The History of LotJ!

Also:
http://web.archive.org/web/20041205112942/http://lotj.wolfpaw.net/
http://web.archive.org/web/20071111011632/http://www.legendsofthejedi.com/

Can’t find any archives for http://www.archsysinc.com/lotj/ though some of you may remember this: http://web.archive.org/web/20010518054359/http://www.archsysinc.net/

I wish I still had those songs I wrote for Shiny…

Oh god, I cant remember when I started but it’s way back in the Ghost/Raven era when Markoth was actually Chancellor for once and the Republic base was on Bothawui, somehow I became Jedi Master, Head of Jedi Order and Chancellor all at the same time within 1 month of me starting LotJ, luckily that didn’t last too long….Oddly enough my char name was Drizzt and I was a Jedi LOL

The first timeline I played on was Markoth’s first run as Emperor. I couldn’t date it for sure, but I’d guess around 2001/2002.  The timeline started with an Empire with no Emperor, but Markoth’s character was soon ‘promoted’. Saraen was given the rank of Colonel and placed in charge of the Army whilst Sintaka controlled the navy. IIRC, Alassra was our lead engineer (back when being an engineer meant you had to make dozens of individual armor pieces for everyone) and the main army officers were Avanga and Kwch. It didn’t take long before we pretty much tomahawk dunked on the outnumbered rebel alliance clan and they were forced into seclusion and irrelevance fairly quickly.

Markoth, Sintaka, and I focused on Empire RP and began various campaigns of cruelty including making ‘aliens’ literally second class citizens and forcing the ‘dangerous’ ones to register and wear collars with microphones inside of them. The first was Whiphid 001 aka Sankis, who would go on to lead the remnants of Rebel Alliance. Our main adversary was Raven and his various mset forcer characters who would wreak havoc from time to time. It was a matter of annoyance in that first timeline, but this was in the days of cheap and unlimited cloning so everyone put up with it as we didn’t have a lot of room to complain since we were not very sportsman-like in our dealings with the RA. Aside from day-to-day space fascism, the two events that stick out the most for me were the invasion and conquest of Hapes by the Empire (Pretty much Phelan vs the entire Empire, hardly fair) and the timeline ending event. Sankis and Saraen were both given force powers and we duked it out on Hoth. I think I won since I returned to Coruscant just in time to try to overthrow Markoth during the final hour or two the server was up. At this point he and Sintaka were roleplaying insane dictators, publically executing massive amounts of NPCs and making weird decrees. Saraen tried to organize the army against the Emperor, but I was cock-blocked by one of Raven’s forcer morts. I believe he locked Saraen on a star destroyer until the timeline officially ended and the server was wiped.

It was probably not a fun time to play on the Rebel Alliance as the most active players congregated in the Empire, but folks like Sankis did their best while vastly outnumbered and outgunned. Many old school players showed up and significantly increased the role play level of the server and I have never seen another ‘evil’ leader who had gravitas matching Markoth’s. While LOTJ’s game systems were much more basic and unpolished back then, I’d call that timeline one of my favorite.

I totally forgot about the Whiphid 001 thing!

That timeline led to so many rules being created. Things like Spyapp seem kinda silly now but the war between the Rebels and Empire was completely meta and just about getting more spys into the enemy organization so you could bomb/steal ships/kill them. This was something the Empire excelled at, incidentally. Toward the end I believe I just stopped talking to potential recruits and left the RA to essentially just myself and Alleni since literally 9/10 of people were spies.

Thinking back, that timeline was really brutal. The Empire had a stranglehold on everything. Jedi were virtually nonexistent (aside from Raven super characters), I believe there was a single master who barely played, and the rebels were routinely identified, located and wiped out while all the while hating on aliens.

Heh. I think that was my second, and most active, TL, Saraen. My memory is spotty, but Empress Malira was before that one?

Either way, that TL was what encouraged me to start, seeing how easy it was to rise in the Imperial ranks if you were half-ass decent at doing anything. I don’t really remember events that well with the majority of TL’s I’ve played in, just the people.

Leo was fun to play with, always running around with green mando armor.

And there was that crazy verpine that would do nothing but talk shit on the comms all day with an abrupt voice… Tirhin, wasn’t it?

BHG with Laish in their back door. =)

I remember the Walldo-ran Clawz character that killed my Rodian Emperor who had rolled massive nat force but wouldn’t be awakened.

Gathorn. =(

Markoth. =(

Hapes palace with spikes impaling its citizens.

Who was the pirate? Cid or some such? Or someone the Red?

Mandalorian regen OP!

The Yevetha. =(

And the good ole 5 layer armor system. Equip screens used to fill the entire buffer and you had to sit there and steal all day just to search a prisoner. =)

what year was the chiss ending?

I started playing around 2002 or 2003 when Javad, Ocerion, Nield, and some other folks who no longer play recruited me from SWCombine and another mud, SWND. At that point, the game was running as mud.archsysinc.com:5555 (which I believe was a server belonging to Ghost’s parents)

I remember it going back and forth between Ghost and Raven during this time until Raven sort of leaked the source code and ragequit.

According to some emails I have from Anna, the MUD was founded in 1999, however our Wiki page claims the game was started in Nov 2000 by Ghost and Raven.

Earliest snapshot I could find of the website (archsysinc.com/lotj): http://web.archive.org/web/20020707040236/http://www.archsysinc.com/lotj/frame.htm

Found this 2003 ad for the game on mudconnector: http://mudconnect.com/discuss/discuss.cgi?mode=MSG&area=promotions&message=9246

Looks like they moved to Wolfpaw in 2004, at which point Orion was in charge (with Anna?): http://web.archive.org/web/20041205112942/http://lotj.wolfpaw.net/
Found a forum post on the Googles saying the MUD has about 6+ people on it at this point

I played Jakob in 2005 – this is when Chizzel led the Rebellion, Khaeros was emperor, and Orion was still in charge and also when we had the Chiss ending (in March 2005 supposedly).

I also have some logs of Alassra as an imm in 2005.

I think I became RPC and then coder/imm in 2006 after Neru Bas era?

I set up legendsofthejedi.com with Anna on Sept 05, 2007: http://web.archive.org/web/20071111011632/http://www.legendsofthejedi.com/
See context here (http://www.legendsofthejedi.com/forums/topic/lotj-website/) – the previous name of the MUD was Legend (no S) of the Jedi, but we changed it to Legends because we couldn’t get legendofthejedi.com

I think around 2010 Orion came back for a little bit and then disappeared again.

I had a post on the old forum with a bunch of archived logs and such..looking for stuff on my HD as well

I disappear for a while and Sankis and Saraen reappear?! What?!

My bit of recollection regarding LOTJ history…

I guess LOTJ history can be at this point, sorted into the “ages” based on the people who ran the game. Ghost/Raven would kind of be the dark age because there’s next to no one around who was here for the opening of LOTJ, where you had the Crimson Regime and Empress Malira. I only know of that stuff second-hand. What I heard about the earliest LOTJ days was that Raven started off as a super-nice guy until the players basically took advantage of him on different things, like “gimmes” and restores. Upon the onset of the game’s second timeline, Raven took a hard-line towards restores and started playing the game with his forcer-morts more.

The game’s second TL when was I joined, and I’d have to consider it LOTJ’s “Wild West” days. They started advertising on Mudconnector more, and gained a steady playerbase of about 10-20 people on at any given time. There was only the Rebel vs. Empire TL in 2000-2001, and as other oldbies have pointed out, the game’s second TL more or less involved the RA getting the shit kicked out of them daily. The Empire had Markoth, who may still be the best single player in the history of LOTJ, and Saraen, who did most of the killin’.  Guys like Sintaka, the Empire Fleet Admiral, and Avanga did most of the flying, though I can’t remember if Avanga was Empire or not. The RA had the lovely emo lady Shri, who would walk around Coruscant with RA standard-issue gear on, and Phaeton, who liked to kill people. At random.

The most important aspect of this period is that while PVP was FAR more prevalent than it is now (which is saying something), perming was extremely rare because there were cloning chambers on Hapes and Coruscant, and you could get cloned for 2k credits. The only was to kill someone was to wait outside of the clone chamber and hope that they logged back on after you killed them. They never did. There were also no PVP rules or spyapp. One of the RA leaders after Shri was a spy, and when he succeeded her, he basically let the Empire rape Hoth. Another fun Hoth moment was when Markoth’s apprentice, Vorgir, ejected over Hoth, logged off there, and waited for High Command to log back on so that he could slaughter everyone.  There were no rules against it at the time.

Also, it was ridiculously easy to generate money through pirate-hunting; so much to the point that when one person bought a midship capable of killing pirates, he’d kill until he could buy more for his friends, and then they could all make millions in half-a-day. One of my alts was once given a 2,000,000 credit midship by an engineer just so that I could pick up parts for him faster.

Blackjack was the be-all-end-all of skills in LOTJ. You didn’t have to approach someone to use it, it never failed, and it didn’t matter if you were wearing a helmet. The only downside was that it didn’t work against forcers. There was no battlegrouping, so large space battles were often decided by the number of people manning one side’s ships.

Upside to this era? Oh my God…was it fun. As for me, winning or losing was important, but getting out there and going balls-out every day and never losing the RP character was like living in text-based Valhalla.

Shri got into it with immortals one day, told the RA she was quitting, and suicided. She literally emoted cutting her wrists in front of us. Phaeton just kinda quit, and eventually Sankis became RA lead, Alleni (me) became Fleet Admiral, and Indigo (Pomarell) became Army commander. Raven used Zahivan, who was one of Raven’s forcer morts, but he wasn’t around that much. Leo Teff ran the BHG, but he was the only one in it. This TL dragged on until a pwipe came, and that is where the lawless days of LOTJ pretty much ended.

Ghost and Raven corrected a great many flaws with LOTJ in the era that followed, which still followed the Empire vs. Rebel theme. Only the Emperor, again Markoth, had access to cloning. To assist with RP-related issues and player relations, a player-relations immortal was brought on and the Roleplay Council was assembled, hand-picked by Raven out of a pool of reliable oldbies. Coreceren, if I’m not mistaken, led the RA at the outset of the new era. It was harder to generate money, but in a good way. Raven still didn’t ease up on his restore policy, and although perming was no longer a rare thing, the wars proceeded in much the way that they do now.

Military commitments forced me to leave LOTJ for a year and a half, and when I returned, Orion/Anna were in charge, LOTJ had gone to a three-era system, and Sintaka was on staff.  I wasn’t here for the start of Orion/Anna, so I’ve no right to call this age anything. Right around this time, I kept hearing the name Alassra. Sintaka offered me a senator role in the OR, and our Chancellor Zurgbra split the Republic not long after I came in (People’ Republic of Coruscant). We got Chancellor Devrin (Kraine) after that, but he got killed early-on. I would hear the name Alassra again due to that, and I’d also hear that while Alassra did a lot, she got blamed for a lot, too.

There’s no need for me to speak on history after that, because it’s pretty well-known. I do kinda miss the wild west, though.

I started playing in the late 90’s. My brother and I grew up in the same city as Raven and Ghost and my older brother was friends with Raven.  The early days were way different, I remember the who list would show everyone that was playing, rank, clan or whatever they put in their title. Raven once hooked it up with a special thermal detonator called a ‘superball’.  The Raven stuff is all true, he had some pretty rediculous characters that never seemed to die, Orion and Anna were in the early 2000’s. Orion always played a character named Zypher, not sure who played Zeed anymore but he was a pretty legit hunter from back in the days. There use to be a pretty awesome mandalorian armor quest that had you span like 10 worlds that a few of us knew how to do that spanned from the old hunters guild on tatooine. The laish monster and that cloak were a classic. STUN Grenades! Super cheap at times but they were classics aswell. Don was a PR imm I believe, or some other type that I always got in arguments with. Proximo and this other guy… can’t remember his name right now were suplementary imms to the Raven/Ghost regime. It’s been so long characters are started to melt together but Markoth, Xolajin, Nield, Zeed, there was this emperor something like Severus or S-something that was real badass. Also there were some good engineers at the time, one of them was in the military IRL and always made an engi with the same name and had the best weapons for like 4 years straight in the early days.  We had an era where there was a good/evil force clan and like everyone had force could’ve been cool if handled better but it seemed like the era went dry quick…. Bounty hunters used to be able to be clanned, special clan armor was around to go over 5 and 7 layer armor, I think we even got up to 8 at one point.

I didn’t really talk on OOC that much back in teh day but I had a couple characters that were a little more known… Sifer Xvim, Markos Skine were leaders of the Imperial Remnants and Mandalorian Empire respectively. Sifer to my knowledge had the largest bounty ever in Lotj at 23 million credits. You used to be able to get cortosis blades which he had a couple sets of which made fighting forcers much easier for a clanned bounty hunter like he was. I also had a smuggler type, twi’lek it was either Tal, or Salazaar that I went on a mugging/kidnapping/ransoming rampage with which brought forth the mugging rule… sorry about that one guys. 😉

Not sure which character this was, but Xerakon the mandalorian Surface Marshall in the Empire that everyone thought had force for a while… I remember my Dathomiri Zirik died on and ISD when you and I were fighting members of Black Sun and got grenaded while inside a captured shuttle.

It brings warmth to my heart that people thought so highly of my Mandalorian quest. I was Steele the IMM, Bron, Revik, Slade, Skrawn, Berend. Few other characters. I started this mud with Bagua when it first started. We were brothers in arms. Raiding pillaging. Smuggling, Stealing. Empire, Rebel, it didn’t matter. I was on my own side. Ghost and Raven era, fuck man what a blur. I was crazy young back then. I was 13-14, it was a hectic time for me. I was the reason the no-sending thermals thru the drones rule had to be put in place. I dunno, if you can put one label or title on me as a player it was Nightmare. I was a god damn nightmare. To the staff, to the players but god damn did I make it interesting. I remember being invis on a big forcer and almost perming Saraen. IMM intervention stopped that. Stun grenades were my bread and butter. Blackjack was a nightmare for me, always had some assholes with cloak or invis knock me out and arrest me >_> Had a wookie BHer, Trando BHer. Had a Whiphid slave when I was Skrawn during that whole era. Did some weird stuff with Twilek slaves I brought on board my star destroyers. I might be misremembering details but I played this game alot, wore alot of hats, I never played the same role twice except for Skrawn. I was amazing in the skies. I hope that’s how I was remembered at least.

LOTJ was actually based off a different star wars mud. I forget the name something with book in the title…. Used to be references to it in a few help files… I doubt those are still around. This was crazy long ago and I was really young so it’s all a little hazy.

Raven and Ghost were both imms there. Raven had a player character as well. I think his imm was actually called Mythos and his player was Raven. I was in his clan (blacksun) and at some point or another that mud shut down. About the only two things I remember is someone named Trent who taught me how to play and Raven having an ingame wedding.

My memory is fairly iffy but I think I had raven on ICQ or AIM and I remember there was a time where the mud was password protected and more or less it would be Ghost, Raven and a few people dicking around. Ghost was adding a lot of features and we’d test them out. At some point it was opened up and became fairly popular (for a mud) reasonably quickly. But early on it was really fun a small pbase.

At one point I did some building. Not sure if anything ever made it off the building server…. I can’t even remember what I worked on. I think I did a few ships. I can’t say I really remember any of the timelines clearly… I remember the Hapan one, that was one of my favorites and I think roughly when I stopped playing and even by that time I think I was playing on and off. I think I was actually in the clan for a while too. I distinctly remember blackjacking tauntauns on hoth and ride them around hapes as the Royal Hapan Mounted Police… I also distinctly remember getting gangbanged with a huge group of people by Raven with hitall in that timeline… Early on there was a female emperor for a while too. I forget her name. M something I think… I think she got slayed for abusing the cargo bug… Or maybe it was she didn’t get slayed when everyone else did… Then Markoth and then I think around then I started playing on and off skipping entire timelines sometimes..

Biggest changes in gameplay came from cloning changes. At different times they were anything from almost non-existent to super cheap and available for everyone. Eventually Ghost became less interested and spent a lot of time on his AVP mud which was really fun but never really got any traction. Raven well ….. seems like most people know the end of the story. I think mostly he had gotten bored and annoyed by the constant whining for restores/force and so on. I had stopped playing more or less completely by the time Orion and Anna came on, a while before actually if I remember correctly. Once a year or every other year I pop in, check the forums, and sometimes make a character and wander around for a couple hours out of nostalgia.

Anyway was around for my yearly poke around and saw this thread and thought I’d put in what I could remember.

Malira was the female emperor for awhile, with her second in command sith Tira. We definitely blackjacked tauntauns and were the RHMP! Royal Hapan Mounted Police!

Saraen, I did the best I could on Hapes 1vAlot was hard to win aganist, so I didn’t!