Recent Posts

1

General Discussion / Re: Shartak Veterans: share your stories!

« Last post by Cobalt Manticore on December 01, 2025, 05:57:09 pm »

Alrighty, well, coffee first. Okay. Introduced to UrbanDead by a fellow Shade {mmwrpg} player name of YeloSnow. Hung in there for a bit, the much more level playing field, everyone being sitting ducks made room for alot of quid pro kills, you stab my back I stab yours, and it was contentful there. Then er there, I think it was, I saw an ad for Shartak in UD's bottom left side. I was on a late stage nearly dead WebTV at the time so my options for Online Gaming were saaad. Even for back then the time of limited choices anyways lol. I joined on in, from then it was a blur of personas, none of them I could fully settle into, mostly many based on my favorite TV Shows of the times. You might know a few. I sided with whoever sided with me, not knowing about the "you're not supposed to talk them them or we grief you" rules too well. Same everywhere really. Doesn't stop me from being nice to those nice to me. Started with 3, but inner restlessness and unexplored character approaches led me to pretiring alot of otherwise quite tolerable choices of potrayals. Many other times I thought I was just plain done, bored or stressed, otherwise not having alot of gaming fun gaming. Game stressure's never worth the blood pressures. Many times I wasn't sure Simon even wanted me in here, hit to miss percentages got suspiciously wonky at times, waking up surrounded by tigers etc, lol like wtf. To this day, still not sure, but I am open to him politely asking me to leave, lol. I also run by the rule if you politely ask me to stop killing you I will, I don't kill peaceful intenders, and I try to save as many friendlies as I do enemies to the cont(r)acts list. I don't totally feel like a veteran, having switched faces and races so much I didn't set down roots, but to the halfhandful of folks that did know most of the me from then to now that was enough for me. I've seen the tides of many different colors of outsider surf ebb and flow, the growth and decline of cultures of native flora influence the terrain, it's a great place to log in on the morning routine, do a few action points worth of mischief, and then resume that IRL game called "Life". No, not a veteran, but maybe a proficient newbie.

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General Discussion / Re: Halloween 2025 Stats

« Last post by Cobalt Manticore on December 01, 2025, 05:26:22 pm »

Barn had helps, many of them new Pirates but their enthusiasm was en joy to be hold.

Top 20 killers of zombified creatures
These the are people you want on your side in a zombie apocalypse

Character Zombified kills Zombified HP Average per zombified creature   Barn Cat 158 1740 11   Manticore 102 1561 15

Manticore woulda got more but... ..cannibals cannibalizing cannibals.. showed less teamwork than the pirates. That's my excuses and explains and I sticky to thems. Skull Islanders, do better. Til next year.[/td][/tr][/table]

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General Discussion / Re: Where do You draw the Line in Terms of Acceptable R.P.?:

« Last post by Cobalt Manticore on December 01, 2025, 05:18:35 pm »

The old forums, I wish I could have rescued my stories from there before the nuke.

As sad as I was to lose the old forum threads, which were truly unmatched in creativity from some remarkable players, I was glad that it also erased the black spots that Cobalt alludes to, RP gone too far, etc

Typed words lose inflection and rely on nuance the silence of print cannot rescue.

4

General Discussion / Shartak Veterans: share your stories!

« Last post by Dani on November 28, 2025, 10:16:22 pm »

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):

                                                                                       ***

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



   

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General Discussion / Re: Where do You draw the Line in Terms of Acceptable R.P.?:

« Last post by Dani on November 28, 2025, 08:28:44 pm »

Well, it wasn't me. I'm surprised and sorry to hear that, though, albeit this thread is a year old. Drama was common when there were more of us to cause trouble on the island.

In hindsight, it would have been a good idea to have some kind of orientation or workshop on how to roleplay with courtesy for others. This was the first roleplay heavy game that I played, and I can think of several times when I behaved inappropriately on the pretense of it being in-character. And other times when I didn't maintain character/player separation very well, and that led to a lot of hurt feelings.

As sad as I was to lose the old forum threads, which were truly unmatched in creativity from some remarkable players, I was glad that it also erased the black spots that Cobalt alludes to, RP gone too far, etc--to say nothing of what it was like before my time, when Shartak was still young and people carried the natives vs colonials theme a little too far.

I check back now and again. Nice to see the old stomping grounds, even emptied.

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General Discussion / Re: Halloween 2025 Stats

« Last post by gridflay on November 26, 2025, 06:44:35 pm »

I appreciate the chance for everybody to get some mummy kills this year!

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General Discussion / Halloween 2025 Stats

« Last post by Simon on November 26, 2025, 05:30:22 pm »

Top 20 killers of zombified creatures
These the are people you want on your side in a zombie apocalypse

Character	Zombified kills	Zombified HP	Average per zombified creature
Mina	256	850	3
Dam Frawd	232	1337	5
Eliza Day	171	835	4
Barn Cat	158	1740	11
Flint	141	1526	10
Gubgob	130	1038	7
ShadowJack	116	1004	8
Wicked Rowan	113	1279	11
Some Idiot	106	613	5
Cabin Boy Kate	103	1067	10
Tempest Fennac	102	889	8
Manticore	102	1561	15
Darian Frost	98	875	8
Malaki	98	2268	23
Scaramouche	97	291	3
Eshowdow	94	1332	14
Amity	90	443	4
Raivo	85	2016	23
gridflay	76	1667	21
Cap'n Blubbertub	75	387	5

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Shartak Fiction/Art / Re: Shartak says the darnedest things.

« Last post by Cobalt Manticore on November 26, 2025, 02:57:14 pm »

Parrots be crushin',? 

Since your last move:
A parrot squawks "Butterfly Li is a beauty! *Squawk!*" (2025-11-26 04:35)
A parrot makes a sound remarkably similar to a human cough. (2025-11-26 12:35)

Who wants to tell them this?

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Shartak Fiction/Art / Re: Shartak says the darnedest things.

« Last post by Cobalt Manticore on October 31, 2025, 02:43:16 pm »

Zombified Parrots got so much more to say.

Since your last move:
A zombified parrot squawks "Bahl is a Shartak Hero" (2025-10-31 14:40)

Or do they? HaPPy HaLLoWeeN! 

10

Native / Re: Mystery Spots, any more?

« Last post by Cobalt Manticore on August 28, 2025, 12:16:36 am »

I was wondering this morning if all the island's mysteries have been found yet when I found another this morning. Sacred space area, around the ruins. It reminds me of the cavern system that was there before the ruins there were so thoroughly ruined.