GUILD HISTORY & LORE

Jademoon traces its gaming origins all the way back to the fall of 1997, when Malagant founded The Dark Empire on the Great Lakes shard of Ultima Online. After a few months of PK dominance, DE evolved into one of the leading anti-PK guilds on the server. By early 1998, however, DE's size and corruption worked against its success, and the helm was passed to Alaric Magnus, who changed the name to Church of the Dark Empire; other splinter groups emerged, including Morph's and Erebos' chaotic (and ironic) The Endless, and neutral BoV, run by Drago and Vert. The honorable members eventually merged back into CoDE (later CDE), leaving the griefers to form TR and later SiN. Spring and summer was a golden age for the guild as we became one of the foremost anti-PK units on the shard, with a reputation as a daemon-wielding cavalry of Virtue and Order, fighting wars against guilds such as Bane, GoD, SoB, and AoV and protecting the dungeons and woodlands from their ilk. A successful alliance with the Paladins of Virtue led to a friendly merge, but the stress of recruiting for war and coping with an absent guildmaster proved fatal by late summer, and so the senior members re-founded the guild as To Hell's Door (yes, THuD) and later renamed it the Hand of Justice. Effectively organized by Ann and Graegar, HJ did quite well for itself through fall and winter, helping to establish a player-run city and continuing to battle PKs, in spite of growing boredom and frustration with the PvP-unfriendly direction of game-play. UO was a pretty chaotic game!

By early 1999, we resolved to move to the flashy new EverQuest, changing our name to Winterblood and teaming up as one of the first official guilds on server Mithaniel Marr, organized by Cimm, Tess, and a few other stalwart officers. Spring became a building period for the guild as we carved out a new niche in a new game, and by late 1999, we'd secured allies in Ilsik Haucil and helped found three other role-playing alliances, including the the OOC Alliance (with the Dark Alliance), the Coalition of Honorable Guilds (small guilds that banded together for RP and raiding); and the Mithaniel Marr Roleplayers Organization (including the Phantom Guard). Several of our members worked on the staff of the MMDN (Mithaniel Marr Daily News), a server-wide forum, as well. Those partnerships led to numerous roleplaying plots and events, and ultimately laid the foundation for our vast library of stories. Small factions in Asheron's Call, Diablo II, Tribes II, and Anarchy Online, as well as a brief return to UO, failed to dethrone EQ, and we continued to grow in strength and numbers, rendering us more than capable of handling many of the toughest zones in the game, quite an accomplishment for a "family" guild which never set out to be uber. By 2001, our members were hitting level 60, and our alliance with Ilsik Haucil led to some extremely successful raids throughout the planes, Kunark, and Velious during that period, including raids on the Temple of Veeshan by May, which at the time was an enormous accomplishment, making us only the fifth group on our server to even attempt it, let alone succeed. We also held a large player meet in Las Vegas, Nevada, in 2001, which was attended by members of our guild as well as IH.

Late in the summer of 2001, we were accepted into the guild beta for Dark Age of Camelot, and a move seemed inevitable. After two and a half years trudging through EQ, our core and veteran members were eager to move on to a new world. Thus, our guild scooped up a few friends and allies, said goodbye to Norrath and journeyed on to Camelot as the Greyrunners, a mercenary guild in Midgard on the Morgan le Fay server, led by Onyx, Ann, and Tor. In the year and a half to follow, we achieved much on our server, becoming one of the first guilds to form up and acquire an emblem, and leveling to join the PvP game once again - we'd gotten a tad rusty since UO. An alliance with Iron Fire was short-lived as Iron Fire itself was short-lived, but our alliance with Stone Circle, old friends from our EQ days, was a friendly one that led to numerous RvR forays and role-playing events. But the veterans soon realized the limitations of Camelot, finding it not different enough from EQ to continue. Within a year, most of our core members had winked out of Midgard, preferring instead smaller ventures, such as another run at Anarchy Online, a jaunt through Asheron's Call II, a brief stint in Lineage, a peek into EVE Online, a minor faction in Planetside, and several deeply-plotted Neverwinter Nights campaigns to tide us into 2003, all while patiently awaiting the impending journey to a galaxy far, far away.

Beta-testing Star Wars Galaxies in the spring of 2003 convinced us to enter the game in June, playing as a pirate-themed Rebel guild on the Kettemoor server, this time calling ourselves Jademoon, and led by Sai, Cal, Tor, Tess, Kiry, and later, Tek. A heroic effort on the part of the founding members saw our architect to master and our guild hall and our city, Greenmurk, planted firmly in the swamps of Moenia by the end of summer. Months later, our humble little guild-city became officially recognized when player-city infrastructures were patched into the game, and months after that, we'd grown to 100 citizens and 6 guilds, becoming one of the pre-eminent role-playing metropoleis on the server - quite an achievement for a relatively small guild. We also participated in various groups and plotlines, including the Kettemoor Underworld, which proved to be a disappointment at best. It became hard to quell the realization that, between the antics of griefing role-players in the community, and the shockingly poor progress and support of the game by its developers, that our time in SWG was coming to an end, and by July of 2004, we left en masse, leaving only a handful of stalwart members behind. To bide our time, we spent a few months in a City of Heroes sub-faction called the Jademoon Superfriends, on the Infinity server, but ultimately the shallow and slow nature of the game led us to leave it as well, turning to smaller stints in betas and free-trials as we'd done before. We also held a small player meet in Vegas, again, in the summer of 2004.

By early fall 2004, most members had previewed World of Warcraft, and we determined to make that our next home. We kept the name Jademoon and its elven equivalent, Ithil en'Calenmir, and officers Oaris, Calenduin, Tesslyn, Vaelynn and Torlith led the guild into the new game. We made an effort at a grand roleplaying plot, but the game didn't support us quite as much as previous games, and we found ourselves more focused on PvP and PvE than in SWG. We accomplished much alongside our dear allies, Remorse and Retribution, including several successful forays into the uber-dungeon Zul'Gurub. In the spring, we gave the new Guild Wars game a spin on the side as well. But Blizzard was slow to add new content and bug fixes to WoW, particularly for the casual-gamer and small-guild player-base, as most new content was geared for uber-guilds, and the balance of the PvP game quickly skewed in favor of the PvE uber-guilds. Many of us achieved high PvP ranks and multiple level 60 characters, and still loved the game, but were looking for new things to try as well, rather than repeating the same three dungeons ad nauseam. We spent part of the summer and fall playing side games, desperate for a change of pace from the repetitiveness of WoW.

In the fall of 2005, we resolved that we needed a change of pace - too many of our members were just burned out on WoW, and not feeling much reason to stay there as a unit. We decided to have another run at City of Heroes -  City of Villains , to be precise, where we set up a pirate-themed villain group called Jademoon Marauders, as well as a new hero guild named the Jademoon Sentinels, both on the Virtue RP server. Several of our members maxed their villains and became well-known in PvP; we built a beautiful villain base in addition to completing a number of task forces as a team; and we wove, once again, an elaborate web of role-play back-stories across both factions. We went pretty strong for a few months, but the holiday season and the continuing shallowness of the game did us in, and we went looking for yet another new game. It didn't take us long to return to old favorites - we found ourselves trying out the NGE overhaul to our beloved old game, Star Wars Galaxies. But, even a few months of singing in cantinas and shooting down TIE fighters wasn't quite enough to hold our attention, and most of us agreed, the SWG we longed for was largely gone, thanks to SOE's bungling. Heedless, we jumped to yet another Sony game, EverQuest II, but barely lasted a month before abandoning it due to boredom and frustration with an unsurprisingly EQ-esque level grind.

And thus in the spring of 2006, we ended up back in World of Warcraft. Our first goal was to complete the .5 armor quests for every level 60 in the guild, which we did within a few months, toppling Valthalak and the other bosses with relative ease - something few guilds ever bother to do. Several members began making a name for themselves in PvP; we began going to MC and ZG as guests of resident uber-guilds; recruited a few new folks and old names; and continued awaiting the promised hardcore-casual guild content. Also beginning in spring, Cal began a Shadowrun RPG campaign, open to all members and friends, and played out in OpenRPG (our global tabletop), which proved to alleviate some of the desire for RP that we just weren't getting from our WoW experience. During the summer we also held a player meet in Hamburg, Germany. WoW continued to dominate until fall, when several folks took a break to play through two of the Guild Wars expansions, and we took another break through the holidays as we geared up for the Burning Crusade. In January of 2007 we jumped right into the BC expansion for WoW, with our first characters to 70 in under two weeks, tackling heroics a few months in, and hosting several successful arena teams. Our Shadowrun campaign moved to the Fantasy Grounds client and admitted even more players as it began its second year in operation. By the summer, we ran our third side-venture in Guild Wars as its last expansion hit the gaming world. Late in 2007, we held a small player meet in New Mexico as well as a wildly successful player meet in London, England, to celebrate the guild's 10th anniversary (oh how long it's been!) and upon our return, we attempted a sub-faction in Hellgate: London, which ended when the game tanked (that is to say, almost immediately). We also tried playing Ultima Online once again (oldies but goodies never die!), giving its new Kingdom Reborn client a try, this time on the Lake Austin server where a few of our members were already established, though we didn't play long beyond the holidays, and indeed, we moseyed back for another stint in WoW.

Spring 2008 saw us looking for something new as WoW had begun to feel stale once again. A sizable group made a run at Lord of the Rings Online on the Silverlode server, and though none of us quite made it into the end-game, most were content to have roamed Tolkien's world for a few months in between WoW heroics. By the summer, Age of Conan loomed large on the horizon, and we signed up for the Omm server, only to be disappointed by the lack of polish, content, and support present after so many delays intended to provide just that. After a month, we'd decided to abandon AoC for another year rather than paying to beta-test. Instead, we kick-started a new faction in Star Wars Galaxies, yet again. Seeing that our old home galaxy of Kettemoor was one of the deadest of the dead servers, we quickly transferred and re-rolled to Starsider, a much more populated but still RP-focused server. We lucked out and managed to acquire a city plot on Lok; naming it Murkhaven in honor of old Greenmurk, we quickly set about getting the new town up and running as an RP haven as well as a trading post. We spent the summer touring RP hotspots, making a name for ourselves (as always) as a premiere crafting town, and hitting the space-lanes together for some starship combat. Although we closed this third SWG faction in September after more than three months building Murkhaven, it nevertheless remains one of our fondest old games.

Autumn 2008 brought the promise of a fresh new game, one with a semblance of polish: Warhammer Online, a game we'd been watching carefully for years. We eagerly geared up for WAR, landing first on the Tor Elyr RP server and then moving to the more-populated Ostermark RP server on launch day, with Sai, Tor, Tess, Cal, and new officer Zaph leading the charge. Founding the guild in-game at midnight on launch-day, we forged ahead and joined the Exterminatus Alliance which was filled with great people. Unfortunately, as with many of the games we'd played in the last few years, Warhammer wasn't as polished as it seemed; it was laden with problems, unfinished crafting, unbalanced PvP, deserted public quests, and an excruciating level grind, all of which caused nearly everyone to cancel the game within only two months. Disappointed, we turned once again to that old fallback, World of Warcraft, which conveniently launched its second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, in November 2008, and started off on the quest for level 80. We played steadily through the winter, reaching, as always, our typical glass ceiling: the point somewhere between breezing through heroics, and being unable to raid for want of huge blocks of time, and huge numbers of players. Our usual fallback, PvP, had been simultaneously castrated and made even more elitist. So in March 2009, we gladly put WoW on the shelf for a while to sample a bit of something else: Lord of the Rings Online. We returned to our old home on the Silverlode server, intent on smoking pipeweed, eating lembas bread, and maybe even making it all the way to Moria (which expansion had launched only a few months before).

Late in the spring of 2009, we grew a bit bored with LOTRO yet again, as the level grind slowly crept up to squelch our enthusiasm. So when City of Heroes granted old players a free week to check out the Mission Architect system - a method for creating and importing player-driven content into the game - we tried it out on a lark, and were impressed enough to pull out our wallets and re-subscribe. The game had changed dramatically since the last time we'd played, and we found leveling much less tedious and time-consuming than in prior periods. Indeed, we managed to play several sets of heroes and villains into the end-game, achieving far more than our previous attempts combined, all while playing quite casually. Our minor CoH faction has thus far continued into late summer, while other members have dabbled in such games as Demigod and Left 4 Dead, and we began beta-testing Aion and Champions Online. Also during the summer of 2009, our Shadowrun campaign - which had been going strong for over three years - finally came to a close, and plans for another campaign, set in the Star Wars universe instead, were underway by August.

After nearly sixth months of CoH, we decided to split amicably and give World of Warcraft another try. August's patch 3.0.2 had introduced a new-new casual-friendly style to the game, not truly seen since the previous expansion; raid-quality gear was suddenly available to casual players through heroic small-group play as well as battleground PvP. Even recognizing it as yet another tactic to keep casuals paying and playing, we still wanted to give it a whirl, and so back we were in September! Although we spent a month early the next year playing EVE Online as a team, we spent the bulk of the fall and winter in WoW.

But just as in the year before, springtime always makes us want to return to the Shire, so we jumped back into LotRO for several months, making it all the way to the gates of Lothlorien before losing interest (Moria was a depressing slog!) and returning to Guild Wars for a month or so to take fresh characters through Factions. Summer brought sales on Steam, and we found ourselves in Champions Online for a whopping $6, while others of us continued to dabble in WoW on the side. By August, we switched gears to a different superhero MMO altogether -- City of Heroes' expansion, Going Rogue, was finally upon us, bringing together our old crew for some smashin' and grabbin'.