I'm not sure that I'm the one totally responsible for starting Strife. Its something that kinda came to life on its own. Hiryo, Monte, Epsilon Alpha, Xatrix/AP all had at least as much to do with it as I did, plus several others too numerous to mention.

I started playing AC in the summer of '00, about a week after SC opened. A friend had mentioned the game to me and so when I started playing I joined up under him in the FrostFire Knights (FFK) way in the n00b filled bottom. FFK had around 1200 followers back then, by far the largest on the server. Strife Alch-Flet was at that time the highest skilled alchemist /cook /fletcher on ANY server, he was a level 85 Mule God.

A few months into the game I had built up a nice little family "house" within FFK. I was a young life mage in my Uber 40s (I could cast lvl 5 buffs that last a whole 10 minutes!), which was pretty high level back then. I had a fun time going around to Lytelthorpe, Rithwic and Eastham and buffing the level 1s with Blood Loather 5 and Armor Self 5. Everyone was a melee back then, since mages were a management nightmare to play. Spell Research without cheats, comp managment without /fillcomps, it was a whole differnt ballgame. Of course that rarity meant that a good mage who could buff/vuln always had a lot of friends

Anyway there was a breakup within the middle of the FFK guild which caused our little group to go out of FFK unexpectidly. No one liked this. Trade mules were very important in those days, and the breakoff group didnt have one. Atlans were big, dying just appeared and almost no one had a mule over 50. In addition, there were other people in FFK that we wanted to get back to. I broke us off from the other group, but my friend stayed (I made it up to him later) and I went to Eastham to get us back into FFK. Strife, who was one of the co-monarchs of FFK was the only one available in town. I said Hey you want a vassal and he said sure. The other co-monarch was Genji who was kind of the power gamer type and big into PK.

For a while things were good. There were occasional quests and trade skill periods and such. I spent time getting to know some of the higher level groups in FFK while the little family group under Taarna kept growing.

As time went on Strife had to slow down playing due to Real Life pressures, eventually he decided to quit. For some reason unknown to me, he chose me to take over his account and co-monarch role. Other vassals had been with him longer or knew him in real life, but I guess they didnt want it or didnt have time for it.

With the Strife account, I soon realized that the upper ranges of FFK had been set up as an XP chain, with our group as the primary "pusher". As weeks went on, the older members of FFK quit logging in as much. Quests dried up, there were some confrontations between the old guard FFK and some of the new future Strifers. There were some play PK battles that turned ugly if I recall correctly also.

The straw that broke the camels back was the Aerlinthe quest. That was the new hot quest back then, just a few months old. Very few people had completed it, fewer knew how to do it completely, soloing it like now didnt happen. These were the days when "high" level was 50, level 80 was almost unheard of and 100 had been broken by only 2 people.

Several of the people had wanted to do the Aerlinthe quest, especially Hiryo. Promises had been made and broken repeatedly, and there were some words said and well..... I log in that evening to a mess. Suprise!

A large group of people gathered that night at the Eastham meeting hall and in a heated meeting a coup d'état took shape. With Strife's (loose interpretation) blessing and without Genji's knowledge, I shattered the XP chain in numerous places and seized control.

It was a dirty trick, but a great many people supported it and I thought it would work for the best. Others were less or more enthusiastic. Genji is probably still pissed at me, he moved to perma DT soon after.

Anyway, no one really liked being XP pushers, so we decided we would try pay back every point of XP we earned through vassals. We learned quests and ran them often.

At that time I was spending 8ish hours per day in Dereth, bad for Karen, good for Taarna.

As that went on over the months and years we grew and grew into a server shaking world rending behemoth and then eventually changing into the modest sized casual gaming group that we are today. I compare it to the English Empire. Grows and grows until the "sun never sets", then little colonies break off, join with each other reform ect, some became big groups. We had some rough times, but in the end we mostly stayed friends.

Thats most of it, written as well as I can on a heavy caffein buzz after a 17 hour shift.