Ancient Web: Storen's Castle Catalogued IRC Roleplaying Campaigns

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Storen's Castle of the Paladin greets the visitor as a traveler at a fork in a forest road. The sign points toward a castle that is forever under construction, with several roleplaying worlds hidden inside.

Visit the Castle of the Paladin.

Its front page offers projects based on Lunar, Secret of Mana, Wild Arms, Final Fantasy, and Exalted. Rather than games someone could install, many are IRC roleplaying campaigns: groups of people improvised stories together in named chat channels and recorded what happened. A tiny badge insists that real men use Notepad, while the footer recommends a 1024-by-768 screen and a frames-capable browser.

The surviving campaign list, last updated December 25, 2007, reveals the scale of that activity. It tracks current games, watched games, planned campaigns, and dozens of concluded or abandoned attempts. The entries include organizers, channel names, session schedules, rules systems, characters, morale, and reasons for endings.

The history of stories that almost happened

A Lunar campaign run by Storen is recorded at session 63. An earlier volume, Illusions of Grandeur, is marked complete after 46 sessions. A Secret of Mana campaign is listed as finished after 61 sessions, with a joking note about the characters' futures.

These records are not just lists of imaginary worlds. They document the human difficulty of making shared fiction happen. Campaigns were suspended because of work schedules, because players left, or because a game master disappeared. A Grandia roleplaying game is credited with more than three years and 117 sessions, while other experiments survived only a meeting or two.

Storen preserves character names and short descriptions even for failed projects: a wandering priestess, a wandering samurai, an ancient ghost bound to a ring, and a mercenary caught in another faction's troubles. Those characters were important to somebody even if the surrounding websites no longer work.

The public index is an archive, not evidence that the IRC channels or characters are still active today. Several linked campaign sites now fail. That is precisely why the central list matters: it acts as a census of temporary imaginary communities that otherwise leave almost no trace.

Explore Storen's castle entrance and the detailed 2007 roleplaying log.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.