The History of the Realms

The Realms of the Dragon was created Oct 14, 1992 as a Discworld clone. (Discworld is a MUD based on the Terry Pratchett series of the same name. The mudlib is made public, and is the base code for many MUDs including the Realms of the Dragon and Final Realms.) The people who started it were Azuth, Elric and Tanis.

Tanis and Elric pirated the mud library from Forgotten Realms MUD (now known as Final Realms). Ducky, the God of Forgotten Realms at the time, got so angry he destroyed the machine that the Realms of the Dragon was residing on.

After it was rebuilt, it was a straight Discworld mud, without using the FR code as Ducky had destroyed it. To make the mud Discworld, Asmodean received the Discworld v7++ from Pinkfish, and overwrote the existing lib. During this time, the first domains and guilds were created. These were the guilds of Rangers and the Pyromancers as well as the domains of Valeris and Thelbane. At that time there was also witches guild in Thelbane and there even existed a television station.

The domain of Manetheren was created by Asmodean, in honour of the Kingdom of the same name mentioned in the Robert Jordan series 'the Wheel of Time'.

On June 3 1993, Asmodean became a God. Firestorm, the original Demi-god was also promoted to a God position. Lirath among other domains were discussed and created at this time as well. Ankh-Morpork was changed to Lirath in a record four days.

Grimbrand was promoted to God in late September for his amazing work in domains.

In January of 1994, Asmodean resigned and Firestorm and Grimbrand continued to rule.

The Realms of the Dragon purged its player base on March 21st, 1994.

Lancer was made God at the end of April 1994 and Firestorm and Grimbrand retired.

Ishamael became a God with Lancer that summer, and in that winter Lancer retired. Shortly after, Aurora was promoted to Goddess. Dyraen was promoted in the Winter of 1995.

In February of 1995, both Ishamael and Dyraen retired, leaving Aurora as the sole power in charge.

The Realms of the Dragon purged its player base on October 21st, 1995.

On May 5th, 1996, a hacker broke into RoD and destroyed all the player files and a good deal of the lib, bringing RoD to a grinding halt for about a week and a half. The player files were never recovered, and the next purge ensued.

In the Summer of 1997, RoD moved off of the Univerity of Michigan site and onto a machine generously donated by an ISP. This machine, a Sun Ultra 143 Mhz with 128 MB of Ram, was far and above the best machine RoD had ever been on. At its opening, RoD managed to have 130 players on at the same time. Unfortunately, MudOS and SunOS didn't seem to get along and memory leaks ensued, which would lock RoD up for 10 minutes at a time. Knowing that this would hamper the enjoyment for the players, RoD began looking for another site. Just prior to the move to the Ultra, Skullslayer was promoted to God.

In November of 1997, RoD found a new site with Paragon Technologies. In the Spring of 1998, Aurora retired and several weeks later, Darsis was promoted to God with Skullslayer.

In the autumn of 1999, Carchoth was promoted to God.

In the spring of 2001, Skullslayer stepped down from God.

In the summer of 2001, the Nightmares and Lakeris domains were merged and the name Nightmares kept as the entire domain name. The Lakeris domain, along with the Planes domain were then removed.

In the autumn of 2001, Grimm was promoted to God. Shortly after in early winter, Carchoth and Darsis stepped down from God, leaving Grimm as the sole God in charge.

Grimm appointed Artriedes as God in March of 2002 with his retirement in mind, for a month later, Grimm stepped down, leaving Artriedes as sole God. In September of the same year, Artriedes asked Zoe to be Goddess and together they ruled the Realms.

During that time, Lancer who had generously hosted the machine was no longer able to. Mudruck stepped forward, and with his kind offer, RoD was able to continue. For a brief period there were periodic lockups due to the machine's CPU so Artriedes donated an AMD XP1800+ processor and motherboard to ensure RoD remained lag free.

Late in 2003, Artriedes and Zoe both stepped down asking Skullslayer with his previous experience to stand in as God.

September 2005 saw the hosting machine start failing with random crashes, causing major loss of equipment for players. A new machine was sourced, being an Athlon64 4000+ with 2GB of RAM, and a 300GB SATA drive. This is by far the fastest machine the mud has ever run on. The month also saw Zoe step down as God again, leaving Sabreur in her place.