When I was typing up the post about “reclaiming” Dickens of a Blog, I mentioned making a “Part 2” that would be a trip down memory lane. As I started gathering screenshots I realized that such a trip would involve three decades of websites and some of the early days would be awfully hard to document. I was still interested.
Then I started doing just that and realized that the post that resulted would be very long if I included any real detail.
I have now decided to keep up with the Blogging Down Memory Lane idea, but I’ll break it up into three or four posts, potentially more if there is good reason.
Let’s start:
Doug’s RPG Page
That is a rough mock-up since as far as I know, no actual record of the site remains.
My second ever website. Maybe my third. The early ones barely counted since they were largely just me typing some words and being amazed that hypertext worked.
Doug’s RPG Page represented the first time I was actively interested in having a complete website. It would have started sometime in 1997, likely near the summer of that year.
To this in perspective as to how long ago this was, if you do a search along the lines of “Top 10 Websites,” the only two that I can think of that would have existed at this time were Yahoo and Amazon. Google came out a year later. Most other big websites that are the cornerstones of the net nowadays were a fair bit later, still. Heck, it predated Goatse. We are talking about the days where HTML 3 was replacing HTML 2.
I used frames for goodness sake.
That was one of the lesser sins. There was a MIDI player that played a selection of music for visitors. There was a blinking marquee that scrolled and I cannot recall why I put it there (but I’m pretty sure it was red). Possibly irony. Probably something like “big updates” or some such.
If HTML tags like <frameset>, <marquee>, and <blink> mean nothing to you: you are lucky. It was a terrible time. Everything smelled of cigarette smoke and we had terrible websites.
Why I Made Doug’s RPG Page
Quite frankly, with apologies to Mallory, because it was there. The “it” in that quote would mean “the internet” as well “the ability to make your own websites”.
In 1997, my friend Jason and I offered to do something somewhat silly in retrospect: make a website for Jefferson Davis Community College. Not only is it frankly ridiculous that a couple of eighteen-/nineteen-year-olds would take it upon themselves to write a website for a business but neither Jason nor myself had any real web development experience. We knew the basics. That was it. No servers. No development team. Just an idea.
It ended up being a beautiful failure but by the end, we had worked out enough concepts that the college gave us thanks and then tasked someone much more professional to actually do it.
While doing that, the interest in making my own website grew and grew. Then I found out about Geocities. I’ll let you read the Wikipedia article about it but in the mid-90s, Geocities was a massive website hosting complex that allowed users to make a free website inside of “neighborhoods.” It was one of the highlights of the earlier web.
I made an account and plunked myself down in geocities > area51 > dimension > 9180 (it is strange how quickly I was able to recall that). Then I started posting stuff.
Remember that back in these days websites tended to have purpose so it was pretty common if you had things you wanted to say to the world you would find some excuse to express them. Jim’s Truck Page. Donna’s Potato Recipes Page. Doug’s RPG Page. There were plenty that would show up that would be Justin’s Random Stuff or whatnot but it felt odd to a lot of us back then to just post a blog-type page without something happening to make it feel justified.
And yes, blogging was already taking shape by this time.
What I Recall About It
Besides some of the stuff I posted above, I do not recall a lot. I do not even remember if it was organized around specific RPGs or by genre. There are some memories that stand out, though:
- The biggest element that came out of that time period was Ghostlight. A quick, odd RPG I made about ghosts who live in an echo of the real world where their interaction with it is based on their emotions. Over time, emotions increase and wane.
- I made a post showing a potential way to play games without a GM. The gist was to generate content on index cards as possible encounters and then to pull a few at a time and mash them up to tell short scenes and stories. While it was designed for GM-less play, it ended up matching some elements of Solo Play.
- I had some non-RPG elements that included discussions of music (I do recall writing a rant about liking techno music and being irritated by people who kept asking me why I liked music with no lyrics) but do not recall how many sections that stuff had.
Over time, the non-RPG elements and elements about my daily life and stuff started taking over. Which is what effectively brought the project to a close. I was basically getting into blogging while still being in the mindset that websites needed purpose.
Other scant details drift to mind. I know I would toss in random coarse language and people would call me out for it. I think there was an old school chat room built into one of the pages?
Besides Ghostlight, there was at least one other RPG I posted to it, A.S.I.A. RPG. I have no archives of this but I’m guessing/think it stood for something like A Simple Interactive Adventure Roleplaying Game. Around this time and for a few years after, I was working on concepts like using short phrases and a system of wide | normal | narrow rankings so it might have used that. I think I wrote some stuff for FUDGE. I feel like I had some Call of Cthulhu / Beyond the Supernatural elements.
That is mostly guesswork.
I made a friends from it. I talked to other game designers. I met some people into the techno/edm scene who liked my discussions. It was mind-blowing for a person from the backwoods of lower alabama to suddenly be talking to people not only around the country but from other countries. It was nice.
My online username at the time was “dreamwyrm” and because of that I ended up getting a cameo of sorts in the webcomic Gaming Guardians and was friends with Graveyard Greg who wrote it. The Web Troll (artist) even made art that had my “Dream Wyrm” persona turned into a Buttonman.
For a country bumpkin to create a somewhat cringey 90s email address and a cringey 90s website, that was really cool. Heck, I still find that to be pretty damned cool.
The Death of Doug’s RPG Page and the start of wYrmhole Games
That above image is around 90% of what I know about the next part of this chapter. I grew unnecessarily frustrated with how much of the page had become a proto-blog and so took most of it offline (or at least delinked most of it). I wrote a short, rambling paragraph about how I was going to embark on a new design.
Just look at the stolen Michael Whelan artwork. Lord.
Also, while I had already started using “wyrmis” as an online name, it seems like “The Wyrm” and “WYRM” were frequent. Somewhere in here is where I came up with Wyrmis X. Simryw as an online name and sometimes started capitalizing only the Y: wYrmis. There was some joke about my name had a capital WHY. I’m a damned fool.
From that above screenshot, I am reminded of two elements that I had completely forgotten. First, I had had some discussion of videogames on the original site and wanted to expand that. We are entering the time period of the Playstation RPG explosion but were still close enough to the Super Nintendo days to still be reaping those benefits. For some dumb reason, I wanted to call this “Electronic Portals.” I don’t know if I ever did.
Second, I forgot that I had a period where I was pretty vocal about Christian roleplaying. A response of sort to the Satanic Panic and its continued presence in the mid- to late-90s in Lower Alabama. I don’t think anything really came of it. It has been a long time since I have identified as Christian.
The “Silver” there was another friend from my early college days: Lance.
After posting my, “Back soon, I promise, guys!,” I don’t think I ever returned. My protest about how my personal page had become too personal essentially just killed the whole project.
The other 10% I know, by the way, is that I had kept working on whatever the hell A.S.I.A. RPG was. I only know this because later on I had a post in later blog about moving version 2 to the new blog and making it version 3.
The mind truly boggles.
A Rough Timeline
A rough timeline of this area seems to be…
- 1997: Doug’s RPG Page is started
- 1998 (Summer): Ghostlight is added
- 1998 – 1999: Doug’s RPG is changed to “Wyrm’s Play”
- Most original pages were hidden but maybe not deleted
- Split into three sub-pages, all RPG focused
- wYrmhole Games: Essentially the OG page
- Electronic Portals: Console and Computer Videogames
- Circle of Paladins: Roleplaying as a Christian
- 1999?: Rebranded back to just wYrmhole Games
- Other elements dropped? No clue.
Next Chapter
Next time, assuming I write the next part, will focus on a massive reversal to the mindset that destroyed Doug’s RPG Page: I rebranded the project to “Doug’s Webpage of Doug.” I am only half joking.