The origins of Keepers of Chaos can be traced back about 5 years ago. It all started with a program called “Kali”, SilentBob, Harmsway & Ezekiel tried out this new and exciting program with their favorite game Warcraft 2. Onward they fought, they made several friends (and more enemies), one in particular, DirtyBob. Dirty and Silent soon became good friends, playing (And beating) most anyone they came up against in Warcraft 2. DirtyBob soon came up from Tennessee to Michigan to hang out with Zeke, Silent, and Harms.
About 6 months into it or so, we began to notice “Guilds” or others that were also emerging on Kali, one of those guilds was known as “LOD” or Legions of Darkness. Enter Splixx. LoD Was comprised of Splixx, Basil, Dragon, Dabs, and Survivor. We played with and against these guys often in Warcraft 2, but furthermore, we became friends.
With LOD and other guilds forming and becoming powerhouses on Kali, we decided to make our own guild, we called it the “Bobs” or “ClanBob”. Everyone that was recruited into ClanBob had to have “Bob” on the end of their name (Except Zeke, EzeBob & ZekeBob just never fit). Now you have SilentBob, DirtyBob, AtomBob, DemonBob, EbolaBob, Thana (Another Name that didn’t fit with Bob) MysticBob, SlippyBob, Unholybob, SniperBob, and a few other bob’s that kind of dropped out of the scene (LightnigBob, ToxicBob and a couple others). To be a Bob meant 2 things: You had to have Mad skills in Warcraft 2 and you had to be able to talk shit with the best of them, a certain swager.
Warcraft2 slowly lost its luster and in comes Diablo. ClanBob and Some LoD play together, we formed what I think was the first Player Killing Guild in Diablo “Clan Messiah”. We made a Trophy page and took pictures of the ears off the people we pk’ed in Diablo. Back then, when you killed someone in Diablo, their ear would come flying off and drop to the ground. We made a complete mess of Diablo, we were one of the first Guilds to have the Town Kill and “Finger of God.” The way it worked is, we would enter your game, and instant kill you no matter what level, or where you were in the game. At this time (January of 1997) I had already sent in my $2.00 to try some beta of a game called “Ultima Online.” But that would be 5 months away. We continued to PK in Diablo and fight in Warcraft 2.
Keepers of Chaos & Banana Boys
Ultima Online (Chesapeake,
Ultima Online
UO Beta Test and Pacific:
I was the only person to kind of make it into the UO Phase 1 beta test. I didn’t actually make it, but lets just say there were a lot of ways to play the Phase 1 beta, however I did make it “Officially” into the phase 2 part of it. LoD’s and Bob’s kept playing Warcraft2, while I tried out this new game called Ultima Online. It was ok, a lot of crashes and a lot waiting for the servers to go up. (They were down more than up.) An interesting thing happened while I was beta testing, I somehow “Duped” the gold I had, I wasn’t sure at the time how I did it, but I knew my 5,000 gold I just spent, had returned back to me somehow (We’ll talk more about that later.) 3 months of that, and the game was ready for the public.
September 1997, Most of ClanBob and LOD decided to play together on Pacific. We decided to make our home near the mines of Minoc. We never had enough money to actually buy a house in our short sting on Pac, but thats where we played. We learned how to play and we built our characters. Back then there wasn’t much PvP but the thing that sticks out most in my mind was one day, a guy in FULL PLATE came to our little establishment talking shit (Back then Full Plate + 60 Str actually meant something, long before Macroing was widespread). The guy proceeded to kick the living dog shit out of all of us. About 2 months later, the lag started to increase and I get home from work one day to find out all the Bob’s and LoDer’s decided to up and leave Pac for a new server that was supposedly had a better ping, Chesapeake. I wasn’t to thrilled about leaving my 88 Magery character behind but I did.
Dread Days & Banaboys:
Macroing is now common knowledge. By day we’re all chopping wood and selling bows to make money, by night we can be seen hitting a dummy to gain stats. Soon enough, Ezekiel learns something, something that would change the course of Ultima Online, the dupe bug. Used & Abused the bug, The Bob’s quickly relocate north of Destard and claim it “Bob Town.” The Bob’s had about 6-7 large & small structures there (Old Keepers of Chaos Tower location). Zeke sets up his LoD friends with a nice 2 story. About this time Vae can be seen hanging with the LoDer’s.
The Bob’s and LoD’s still aren’t pking yet, but we’re being PKed. 2 Mages can be seen picking us off and gain a lot of fame. One night, Ezekiel and Slippy find their Castle north of Trinsic, and with Zeke’s new found Gate – House breaking bug, they proceed to loot and destroy their tower thus rendering them out of business.
The Bob’s, seeing blood, decide to start pking. We named each of our guys “Banana Boyz” and wore all Yellow. We set out to PK, all dressed up in our yellow clothes and mage gear. Full spell books in hand, we start to walk towards our favorite PK camping spot, the Minoc-Vesper bridge when we ALL got PKed (How Ironic).
The Banana Boyz are now PKing full time, behind most of the Bob’s and LoDer’s now as they merged. Battles spawned all over, PKer’s dressed in yellow could be seen running through every major dungeon. The Banana Boyz made a very good name for themselves, our first challeges were the “GOD’s”. The GOD’s were run by Defiance, Syx and Den Of Earth (Later Keepers of Chaos members). We had some good fights with them and interesting ICQ conversations, we quickly became friends off the battle ground. Banana Boyz grew in numbers and established itself in “Bob Town”. The Banana Boyz had tower surrounded by tents. About this time, many new members joined, with the likes of Slay, Mordenkainen, Ritalin of God and serveral others. Estimates of 30 people Banana Boyz grew to. All of the GOD’s were now Banana Boyz. A new powerhouse “Anti” emerged and named themselves MiM.
MiM, the people’s guild. A group of players dedicated to the greater good of the shard, basically the exact opposite of The Banana Boyz. MiM & BBz had it out all over the shard, with each camping the others home base. Other Anti’s came to power, they included LoM, PR, LOV & Sangdragons to name a few, they weren’t as big or organized as MiM, but they wouldn’t back down from a fight. The likes of them included Parthor, Tervex and Plox from PR who we later assimilated into Keepers of Chaos, Brooklyn and Notorious Big from LoM, Ivan & Caranthir from LoV and Rak from Sangdragons. Huge battles fought in front of Despise, The Chaos Shrine and every level of Cove. With the BBz PKing full time, and mostly hanging out at the Chaos Shrine, Splixx and Magincia decide to throw a house there for easy access when they died, and a guildstone. The guild located at the Chaos Shrine would be called “The Keepers of Chaos”.
Virtue Wars:
Around the time of January 1998, OSI announces future plans for stat loss upon death if you are red and their new “Order Vs. Chaos” wars on the horizon. This put a shutter of fear amongst the PK ranks. A month later, the system was in place. We tried to PK and noone seemed to get any statloss. A couple months into the system, more and more people reported minor stat loss but nothing major, bottom line is, we could still PK full time. Most of us made secondary characters to try out the new “Order Vs. Chaos” wars. Since you could macro becoming a Great Lord (Requirements to get a virtue shield at the time) we were soon thrown into the Virtue wars.
May 1998, Stat loss is now unbearable, and PKing as we know it, is gone. The Dread days are over. OSI implements guild wars and does away with the virtue requirements for the nice virtue shields. I remember gating from town to town, arming our Chaos shields attacking a lone Order, then disarming so no others could join in, OSI quickly put an end to that bug. Reds or Murderors now, were basically useless in large scale warfare. Our reds stayed on the Keepers of Chaos stone, but Zeke, Splixx, Harmsway, Ritalin, SilentBob and Atombob made a new stone and called it “LOJ” or Lords of Judgement. We had “Arguably” at the time, the top PvPers on the shard. No guilds would war us. Late May, Zeke takes off for 3 weeks on his honeymoon, when he returns, LoJ is pretty much dead because noone would war them. All of us jumped back onto the Keepers of Chaos stone, with our Reds as they had plenty of wars.
With guild wars going full speed now, Keepers of Chaos and a new upstart guild named MoA decided to test the waters of a merger. The GM of Keepers of Chaos at the time (Magincia) decided it would be a good idea. Our blues jumped off the Keepers of Chaos stone and onto a new merged stone and called it “AoC” or Alliance of Chaos. Our reds stayed on the Keepers of Chaos stone while our blues lasted a good 2 days on the AoC stone. All of us were back on the Keepers of Chaos stone.
After AoC broke up, all the Keepers of Chaos who’d left the stone rejoined the people who stayed on the stone, Shinji, Splixx (Chupa), Zeke, RG and assorted Reds go back to warring just about anyone and everyone. Few people know about it at this point, because MoA had most of the message boards tied up with propaganda by a certain someone (Darkmist), but Keepers of Chaos easily has as many wars as MoA, including being the only guild BOB would war. The Bob’s didn’t speak much english, so they didn’t understand our trash talk, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. Around August, MoA has it’s first big break-up and splits off into a few assorted guilds, the most notable members of MoA moving onto MDC, while one member, Regulator, joined KoC to war BOB. After a short while, MDC merged into KoC, bringing along such members as Mokie, Zak, Defrag, Mord (who had guild hopped to Keepers of Chaos for a few days then back to MoA in July), and Narf (who finally had both of his main characters on the Keepers of Chaos stone, as he’d had his thief on the stone for a very long time).
Change of the Guard:
August 1998, Shinji, Chupa & Magincia were CO-GM’s of Keepers of Chaos at this time. Things are going good except for a small problem near our stone. The RPing town of “Oasis”. We simply wouldn’t leave them be and they us. They made newbie thieves and proceeded to annoy us, so we made throw away pkers. Names like Rapist O’ Oasis (Parthor) , Molestor Bear (Soul), & Bloody Tampon (Ezekiel) were 3 names that come to mind. The GMs promptly changed our names to Forbes, Carebear Skinner and Stephen. They fucked with us, we fucked back twice as hard. One night, the ‘Care Bears’ or The Oasis’s newbie thieves, somehow got ahold of Magincia’s keys to his house. They kept coming, we kept taking murder counts. They looted, we went red. Magincia went crazy in the IRC chatroom, Magincia was no longer Keepers of Chaos. Sadly, these were the last days of SilentBob and Atombob, as they moved on from UO as well, not before SilentBob took about 20 murder counts in the name of Keepers of Chaos.
September 1998, Ezekiel now in command of Keepers of Chaos with Parthor, KoC is running smooth. Nothing real major happens. Just a shitload of guild wars. February 1999, Rollergirl gets his account banned, (Indirectly because Zeke PKed someone macroing and taunted him so the guy turned RG in) unattended macroing and use of 3rd party programs are now bannable offenses. The birth of the townies is now upon us. Zeke’s ChainGun and Ayanami (The rebirth after the banning) lead the way in this new era. They are referred to as Dex Monkeys. Sporting 100 Dex & 100 Str, with GM X6 Healing, Tacts, Weapons of Choice, Resist, Parrying, and Anatomy with some fletching & magery, they are simply unstoppable in town and nearly equally as devastating out of town. Town warfare was the hot thing now. Being spells did no damage in town, it was a nice change to be able to gate from town to town and not have to worry about a mana dump. A new phrase entered the Keepers of Chaos aresonal, PBR. To Keepers of Chaos this was simply known as “Para, Box, Rape”, the 3 steps to easily defeat any townie.
For the next several months, Keepers of Chaos accepts all challenges, never strays from the Virtue guild path and never backs down. Holding the Deciet “wall” fending off would be challenges like AFC 1 and 2. -Z- disbands and resurges. Keepers of Chaos stands tall. O-B wars then peaces us, Keepers of Chaos is still there. -S- disbands and won’t accept war, Keepers of Chaos takes on all comers. MiM decides to make another appearance on Chessy, they make some nice little war rules, 1 being noone can war Keepers of Chaos which would thus disband Keepers of Chaos. Their war fails, Keepers of Chaos lives on. Oinland round 2, Keepers of Chaos stands strong
The End of an Era:
December 1999, everything is going status quo. Having virtually no challenge left on Chesapeake, Keepers of Chaos decides to try out the PK haven shard known as Siege Perilous, with no stat loss, its an attraction for the members remembering the dread days. Our Magery to high! Our PvP skills to good! a tower in 6 weeks? Impossible!!! Everyone on 3, scream dupe.. The witch hunt begins and ends with the mass banning of some 200+ accounts, mostly Keepers of Chaos but not limited to. Most if not all of Keepers of Chaos was banned in the beginning. Some got their accounts, some cried rat, I mean wolf, some cut their ties with Keepers of Chaos, more are KoC forever.
January 2000, Onward we move to the next challenge. Few are playing UO still, some are playing Asheron’s Call, most are waiting for something new. Diablo 2 comes and quickly goes. Keepers of Chaos lives on, nothing could stop us, not even a bunch of underpaid 16 year old GMs who had nothing better to do with their time than fuck over a bunch of ruthless PKing assholes. Because that’s what we were.
The Blood Monarchy
Asheron's Call (Darktide)
A New Game, A New Era
Keepers of Chaos founds the Blood monarchy in Asheron’s Call on the Darktide server.
End January 2000, With Seth-Drone, Rak and Chupa already playing Asheron’s Call, Parthor gives it a shot. He tries to explain to Ezekiel how cool of a game it is, and finally convinces him to try it for himself. Zeke and a few others try it out, leveling their characters from exploit spots in the games with their new Archers (At this time level 30’s were bad-asses), the slowly move onward with the new game. Most of Keepers of Chaos is now under the ‘Gara’ Monarchy while we learn to play, with Seth-Drone still playing with ‘The Mercs’ the self proclaimed super power of that time. Zeke levels to level 17, and promptly quits exclaiming in the Irc Channel Topic “Asheron’s Call would be good if it didn’t suck”. A few weeks go by, and Zeke decides to give it another shot, this time purchasing the account of Ghost Al-Fan off E-bay. All of Keepers of Chaos (Except Seth-Drone) is now under Ghost.
February 2000, Ezekiel deciding that Ghost isn’t good enough, probes E-bay and purchases the account of “Blood”. Blood was purchased for the sum of $400.00 which was a lot back in those days for an Asheron’s Call account. At the time of purchase, Blood was level 44. The Mercs reign on DarkTide was over and Seth finally came home. Everyone was now under the “Blood” monarchy.
We made our initial home in Khay, having no allies and taking on all comers. We held our own at first taking on the likes of The-Feared and DoughBoys and many, many others who used to even camp us back in those days in Khay. The-Feared, Red Devil and Shollos allied together. We were still young and small, but we held true to ourselves, pks forever. Blood included friends and enemies from UO, with the likes of Oinland, -S-, DJ’s, -Z- just to name a few.
At one point we were contacted by Black Rose Noble, GM of the BR monarchy, who wanted us to move in with them in Kara due to the fact we had common enemies and a common friendship with Dark Doomer. The problem for us was that most of our guys were still low levels and the lin / khay region was perfect for them to level at. BRN talked to Dark Doomer aswell as to X-Factor and about a week later after being given several info about the shops and such we agreed to move in.
However us moving in caused several problems within the BR monarchy. As a result their monarchy disbanded the day after we moved to Kara. They then rebuilt from Plateau I beleive. Living in kara made things really easy for us since Lin / Kay prices sucked badly while we could sell our loot for pretty good prices in Kara. Our war against the Loch/Shollos/Red Devil/The-Feared alliance became more serious, we’d raid Mayoi a lot, and the BDC war really started to turn in our favor. We had kicked The-Feared from Olthoi Tunnels and made it our private dungeon. The-Feared was going down and DVN / BIX ended up selling which made it only worse for them. RD and Loch merged in a single monarchy of around 700s vassals.
Everything was going great for us, a good town, some of the best leveling spots… Then suddenly, BR came back.
For a week BR / TF / Schat raided us but it wasn’t that bad although we only had about 4 high levels on our side when they had at least 10 of them. But after that things got out of end about 7 anti guilds joined the conflict, it was us vs BR / Schats, TF, Lop, CeD, CoA, CoS and several other individuals. As I said we only had a few high levels and our average level was level 30s while most of the raiders were 40+ with a good proportion of 50s. This is when we mostly started to build our pvp experience. Fighting outnumbered all the time against other high levels was the best way to improve.
While our high levels could live with it, it must have been hell for our lowbies which is why after a good 3 weeks of fighting we decided to move out. We took over Lytelthorpe from a couple anti monarchy (Towel & Pathion the elf). To our credit, not 1 SINGLE CORE MEMBER HAS LEFT BLOOD SINCE WE STARTED THE MONARCH. That says something.
Blood Becomes ‘The’ PK Powerhouse
September 2000. There are literally no PK monarch’s left but a handful. Blood, Red Devils, and Patryns begin a 3 week long onslaught of AB which has probably the greatest fights on Darktide to date. AB isn’t Blood’s goal though, there is still some unfinished business in Kara. While the war in AB comes and goes, Blood turns its attention to Kara. Red Devil’s and Blood give BR a little payback in lifestone camping and easily dispatch BR from their home in Kara. The-Feared did come to help BR but they were kicked out with no question asked.
Having taken Kara. The Blood monarchy started to grow. From 1200s followers we reached 1700s once Red Devil and Shollos swore to us. Our 1st step was to take leveling spots back from TDM which was a pk monarchy that had used our time in AB to take over leveling spots. Their monarchy disbanded pretty fast.
Then came the second test : who could control Aerlinthe Island ? TF who had rerolls with no tie learnt felt they were in a position to break the peace that was agreed there by the whole server. After a week and several aggressions from them we decided to declare it an official war zone. Their ties indeed did help them a lot considering they’d camp us at the the portal drop and would attack us coming out debuffed from the diamond golems. But ties became more spread and when Tai got a gating mule to provide us recall ties to the island, fighting became a lot easier. We were finally in the same conditions we pretty much kicked them out of the island. Soon antis had their own gaters but it still didn’t make much of a difference. Island was owned by us as much as such a wide place can be owned by a group.
November 2000. Blood has grown to a monarch the size of 2000+ people strong. We live in Kara and get raided around the clock, yet we remain.
The real test of our power was the opening of a Kara portal, making raids on us 10x easier for our opponents. The Feared who had announced they wouldn’t let us keep Kara launched big raids on us using help from other neutral / antis. As a matter of fact it only made us stronger by reuniting a population that was slowly carebearising.
We are a target to the entire server, unlike 95% of the server which is neutral and wants to level in peace (You know who you are TF, Wilc, Venger just to name a few). If people want a fight, they know where they can find one. You trash talk us on msg boards, you camp our town for hours on end, you camp our level spots 24/7, yet we’re still here. Without us and the likes of NH’s guild, the entire server might as well be playing on Thistledown. As I write this, Blood is the LARGEST monarch on the server, any server for that matter, and Blood himself is the highest level character on Darktide at level 87. Once again, mock us if it makes you feel better on the msg boards, but know this: Not 1 core Blood member has left Blood for another monarch. Its not the size of the monarch, its the 20-30 people at the top that matter.
AB is ours:
December 2000. There was not much left to do other than taking over AB from the antis/neutral bears. Those same neutral bears made it possible when they decided to create GEN and go RPK. Each anti/neutral bear that had left to create GEN was one less anti we would have to fight, making numbers a lot more even…
With that said AB was now easy to get since their only force was their high numbers. However we also knew that the sooner we would attack, the sooner they would all make peace and ally again. Instead of attacking we told our vassals to start making DIs/cash for a war, and started board propaganda to prevent both camps from reuniting. The day The-Feared showed their true face and allied with that RPK force, we jumped on this occasion and kicked both camps from AB, taking it for ourselves.
GEN threatened us and said they would never let us take it, they even allied with BR but were forced to run away. They were left with our scraps (Kara/BH BSD) while we were taking the prime spots of DT. Several antis (mostly Deborah & HoS) fought us for a couple weeks then gave up too.
January 2001. – It was over, all our goals were reached there was no real opposing force left so lots of our guys started to stop playing/selling by the end of January.
While that, GEN allied with half the server from ex-alberons to HoCs. However, if GEN did grow to 3200+ peeps while we had 2300+ guys, they failed in all their attemps to get rid of us. Several of us came back and after several months of fighting, GEN ended up being so weak that they asked us to ally them to fight antis, but since we laughed at them and refused, all these ANTI and PK monarchies we had crushed allied with each others and formed an alliance called TLS (The Last Stand).
Not only TLS had overwhelming numbers but they also allied with tons of other monarchies. That made things hard for us the first few months but while they won a few battles, we still won the war and ended up at one point with 18 000+ followers.
The end of an era:
By the end of 2002. With no competition left, most of us decided to leave the game and try other games/beta like AC2, SB, SWG, Lineage 2, …
2003: Blood is still around but like the game, it is no longer the same. The people we handed Blood to were sadly not the right choice. Multiple powertripps happened leading to the departure of our best members, while the worse trash was let in.
January 2004: With more key people about to leave, we were forced to make a sort of a come back to kick the powertrippers and clean the ranks from the trash.
February 2004: We are able to celebrate Blood’s 4rth anniversary with a much cleaner monarchy. With feb patch came the end of XPchains and an higher anti macro policy from Turbine which made fighting for leveling spots even more pointless than before. This game really lacks goals to fight for.
April 2004: Blood was “conveniently and mysteriously” deleted, eventhough its not hard to figure who it benefited to. Yet the monarchy still does quite fine under a new tag known as Bloodtide. The game has gone quite boring, it seems Turbine does their best to screw it every patch…
Keepers of Chaos’s Current Situation & Future
Years passing made our RL situation change a lot. Most of us have jobs and don’t have as much time to play anymore. But the hardest issue to deal with is the lack of games worth playing. All the games which have came out aim carebears and only allow PvP on a consensual basis.
Shadowbane which could have been a huge PvP fest was so bugged that it made it barely playable. The game more or less died in a few months.
As a result our members are currently spread on on various games such as Ultima Online (Ipy Server), Asheron’s Call, Dark Age Of Camelot, Lineage 2, City of Heroes and World of Warcraft (Beta).
World of Warcraft which should be released by the end of 2004 might be the game we are all waiting for although Blizzard is still vague regarding PvP possibilities.