It all started in Ultima Online, the grandfather of them all. Our name there was a wee bit different as we are a roleplaying guild there — Children of Darkness (based on the vampiric lore of Anne Rice) — but our oldest, truest members come from this chapter. They would be Luke, Matt (Ohlandt), Jennifer, Susan, Adam, Jim, Jason, Han, Warren, Lisa, Nick, Ben (Lynette) … I could go on and on. Most of these folks are now playing both UO, WoW, and Rift with us. CoD still stands today, as our “role playing” chapter for those of us that enjoy storyline and D&D settings of “dungeon mastery”. We own quite a large player-ran city called Vamp’s Lair and often hold grand events for the shard we lovingly call home, Catskills.

The Children of Darkness is an old school guild that was created on the first day of release of the Catskills shard in Ultima Online on October 17th, 1997. The coven leaders are Pandora and Marius, played by yours truly, that role played as ancient vampires. Anyone that’s read any of the stories written by Anne Rice, author of the famed Vampire Chronicles which Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise pushed into fame with their movie, “Interview with the Vampire” would recognize a lot of the names for the characters that are part of CoD.

We later decided to create an Evil RP theme that players could sign up to join and be part of. We needed a well recognized start, so we chose to base it on Vampire the Masquerade. So we looked at all the content that was available out there on VTM, and we chose to write our own story. So if you are well versed in the land of VTM lore, you will notice quite a few changes and differences that we deemed necessary in order to adapt it to Ultima Online.

If you would like to join our guild, you must obviously be up to the challenge of RP’ing a vampire with your characters. CoD is one of the leader guilds for the Camarilla Sect, so we’re very sophisticated and very proper and very beautiful. Our interaction with humans is of respect and diplomacy. We, as a guild, feed only on monsters and non-humans. As with all themed guilds, you are allowed OOC play only in certain situations. In our case we are more liberal about this than other themed guilds, as we allow OOC predominantly with other players except when we are engaged in storyline play. Some of us use Savage Kin Paint as a method to place ourselves “in character”. After applying paint, it can be removed by either dying or using an oilcloth on your character. Savage Kin Paint is made by cooks and requires tribal berries from Ilshenar’s savages.

Player vs. Player combat is a must for participation in this theme, therefore it is a part of this guild as all themed warfare will take place in Felucca. All Camarilla guilds are AT WAR with Sabbat guilds. So make sure you insure your valuable items and keep your runebooks charged up. Once you die to another theme member, you may not speak to them unless you “re-engage” in the theme war. Players may not re-engage unless they are fully equipped and able.  We strongly abide by a pre-set cross-guild set of Rules of Engagement, and all players must follow them.

CoD leaders often write a lot of the theme events. All CoD members are required to attend in full character to participate when their real life allows them to. CoD members are also encouraged to write theme events for themselves and submit them for Game Master and Seer review. We are one of the most recognized, well organized, respected and OSI (EA) featured guilds in the history of Ultima Online.

When we decided to move on from UO to the amazing world that was Dark Age of Camelot, our original lore and RP just did not quite fit into that game, so we decided to change our name and founded THE LAST PROPHECY on the Lancelot server.

The Last Prophecy refers to predictions started by Nostradamus in where he depicts the end of the world furnished in by a great war where three major rivals would destroy all life in their quest for power over one another.  It was perfect for DAOC, since there was Midgard, Hibernia, and Albion all at war with each other.

This guild was founded by not just myself (Danitsia) but in conjunction with two of the best gaming friends I ever could have asked to know — known to everyone as Demonic and Olorin. Demonic and I loved to role play still, even though we were no longer really a roleplaying guild, and we had a lavish in game wedding — living in a fantastical world where Trolls and Dwarfs fall in love! He was truly my partner in crime and in DAOC we built quite the guild adding along more lifelong friends like Phil, Justin, Jon, Preston, Mike (Flowers), Chaz, Shawn and Meaghan and other Megan and Dave, and others along the way.

Housing in DAOC allowed us to also become one of the first guilds to attain a guild mansion, which was very expensive. Other guilds like Rulers of Camelot and Kindred had also made this exclusive list. The uniqueness of housing in this game is what mostly attracted us to it, coming from a game like Ultima Online were we had built such an expansive territory of player housing. Next to our guild mansion we had most of our guildies build their own private homes, thus we had our own sector of the housing zone that was predominately TLP. Mansion was the center of our tradework, our meetings, our guild banks, etc. etc. We enjoyed the time we spent in it.

However, we were probably best known for our RvR (large-scale PvP) — and the founding of the BEST alliance Midgard on Lancelot ever had, The Greater Alliance of Midgard, encompassing 20 guilds and over 1000 members — we really knew how to take down Albion and Hibernia forces. With TGA, our alliance, we were able to hold on to 4 of the 6 relics for 8 months straight, something Midgard had never been able to accomplish before. Together, we kept Midgard strong on the Lancelot server.

On a singular level, we formed two core PvP guild groups with set-man teams of 8 each to engage in what was commonly known as “8v8 group pvp”.  As a team, we rolled through many other 8v8 groups from Albion and Hibernia.  We did alright for ourselves — we weren’t elitist or claimed to be the best, but we certainly gave it our all and succeeded most of the time. Most of the members of our 8v8 teams were Realm Rank 10+. I mean let’s face it, Danitsia (my dwarven healer and main) was Realm Rank 11L3 when I retired her. No small feat for a healer!

From DAOC, we went on to create TLP chapters in Shadowbane, EVE, SWG, Everquest II, and Guild Wars. Until the release of World of Warcraft closed beta… which we were invited as a guild to join.

World of Warcraft introduced to us a whole different way of gaming in MMO’s — as it was much more focused on PvE. The leveling system was similar to DAOC in the fact that it was level based, not skill based like UO is. For us, as a guild this made it very easy to level in. Most of us in beta hit level 40+ pretty fast. We really enjoyed how much effort was put into the details of the leveling system, its quests, and the encounters and fighting styles. The graphics really blew us away. We were hooked and signed up right when servers went live.

At first we coordinated with friends from our old UO and DAOC days, the guild known as Xiled From Humanity and also members of the guild known as Resurrection to create a conglomerate guild named “Invidious”. My good friend (love him still!!!) Anthony who was the GM of +R+ became the GM of INVIDIOUS, and I was a senior officer. My TLP’ers merged into Invidious and we added even more friends… and I met Jake (who is now my fiance) in Invidious. Eventually that guild grew and we were presented with another merger offer — to which we then became Torture and then Reroll, which is when I took over as GM once again after Anthony retired.

As we did in DAOC, we thought it would be beneficial to many for us to build an alliance of guilds with like-minded goals, thus the Horde Alliance was born which included guilds like Ministry of Pain and ACE. With the alliance we now officially a raiding guild, something that was very new to most of us. Molten Core, Onyxia’s Lair, Blackwing’s Lair, Naxxramas were the order of the day. The Horde Alliance, which had a total of 11 guilds with a total of over 1200 members, functioned as a cross-guild raiding system where members from other guilds were able to secure spots in the 40-man raids and we used a cross-guild DKP system for loot. Many guilds ended up outgrowing the joint groups, forming their own set-man groups… we were no different.

Reroll went on to many successful raids, but it did cost us the alliance. Many allies did not see a need for us if we were raiding on our own, so we handed over the alliance to another guild there and kept going on our own. After a while, however… most of us got burnt out. It was TOUGH to run a successful raiding guild when you had to field FORTY PLAYERS for a raid. So we quit for a while, and since the tag “Reroll” never really meant much, I simply disbanded it and on hiatus we went.

We ended up going back to DAOC for about a year or so.

When Blizzard announced its expansion, The Burning Crusade, we decided to reform the guild on WoW. One key element in the changes to WoW with the expansion was the reduction in amount of players that was required to raid — from 40 players, it was now 25 players and added some raids for 10 players too. This was an instant draw for us.

This was when we acquired most of the lifelong members you see as part of this guild today. We even made Karazhan fun! We rocked through most of the raiding instances, albeit at a slower pace than other more hard core guilds. We cleared everything but Sunwell Plateau by the time Wrath of the Lich King came out.

When Wrath was released, we struggled through some of the first raids of Wrath — the newly revamped Naxxramas tooks us a while to claw through. Towards the end of Wrath, most of us were burnt out. The few that decided to stay ended up merging with our friends, the guild formerly known as 12P. They came over and soon we retagged the guild “Predestined” on another server effectively ending our run on Mannoroth. I do still have the guild and the guild banks on Mannoroth though; it was not disbanded.

In our new guild, the general theme of the guild changed. TLP-WoW has become a hard core, world ranked guild thus has a set mandatory attendance to all raids for starting lines, which we had two of running side by side. Soon it grew in size and more than just Blizzard took notice. The #1 ranked European guild at the time asked for us to become their official “US” chapter. After months of deliberations, we found it would be the best option for us to continue and join their already expansive community.

Today the guild has expanded to include SEVEN 25m raid groups, one of which is an alt/recruiting GBID run that is quite famously done weekly. It is a large, massive guild. It takes nearly 50 class leaders alone to run this guild, since WoW has so many classes. Each raid group has a class leader for every class in it, but there is one SENIOR Class Leader that is in charge of all research and specs and macros and addons and everything that comes with it. Our CL’s alone could make a guild by themselves.

This guild has a very effective TRINITY (1 GM, 2 Co-GM’s) that truly lead the guild with passion, heart, and competitiveness. Alongside with their various Senior Officers and Officers and also Raid Leaders/Raid Assistants (each main raid group has one of each), they do a fantastic job. But if you are not willing to run in a hardcore raiding guild — doing 4-6 times a week, 5 hrs each day — you shouldn’t even apply.

The core group is our server/world first group and is currently doing heroic achievement runs, as they cleared the entire content of Cataclysm — WoW’s third expansion — in roughly 3 months. They have plowed through the content of WoW’s 4th expansion — Mists of Pandaria — in just weeks of release. And now site very pretty in the 5th expansion, Warlords of Draenor, at the top 10 list overall WORLD WIDE. Can’t wait to see what the 6th expansion brings.

RIFT: The Planes of Telara presented the opportunity for us to raid once more under our primary tag, The Last Prophecy. We started the guild at the request of one of our elders, Mike Flowers (aka Ampara or Camdoras).  He was playing the game on the Alsbeth server and asked Cips and I to give it a try.

We found it to be a clone of World of Warcraft but with a highly improved graphics engine and a development team eager to hear their player base on how to further push the boundaries of the game. If anything, we can definitively say that TRION Worlds makes the game great by continually adding new content to the game in a relatively expedient manner and without the need to charge for an expansion.

In Rift we were the only running successful “casual” raiding guild that could at least keep up with more hardcore, competitive guilds. Having fully experienced almost the entire release-based content (aka Vanilla) and raids up to Infernal Dawn’s Laethys (we never did down her).

When the new expansion came out, however, we struggled. The continuous grinds in the game made it very hard for casuals to keep up and be effective raiders. Storm Legion raids proved to be tougher than any other raids we had to that point tackled. Even WoW raids paled in comparison. Not to mention the overall interest in the game was dwindling; populations dropped and servers were consolidated. This made recruiting very difficult, especially when just about any Tom, Dick, and Harry could spin off a new guild extremely easily.

At its high point in Storm Legion, TLP-Rift ran 3 consecutive raid teams — Wookies, Misfits, and Trekkies — however as folks started to quit the game, it became more difficult to sustain the raid teams. Eventually Wookies was merged into Misfits. Then Trekkies saw issues with a failed merged and its stopped raiding. Misfits couldn’t fill its ranks with competitive players and its hard to get through challenging content with random PUG’s.

At the end of the day, it left only Danitsia and Lysippe to lead it with few others in some key roles. Certainly not enough to sustain the chapter. We ended up merging what was left of TLP-Rift into our sister guild, The Chosen, who is led by our good friend Falconi.