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The True Life Journal of Lord Swampy


Lord Swampy

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Last Sunday was my nation’s three-year anniversary. Three years is a long time to do any one thing. In the three years I’ve been here, I’ve learned a lot, seen a lot, and done a lot. I wasn’t planning for long to write anything for that day, since in many ways it is just another day (hell, I didn’t even get a happiness bonus as thanks from Admin for sticking it out this long), but I find myself beginning to struggle to recall some earlier details, and figured the best way to motivate myself to finally get down on paper my long and sometimes controversial history was to do something regarding my anniversary. I began writing the story of my history here in CN with the intent to post it the night of my anniversary, but soon realized that a task like that takes planning and preparation, and I had a lot more to say than I originally thought.

Instead what I’m doing is a bit different. I still want to share, but more than that I want to write down the events from my past here because I want to have a record of them before the memories fade away. I’m not known for brevity, and I decided I’d have fun with this and tell stories rather than just create a historical overview. In those stories there is more than just my history, but also a great deal of history from The Legion, where I spent almost two years. Because a number of the events of my past are still confidential and their revelation could get some good people in bad trouble, this cannot be a tell-all, but it is a tell-lots, especially in the early stories. WARNING: These are long, and I make no apologies for that. This was a big intro-/retrospective writing piece for me, and for the sake of readers and so I can fit it into posts, I decided I’d release pieces at a time, making several of these in episodic form.

Episode I – The Early Days and The New Dominion

I came over, like many, from a far-off land that may or may not rhyme with station-mates, where I led a rag-tag bunch of RPing friends. One of those friends of mine made a nation called Tain Guo here just a few days before I made a nation. We were two of the original purple team members, in its first Senate. Realizing the potential in this world, we invited others from our previous home, a group we called the Old Dominion of Kaynistan. I founded New Kaynistan, and dubbed our merry band The New Dominion, all home on purple sphere.

Within a week, we had taken the Senate and began our plans for world domination, like I’m sure many thought they’d accomplish. For us back then, that meant having big nations and my growth was stimulated by a bug admin quickly fixed involving trades (gold, intended to give +$5 to income originally, actually doubled your income and then added $5 until that was corrected. Yay gold.) and by the gap in power created by one of CN’s first resets.

I actually joined CN’s first alliance, Imperial Nations Coalition. Communication was terrible, and I wasn’t even aware there was a conflict with CATO (GATO today). We lost, our leader deleted, and the alliance died quietly.

Soon after that, with the destruction of Tain Guo (my friend’s nation) due to a war glitch which deleted his nation when all his infra, land, and soldiers (all there was to a nation back then) were destroyed, I ascended to Princeps of purple team and enjoyed the +3 happiness bonus it afforded me. I made my way up through the ranks and claimed a top five spot with several other members of the New Dominion close behind me.

In the initial blitz of the First Polar War, I was knocked back a peg or two by some guy from NPO who accidentally hit me even though I was unaligned. I bargained with the very humble and apologetic ruler of that nation, TrotskysRevenge, for a protectorate status under the NPO in return for not continuing the fight with him.

I continued climbing, and at the second rank formed an alliance with the number one ranked nation, “KD,” and the third ranked nation, “Stifler’s Nation.” KD dissolved it shortly thereafter to excuse us from unwarranted participation in the Citrus War. He dropped through the rankings and I hit number one. It was awesome for me, and I loved it.

Great Britain loved it too, and was adamant that the number one nation in the world join The Legion since I was purple, and he invited me to be a part of the formative Cabinet. I joined, and brought with me the members of the New Dominion. One of them, ChatNoir, even also participated in the original Cabinet of the Legion as Minister of Defense. Since as Princeps I had some intel bonuses when viewing other nations, I took the post of Head of Intelligence, then a Cabinet office. The world was small and Legion was smaller. There wasn’t much to do, and after being elected to the first officially elected Cabinet of the Legion as Head of Intel a few weeks later, I kind of dropped in activity. I managed to be inactive enough that my signature made it on the ODP with NPO without me actually knowing it at the time.

What I did actively do was help other purple nations. I was active on the very old boards trying to unite the sphere and get some communication and trade work going. I also browsed the wars trying to stop any purple-on-purple conflict. The team’s well-being was important to me, and I actively was working for its betterment.

Things were great until April 3, 2006. I was informed by my friend behind ChatNoir that we had been nuked. In fact, the entire top six nations were nuked by three rogues: usa, Bepoon, and Kelehana. My nation, as well as ChatNoir’s and four GATO nations, were devastated. We weren’t big, but this was before damage caps were put on nukes and aid systems were used heavily and back when there wasn’t much aid to go around. There were no improvements yet, and I only kept any kind of decent rank because my nation was tech-heavy for the times (I had more tech than anyone else: 35!).

Despite this being the first coordinated nuclear rogue attack in the history of CN and getting incredible amounts of attention then to the point of causing conversations about a nuclear-capable registry for independent nations and all sorts of other things that now would sound preposterous, now it seems rather trivial. Nuclear rogues come and go and get squished with very little fanfare. What was amazing was that the entire world united behind the nations who were attacked. NPO, NAAC, Legion, ODN, and others all jumped on the three rogues and squished them dead. Nations from virtually every alliance gave aid to the cause in some form. It almost sounds darkly comic to say now, but in RP terms, this was CN’s 9/11 terrorist strike. Its significance today lies not in the actions of rogues but in the reactions of the world: unity against an enemy of all alliances.

After that, other things took my attention as that was an important spring and summer for me in life. My activity in Legion dropped, but I still lurked from time to time. I almost missed the Second Polar War, and did miss the brief but quite devastating Warpstorm Alliance War against Legion. After this, I perked back up and soon after it noticed that LUE had moved in, moved out, and was somehow in trouble with our allies in NPO.

It became clearer after I read Yaridovich’s account suicide post. I, like others of decency, was disgusted and appalled—that was his point, I suppose. I watched with some dismay, though, as it became a very violent war. I watched the epic devastation on all sides and was glad we weren’t a part of it. The Cabinet at the time told us it wasn’t our fight because NPO had helped start it.

Then suddenly it became our fight. VL posted that NPO leadership had been plotting to strike the Legion after the war and we wouldn’t simply wait for that to come. I was surprised, but more than that I was wary of fighting a war—all it meant to me was devastation. I messaged the members of the New Dominion and had them switch to peace mode so we could be bankers. VL approved me to be a reserve fighter to come out fresh a few days into the war and aid and fight. I never got the chance to fight, but I did send out aid when I left peace mode.

The war ended, and things got quiet. Legion swelled some, and strength gaps closed for a bit. NPO pulled back ahead again, but we liked our position for the most part. We thought NPO would get over what happened and we moved on with life as usual. For my part, I was happy to just look around Legion’s boards and help out purple team nations who asked me for assistance as Princeps. I kept trying to stimulate some activity and unity on our team boards, and talked with other alliances like TAB and PAW.

My contented situation was threatened in November of 2006 when the Senate got a big restructuring from the continuous weekly voting system with aggregate vote totals to a monthly reset we know today. I was an active Senator, but not so active in the Legion and the Cabinet wanted to reassign the Senators to active Legionnaires and government officials. I panicked, rather selfishly so in retrospect, but after nine months of being in Senate and being a damn good Senator for the team, I was mad and felt some ownership over the office.

Realizing inactivity would eventually strip me of more than my senate office, I started posting more and eventually founded Swampy’s Corner, an advice column and Q&A thread in the Legion. I had a lot of fun there, and also enjoyed the time I spent hanging out in Cohort V Alaudae, my military brigade. I bonded with a spunky and charismatic young Legionnaire named Sinatra during that time. I also had fun working with several other New Dominion members to try and gain some power in the Legion so we could be more in the know and make some decisions. Why we were originally hesitant to join the Legion was because we didn’t like the idea of not having autonomy—why I was only planning for TND to be in Legion until we were strong enough to go do our own thing. The problem was now I had friends there outside the New Dominion: Sinatra, Rakari, GunneR, Sir Galahad, Divyjain, Graphix, and numerous others. I didn’t want to leave.

One friend, Great Britain, found himself in some controversy as our President (a powerless and purely ceremonial post). He was caught up in some very anti-NPO sentiments and spammed around the alliance for us to vote in favor of the pending GATO and NAAC MDPs up for vote in our League of Nations. It was the first in a long line of very heated arguments in the Legion that devolved into base infighting and inspired me to create an award to recognize those who remained civil and decent. In cooperation with the Home Minister Miemalkonnen, I began awarding Lord Swampy’s Ribbon of Respect for good forum and interpersonal decency.

I like to think that it helped encourage people to be a bit nicer to each other, or at least stay a bit more civil in discussions, but the arguments kept coming. We bickered about what to do with Great Britain. We bickered over Zunea’s pardon of him when Zunea took the Prime Minister office. We bickered about the MDPs, and the NPO, and tech raiding and wars of aggression. All the bickering eventually drove out a few members, the most noteworthy of them was a man I looked up to greatly, Fonzoland.

Before wars of aggression were banned, a member of the New Dominion was attacked. He had refused to join the Legion, and TND organized a response militarily and financially to support him against unaligned tech raiders. It was still legal, but I informed our Minister of Defense, North Prussia, as a courtesy. I was unaware that he was away at the time though, and when he came back he was livid that I was using Legion resources to help an unaligned nation, more so because he didn’t trust me and what seemed to him to be my personal micro-alliance or political party.

That argument was followed shortly by some drama when I realized a New Dominion member, Crethoria, was hacked by his little brother and the brother nuked a friend of his who ran a nation in Legion. The alliance didn’t know this, and reacted as you’d expect to a nuke rogue from within their own ranks. It was only when he was just above ZI that I caught the situation and tried to clear his name by explaining what had happened. I got him off perma-ZI, but he was expelled and forced to pay reparations. I felt bad about the whole mess, especially because the friend who ran Crethoria was too pissed to bother arguing his own case and I posed as him and acted as his intermediary in order to defend him and promote the truth of what happened. One of the most aggravating parts was having to constantly butt heads with an old neo-Nazi Legionnaire named USNN. In the end, the only good part was that I was introduced to IRC, where I made many friends and wasted many happy hours.

My disagreement with the Cabinet (mostly via the MoD) petered off when they had bigger fish to fry. Our Foreign Minister, Master Revan, was mostly inactive and Zunea asked him to step down and appointed Thom Solo to the post before Revan actually did anything in response. It caused a huge backlash, and was our first and only impeachment trial for a Prime Minister. It was eventually deemed a mistrial because of screw-ups all around and the term ended before anything really happened about it. Zunea left before too much longer after his term, but not before his actions (and many other disagreements in the Legion) had divided enough people to send some members off, including (if my memory is correct) SocCarolina, a Legionnaire I idolized and was quite dismayed to see leave.

The new Cabinet took office, and they went about trying to set up our part of the MDP web outside of GATO and NAAC. We signed Orrple around that time, and it quickly became our most treasured treaty. The bickering didn’t stop though, and our latest internal feud was probably one of our most important ones: whether or not to enter GW2. VL, our Prime Minister, had a vision of moving the Legion away from the polarized world that dominated CN politics, and the Cabinet wouldn’t put us into the war. I was happy to not fight: I felt the League started the war and our treaties weren’t aggressive.

I was happy hanging out in my Cohort, chatting in IRC, and dispensing what wisdom I could in Swampy’s Corner. I did want a spot in the Legion’s Advisory Council, an establishment for former Cabinet Ministers to advise current Cabinet Ministers. I was rejected from that group for transparent reasons; the truth was I still wasn’t trusted. I suspected the New Dominion was why, and in an attempt to smooth things over and correct some misconceptions about us, I talked to VL after GW2 ended and things cooled down for us.

During that conversation, some influential things happened. I bargained with VL about TND. Until this point we had been noting ourselves for the most part in our signatures around Legion’s boards or in user titles. We had nothing to hide, and we weren’t really doing anything actively anymore. Half of us had left the Legion or CN altogether, and no one really was as into it as I was. The agreement was that we’d remove all mention of ourselves and pretend to disband to prevent the issue from going on further. In exchange we’d be allowed to go on as we had as long as we were quiet about it and continued to not attempt to influence anything—basically business as usual. I was also offered an office in that exchange: Director of Communications. In a decision made to protect The New Dominion from expulsion and to remove the glass ceiling from above us, and to ease the worries of the government, I accepted VL’s offer. I asked him what the rest of the Cabinet thought of his offer and what he told me gave me pause. He said he had lied to them, said that I disbanded the New Dominion in order to pursue politics in the Legion. This was his story, and I was to adhere to it from this point on.

We did, much to the anger of my New Dominion Lady of the Realm. She was pissed that we were subjecting ourselves to the decisions of a power outside the New Dominion and that I, even as Supreme Holy Magistrate of the New Dominion, had made the decision alone. From there on out, she and the other members of TND dropped in activity, and sadly VL’s lie became a de facto truth. After a year of fun together, the New Dominion fizzled and broke apart. A bit over a year old, I was Director of Communications, and thinking ahead to elections just three weeks away as the rest of the world held its breath between Great Wars.

Thanks for reading the first installment. I invite you to continue the adventure in Episode II - Ascent to Cabinet and The Third Great War (for what it's worth, the GW3 story has a bit more action to it if you felt that was lacking in these stories).

Regards,

Swampy

Edited by Lord Swampy
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I have been here a mere 2 years and a 3 months, but have heard about alot of these events and it nice to see them from a personal point of view. Plus I "grew up" in Green and its cool to hear the stories of Purple.

I will be looking foward to part II.

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I enjoyed reading this - thank you. My 3 years is coming up a bit later then urs but you have a richer history then me in the very beginning of CN.

Maybe it's just me, but the way you constructed your story - and also having hindsight - it seems like your story sounds like a dream. Very similar to how Legion was from GW1 to GW3 (dreamy)...coincidence?? :P

Looking forward to more :)

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So you thought that the Legion could just betray Pacifica and we'd just "get over it?"

I felt pretty darn betrayed when I read that NPO was plotting to attack the Legion after the war. But I put on my big boy pants and got over it, forgave NPO, and wanted to be friends again one day.

Swampy has the nice hair like girl

I like...

wat :psyduck:

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