Origins of The Dark Tides
"Its only a matter of Time."
Orraxus the Historian
The Above Map was originally drawn and coloured between 2001-2004 for the Dark Tides RPG game.
The Dark Tides RPG was originally an old school pencil, paper, and dice game created by Benjamin Albers(me) and Adam Brown(co-founder) in the late 1990's. We originally started this while in high school. I created most of the rules, the world, races, and other content while Adam created the art. In the 2000's the project grew to massive proportions and included over 60 character classes, and over 200 races. Due to various personal reasons the project came to a stand still in 2009. Adam Brown still works on existing art projects related to it.
Adam Brown's Art may be viewed here, some of which is related to Dark Tides RPG Adam Brown Graphic Design & Illustration
In 2002 the idea of a MMORPG was floated around the table, but none of us really knew how to make this idea possible. With the already massive project on our hand this idea was just a pipe dream left to the back burner. In 2006/2007 I was introduced to a little UO Freeshard called Age of Virtues, by a friend. Until this point I had never known of the large community of people building there own UO servers, including custom maps servers. I didn't spend my free time searching for UO stuff online. While I was a former UO player, from the early days of its creation till Age of Shadows. I spent most of my free time designing DarkTides RPG. Age of Virtues was a great place to escape the daily grind I had committed to. While exploring Age of Virtues, I learned of RUNUO by looking around the web. It was at this point that I first thought of making The Dark Tides Server. I had already had a lot of experience modding other computer games, I figured maybe I could back engineer UO and learn to code my own game. Eventually I decided I would build a Server and back engineer a client program later. One day while playing on Age of Virtues, I had been talking about an area on the map with a staff member, when a different staff member appeared to give the one I was speaking with some news about firing a different staff member. Long story short, this was my moment to shine and I emailed this owners of Age of Virtues and I became staff. I learned a lot of things from the staff on Age of Virtues, all of which eventually helped to make The Dark Tides Server possible. While Age of Virtues may be gone, the ideas and memory remains incorporated into The Dark Tides World.
In 2018/2019, The Dark Tides Server became a reality.