist to be a group of people having fun and interacting together as we journey forward getting our loot, experience and seeing new things.
A guild tag also gives us a chance to share in a common reputation. Each EQ world is huge and none of us know all the players. As a guild, or group of people sharing common ideals and views, we get to share in the reputation of every other member of the guild. I think we have a group of people who are honourable, kind hearted and mature. That is what I want to hear others say about us.
And yes having a group of people who play together and know each other allows us to organize and do things that would be hard to do by randomly gathering individuals together. Most importantly we offer the chance to socialize together in the guild environment which is a safe and friendly to get to know each other. The unmoderated General Chat nasty and full of drama while be the guild chat is friendly and drama free.
We spend more time on grouping events then raids but we do enjoy participating together in Open Raids as well as occasionally doing older raid content just for the fun of it.
Guild Leader History
Let me start with a little bit about who I am at least as far as gaming goes. I play Caellon Silverwood, Augustaes Tenarien and Corwyhn Lionsheart on the Xev Server.
I started D&D gaming back in 1973 and have had a continuous campaign running from the early 80’s to mid 90’s. I haven’t done a lot of offline gaming since then as I got hooked into online gaming.
My first online game was Realm and I didn’t really get involved in guilds at all. I mainly just ran about helping people and playing. Next came Ultima online, I started in that as soon as it went public and made l lot of friends quickly. I soon had a guild though there were no rules in Ultima at the time to create or form guilds…. I simply had a lot of people who followed me and one day I realized I had a guild. For those that know UO Online the clothing is much more customizable and our guild uniform ended up being what I generally wore. Which was funny because it was green and brown so I could hide from the PKers (player killers as UO then had no non pvp option at all). None of us had gotten far enough to port and in the early day we spent a lot of time riding places. And oh did we look sharp when 20 of us were riding down a road in uniform and column of twos.
I spent my time on UO Online running the Knights of the Gryphon (my guild) and fighting AND…running my house decorating business. Yes… I had a flair for decorating homes in UO and got paid for it. I had a large house for a long time and I could kick myself in the head for never doing a screen print of it. At one point I vacationed on a new UO server and loved it…. there was a newness to it that was very appealing with so many actual new players. I left my second in command in charge of the Gryphons and I restarted the guild on a new server but I kept it small. On the old sever we had gotten up to 60 or so very active members and it was a lot of work because I tried to do too much of it all myself. On the new server I still did a lot of it all myself but I kept the numbers down.
One day a large number of friends left for the EQ beta. Not so much guild members but other guildleaders I knew well and various friends I had outside of the guild. They kept trying to get me to jump ship but that was not something I could easily do. I loved my Ultima . What actually sparked me to leave was that I had several friends who had gotten into some situations that were all too soap opera-ish and were coming to me even though they would not listen to my advice. I found I was spending more time as counselor to others then playing the game and decided maybe it was time for a change.
This was a couple months after the EQ beta had ended and it had gone public. I started playing with a friend who had left UO for EQ a month before me and after a couple weeks of learning the game we both went over to another server where friends of mine were running a guild. Again, this was the very early days of EQ. They had guild rules sort of initially though it was all very manual. I was there for when the guild actually formed as a guild and spent a lot of time as simply a member. The leadership was good and the vision she had was very much in line with my own so
Though I never craved being a leader I do enjoy the challenges of leading a group of players. My main concern was that everyone was treated fairly.
Any I also believe in not running a guild to benefit myself Corwyhn my main character and I have always worked to get my own gear by myself with the exception of raids which are always a group effort. Being the leader of the guild it would be far too easy to use that positon for my own benefit. I will never ask members for donations or ask them to help me gain items in the game. I am more than happy to help others in various ways but I think a leader has to be held to a higher standard.