Secfenia: Age of the Viceroy

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Post Mortem for Secfenia: The Age of the Viceroy

What started off as a group of friends writing together, ended up growing past my wildest imagination. It was something that made me really get into fantasy writing and expanding it to others in the future. The start was humble. We took turns writing stories that we put together. It wasn’t even what most would consider an RPG at that time. Just adding to what others wrote.

As more people starting writing and joining, the concept of a GM was necessary to help keep things going and to mediate in disputes. Then came gateways. This allowed different mediums ways to interconnect bringing the old age writing style to the new age digital media. As time went on, we adapted it more and more. It morphed into an RPG and moderation was not something that was heavily required. We worked together and the main challenges were overcoming the changes felt by the digital age.

Email, BBS’s, newsgroups and the internet. Half of those things still are used commonly. Although most now see email as the old snail mail, it wasn’t originally like this. Back in the day, your email was only items that you wanted to get. Spam was almost non-existent. Of course, as the popularity of the internet in things changed. No one was sure exactly what “final” form the internet would come.

We transitioned and grew. There were certain things that we hadn’t learned fully then. For example, mail, BBS’s, newsgroups, email, etc had a sort of permanence in our minds. I still have some of the original messages and what not from when Secfenia (Age of Viceroy) existed. Some of them I have transferred to this site, but many of them are lost. Newsgroups got flooded with spam, emails came and went, and web site crashes took the rest of the digital foot print. Hard copy papers weren’t seen as necessary due to the digital presence. Those eventually got list in moves that we made and faded into the trash heap that is a lot of the old world’s history.

Looking back, I wish we had more backups to be able to share some of the great stories of the past. Some of the lessons that I learned with Secfenia (Age of Viceroy) I have incorporated into other projects. Of course, with new projects there are new lessons to learn. Adaptability and the desire to improve is now hard coded into me. I don’t desire to be at the cutting edge of technology like we were before. Let the technology be founded and improved upon before we jump in.

In the end, I don’t regret much from that game. We had a lot of fun and it was a very nice community. There weren’t a lot of the hassles that we assume are normal in the digital world back then. It led to a much different idea of what was expected. There were no set of hard rules. It was a community that worked together for the fun of each other. We all had our laughs and we all had our misery. My regrets center more around the loss of content over the years. They were good stories and very good memories.

- Bobby Russ
Secfenia: Age of the Viceroy (1994-2002)

Updated 9/29/17