A Brief Introduction and Apology

This blog will start out as a somber, but necessary note, for the players of Shadows of Isildur who have questions regarding the departure of the majority of the Northlands staff from the game as of last night. I will attempt to clear up misconceptions, make clear our complaints, and show with a more level head than I would have been capable of last night things that the players should question.

From there, the blog will hopefully transition to a more fond look-back at some of the unique things that we attempted, with mixed success, and present the idea that there were some really special things that happened in Northlands in the past year; these are things worth celebrating, no matter what your feelings about the future of the game as a whole may be.

A few quick notes:

1) I will begin my showing the resignation letters of the staff, of which they've given me permission. Some are more fiery than others, and my own was a chaotic race to finish what was a lot of opinion and feeling in the close time restraints left to me via computer lab (and no working personal computer, at the moment).
2) From there, I will go more detail into complaints. Specifically, all complaints really can be sub-categorized into the three major points below --
a) Disagreement with the break from Tolkien and canon, some of which players were aware of, some of which players were not aware of, and some of which most players could care less about.
b) Disagreement over staff policies that make it impossible to achieve reconciliation with an inner OOC circle that exists at the higher echilons of SOI staff, where a primary and re-occuring theme is to pursue policies that benefit extremely high-power-positioned staff PCs and the clans that they run.
c) A damning level of lying, backstabbing and general dishonesty. When you reach a level where most information is at your fingertips and keyboard, and you come to realize that there is a lot of blatant lying and cheating occuring, watching many of the players blindly follow what I would call a wolf in sheep's clothing became overwhelmingly depressing for me.


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Despite all of this, there will be claims that we abandoned our post and let our players in the Northlands down. This could not be more wrong. The truth was that the staff that left, and myself included, had stretched ourselves far beyond the point where we felt healthy putting an extreme amount of time and effort into something that has increasingly proven rotten at its core. The truth is that we suffered frequent threats against us, against Northlands - frequent and crude insults - warnings to not investigate so hard and not to side with the players. Looking back at it, it is almost unbelievable that we were able to keep the team together for as long as we did; and I do take some small pride in that, because there have been many times where staffers have wanted to resign and I was able to talk them out of it.

With all of this said, before I move on to attempting to answer some of the players' questions as best as I may (and before I move on to trying to remember some moments and times that I really enjoyed as an RPA and Lead), I wanted to apologize to the players never-the-less. This undoubtedly puts what has been an explosively successful region of the gameworld into an uncertain future. We will do what we can to help transition, as much as we are able to, as we have obviously been banned (and our player characters banned as well, for that matter); but certainly, the Year Four Finale which I have envisioned for so many months now is thrust into a precarious future. You all have my best wishes.