My name is Jesse. I played Shartak from around mid-2010 to 2017. I first called myself 'Mencken' on the forum, after my cannibal anarchist character of the same name, and later renamed it to Dani, after my orientalist statesman Dani al-Ghazali. I was in university when I first started playing, and continued playing regularly until around the time I stopped drinking. Nowadays I'm in social work (and sober). I got into Shartak via Urban Dead, a similar low-tech, RP heavy, incrementalist game, but found Shartak much more engaging. Too much, perhaps. I still do RP but just tabletop IRL. It makes me less obsessive.
I spooked a lot of people early on with my playstyle. In those days, I had a habit of reading everything I could about a game beforehand to really immerse myself into that world. And at the time there was so much to go through, literal years of conversations and stories from Raktam, Durham, Wiksik, etc. I thought I knew a lot, but in fact, I didn't know much at all. I had never chatted with any of the players I was trying to play with, nor was I aware of the drama surrounding them, which was kept on a tight lid. So when I came along, a new player eerily knowing more than a new player should, with a morbid fascination for the GSUC, a clan which had been big the year before I joined, and my playstyle predicated on blowing up the games of other players (a consequence of having an anarchist anti-royal character), people assumed that I wasn't new at all, but some old enemy with a new account. That seemed pretty paranoid to me. But much later on I would discover that one of my close friends in this game had done that exact thing, and yeah, super creepy, but eh, let's not resurrect the drama along with the nostalgia.
Luckily, the people I was playing with, the characters I was seemingly opposed to, like Blue Hummingbird (Queen of Raktam) and Anthor (King of Wiksik), had a lot of grace and helped incorporate SOAP, which stands for something like 'Anarchist posse' but I forget what the 'o' was. It was very half-baked but it lasted a few months. Maybe the other players were just bored with the status quo. You need conflict or the game gets stale. Just not too much. I had another guy I played with, Mortis, and when I eventually got bored of Mencken, he carried on with the anarchist stuff, mainly just PKing. Like I said, they were good sports about it all, and neither of us were griefers. I was never very good at combat or hiding and all my characters were hilariously easy to kill.
I think the period after Mencken, covering the rest of 2010, early 2011, was my favorite era of the game. There were lots of people still around, most of the villages had some kind of ongoing, organized roleplay (except Dalpok, nothing ever happens there), and people had some very creative ideas. My favorite clan looking back was Orwhans, a native-aligned invite only RP clan, which I was never a member of, but I saw the stuff they did and thought it was innovative. Most of those players went on to form the core of the Misfits, the active clan in Derby for a long time. During that time the game hosted some truly great players: FirstAmongDaves, who went above and beyond to pay for a couple interactive ships to explore, Anthor, Neil Tathers, Bobby the Hatchet, Etherdrifter, Iceman, Killy, Katie Calhoun, and so on. I would count my character Dani al-Ghazali among those luminaries. The character was inspired from the Leon Uris novel Exodus, about the Israeli war of independence, which has some rather racist descriptions of Arabs. Although he started out as a caricature, Dani became an emissary of sorts, visiting the various player domains and hob nobbing with royals and bartenders, but his civility and charm was only surface level, and underneath it all he was a maniac who wanted to conquer the island.
Such were the good times. As for the not so good times, it really came back to two big questions: how far is too far for roleplaying? And, how do you set up a story with another player without intruding on their space? To me looking back, these questions have simple answers: 1) good villains don't have to be bigots, and 2) you ask people if you can play with them. But it took me awhile to get it. I made a character, The Hierophant, based off The Hanged Man, a tarot-inspired dictator from York (birthplace of the GSUC). Hanged Man was basically just an enigmatic PKer, but I made a new account for the Hierophant and tried to make it seem like I was similar to Hanged Man, blowing up his game in the process, but also a different player from myself, which evoked the old idea that I wasn't who I seemed. I think it was also pretty obvious to people that it was me, I'm not very good at disguising my style. The main problem was that the Hierophant, in addition to being a crazy York nationalist PKer, was also racist and sexist, reflecting the colonial times --of this fictional island which deliberately exists out of time and historical context. This was long before US politics made me realize how gross pretending to be a bigot was. But other people knew and didn't want to play with a character like that (and rightly so).
For all I talk about roleplay, I spent a lot of my time by myself, or playing with at most one or two other players. The game lost a lot of players after 2011, not a big exodus or anything but just people idling out. I think now that 2009 had been its biggest year and the game had begun to decline in numbers in the years after. Derby became the main roleplay-heavy village, and none of my characters were welcome there because of forum issues I had with other players. That also made Derby a target for pkers and griefers, and Derby's leaders returned these behaviors in kind. During those days, I used Dani to build signpost roads, and then getting mad when people smashed them. For me it was a way to quickly get around the island, but for other players it cut into their sense of exploration and mystery that made Shartak interesting. Later I tried to capture that theme and built various monuments trying to add to the lore. Simon made them permanent, which was nice. Yet I wondered what the point of it was, creating mysteries for mostly hypothetical newbies that never stuck around long.
This went on longer than I expected. I guess to sum it up, Shartak was a beautiful adventure for me. But despite being a grown-ass man playing irl, I still had a lot of growing up to do. I wish the game had the numbers it used to have in its heyday, and I could play with the maturity and life experience that I lacked back then. I'll end with hapless pirate character Gorry Louis's favorite deaths (written by other players):
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ClickClick fires at you with a blowpipe for 4 damage. You die. (2012-04-19 21:50)
ClickClick says: You are persistent, white devil. Yet you lack the skills and abilities that would make such persistence a challenge. Instead of the tiger that lurks in the undergrowth, teeth and claws ready...with a slight accent. (2012-04-19 21:53)
ClickClick says ...you are the honeybee that bats its head endlessly against the confining walls that it has blundered amongst. And so, for its own sake, must be swatted. with a slight accent. (2012-04-19 21:54)
Graagh attacks you with a heavy sword for 5 damage. You die. (2012-10-13 15:23)
Graagh scratches out what was carved on the wall. (2012-10-13 15:24)
Graagh carves GORRY LOUIS DIED HERE - AGAIN onto the wall. (2012-10-13 15:24)
Graagh collects the head of Gorry Louis. (2012-10-13 15:24)
Graagh holds up a gruesome skull. (2012-10-13 15:24)
Graagh grabs the parrot and bites its head off (2012-10-13 15:26)
(2017-03-03 19:19) You say arrr i shouldna drank all me absSzzsssinthe, yarrrrr
(2017-03-03 19:19) You climb outside.
(2017-03-03 19:20) You stagger drunkenly.
(2017-03-03 19:20) You stagger drunkenly.
(2017-03-03 19:20) You stagger drunkenly.
(2017-03-03 19:20) You stagger drunkenly.
(2017-03-03 19:20) You stagger drunkenly.
(2017-03-03 19:20) You stagger drunkenly.
(2017-03-03 19:20) You stagger drunkenly.
(2017-03-03 19:20) You stagger drunkenly.
(2017-03-03 23:22) sminky says If I'm honest, the tactic of killing someone then stumbling a few block out of the village baffles me. with a slight accent.
(2017-03-03 23:22) sminky says Like you didn't think retaliation was likely. with a slight accent.
(2017-03-03 23:23) Your parrot flies away.
(2017-03-03 23:23) sminky attacks you with a heavy sword for 5 damage. You die.
(2017-03-03 23:23) sminky collects the head of Gorry Louis.
(2017-03-03 23:23) sminky kicks the skull into the grass
