You have heard tales of an old, crumbling castle, just waiting for looters, somewhere in Mossflower. You’ve traveled for days, following an old map you found somewhere. As you reach the area, you discover that there is no crumbling castle, but a massive fortress, strong, and well built. Suddenly, you are siezed from behind by two cloaked beasts, and dragged to the fort, your protestations making no difference, they are swift, silent, and implacable. They drag you into a throne room, where an gigantic fox sits, glaring down.
So... another robber coming to pick the corpse of this realm. Another interloper into my territory?
Y-your territory?you stammer,I thought this place was deserted!The huge fox laughs, mercilessly.
It was. But now, I have taken it over, and made it my own,states the fox,My name is Lord Borak KinDraco, once Borak BenDragon the Fox, and I have taken this castle, and rebuilt it, with the fort around it.He snaps his fingers and five foxes step out of nowhere and surround you, their swords ready to chop your head from your shoulders if you make a wrong move.
Well, you have two choices.. You can walk up to my throne, and kiss the blade of my sword, joining my castle, or you can fight your way to the door.He grins, as many more warriors—from their looks, his clansmen—come from the shadows. Borak smiles, leaning back in the massive throne.A new follower, or entertainment... I would not be averse to either.
KinDraco Fortress was an Redwall-themed vermin (i.e. villain) roleplaying club that I took over in 2002 and ran until 2004, though issues I was going through at the time kept me from doing a good job of it.
This club started on Angelfire (a very popular free webhost back then; the original URL was www.angelfire.com/yt/wolvesbane
) as Wolvesbane Keep. The fellow who ran it went by the name Darkblade (though I can’t remember what his species is). I’ve a copy of its original main page, which was last updated October 18, 2000.
Someone else who played a fox called Deathshand took it over and renamed it Darkmire Castle, and I have a copy of its main page as well, last updated on April 8, 2001. On this one, you’ll notice this statement: I found a new message board for the Castle, it’s not as good as the last one, but it will have to do!
This refers to the much-lamented March 5, 2001 demise of the InsideTheWeb message board and the replacement with one from VoyForums, which was happening all over the ROC and the World Wide Web in general.
In 2002, I took over and renamed it KinDraco Fortress. Shortly thereäfter, I got a hacking threat which prompted me to move it to 0catch.com (the URL kept the original Wolvesbane title: wolvesbane.0catch.com
). It was because of this move, by the way, that I still had an archive of the club.
Since 0catch did not have a website building tool (Angelfire did, which was why it was more popular), I had to learn HTML to properly do the move. It was this, and the advice of a fellow I met online named Wolfie Fox, that kickstarted my fascination with website coding.
Part of that move, of course, meant I downloaded the files off Angelfire and somehow, through years of backups, keeping an external hard drive for years on end (I still use it as of this writing), or SOMETHING, I managed to keep an archive of it although I didn’t realize it... until 2019, 15 years after I quit running the club.
In 2019 I started to do a listing of all my roleplaying characters past and present. When trying to see if I had any pictures of some of them, I found some old graphics I made for the club (namely some of the Dragonstones). I did a computer search to find if I had the entire set of graphics—and found I still had most of the entire site. This gave a major hit of nostalgia and I decided I wanted people to know where I’d come from; to have a look at my first forays into the Furry Community and website coding.
But there was a problem: most of the old ROC clubs are gone.
Many were hosted by Geocities, and that entire part of Yahoo! was taken down in October of 2009. Others were hosted by Angelfire, Compuserve, and Homestead, and these sites were removed after years of disuse.
But as I had an archive of this site (or at least most of it; some pages are missing), I decided I would put it up and give my fellow now-greymuzzle Redwallers down Memory Lane, give younger viewers a trip through a virtual museum, and myself an excuse to talk about my early history with HTML and website coding in general.
LinksWith Dashed Underlines
darkblade13@home.com
deathshand6@hotmail.com
evildarkfire@hotmail.com
mrinitialman@yahoo.ca
The Redwall Wiki has a great article on the Community, but I’ll add my own comments as well.
The ROC that I knew was very much a thing of the early World Wide Web, starting out in the mid 1990s and consisted of interacting roleplaying clubs, The Redwall Encyclopedia, and Redwall Abbey (which was at www.redwall.org then, rather than http://www.redwallabbey.com/ as it is now).
Some of the most well-known clubs were Dark Mouse’s Cove, The Long Patrol, Sampetra (INSU), and Camp Willow. It started to stagnate and then slowly die in the early 2000s and now the ROC of old is all but gone.
Part of it is because the golden years of the ROC were 20 years ago. The eager fans who were in our teens and early twenties are in our 30s and 40s now, and our tastes and priorities have changed. Brian Jacques died in 2011 shortly before The Rogue Crew was published (making that the last novel), and Redwall is simply no longer as popular as it once was.
I fell in love with the original Redwall novel when I was in high school (I graduated in 1999) and joined the ROC as soon as I discovered it. I don’t remember if I was in high school when I joined the ROC, but I strongly believe I was. The clubs I remember joining were Fort Darkmist (for which I wrote The Lament of the BenDragons), Moonshadow Island (five of the Tales of the Windchreiener Family are set there), Lunar Isle and the famous Sampetra: Imperial Navy Serving Ublaz (INSU), although I distinctly remember joining at least one goodbeast-aligned club (I think it was Fort Oakwood Stream).
It was my first truly furry experience, and gave rise to characters I use to this day: Wildwind Dandinson started in the ROC as did my Furcadia characters Donnkhai Fateweaver and Donnsoren. Others who have fallen by the wayside such as Bustfang Tarnysk also started here.
Sorry, but the club is closed for the forseeäble future.
The context of the site, the Redwall Online Community, is no longer what it once was. KinDraco Fortress now exists almost alone where it was once one of dozens if not hundreds of other websites, where its members could go and cause trouble interact with members of other clubs (hey, KinDraco was a vermin club) and that inter-club interaction would require at least one other club to exist—preferably several. So, this club remains closed for now.
If there is a resurgence in interest, this club may reopen.
I’m sticking this at the bottom because here’s where I get reminiscent, technical, off-topic as far as the ROC is concerned and really blathersome, but if you want read my nattering about coding during Ye Olde Dayes Of Yore, by all means continue.
I really questioned whether or not to update the HTML. On one hand, I am very nitpicky about my website code. On the other, I wanted to give the curious the true 1990s-2000s Angelfire/Geocities/Ourworld/Homestead/AOL Hometown type of website typical of the ROC, complete with the coding practices of the time which focused on what we knew worked. Heck, I had quit running the club before I found out about the World Wide Web Consortium and its validator.
A good example of that kind of code is the old noframes
page of Wolvesbane Keep:
Two sidenotes here. First, a noframes
page was a fallback in case your browser didn’t support frames (many didn’t back then). Second, I specifically picked that page to save because near the bottom of the code you’ll see this: http://www.InsideTheWeb.com/mbs.cgi/mb654131
. InsideTheWeb was one of the most popular message boards on the internet until it shut down on March 5, 2001.
There were things that needed to be fixed:
Ultimately I realized I’m one of the few nerds who’d even look at a page’s HTML, so I might as well bring the code up to my current standards and reconstruct the parts of the club that I could and update its content as needed (that is, add the links to the unlinked pages, disable links that went nowhere, and add little notes here and there for those viewing the board).
The appearance of the website, on the other hand, would be kept as close to the original as possible (with the exception of the altered/added links and the aformentioned notes). This includes stuff like (drum roll of shame please):
center
element—but the end tag was left out. The entire page ended up centered.u
element was ended in the wrong place.font
end tag left it red.center
element rather than any actual header elements.blink
element while doing this site. There’s not a modern browser that still supports it—so I used a little JavaScript to emulate it. You’re welcome.alt
attribute so its text won’t be displayed.Some changes were inevitable:
basefont
and font
elements, so the font size is slightly different.frameborder
attribute determines whether or not a frame has a border (1is
yes,
0is
no). Using it with the
frameset
element is technically incorrect—but it works. It’s supposed to be used with the frame
element—but that does bupkiss in most browsers. Guess which most webmasters went with.Other changes were deliberate
So, once again, here’s the link to this Internet time capsule: