Hunting Grounds

I'm a little annoyed, okay make that a lot annoyed. See, one of my favourite websites is closing down. That would be Alter Realm, home to the largest online gorean community that I know of. The owner of the server has put up some reason involving moving home so his kids can go to a better school as his reason for closing the place down, but from what I've read on the message boards and such, no-one's buying that as the "real reason", even if nobody seems to really know what the real reason might be.

Reaction to this has been mixed, while a lot of people will miss the chat rooms and the incredible travel matrix that links them together, to create a semi-viable geographic chat world, I think very few people will actually miss the message boards on the site, that have for a long time now been synonomous with the worst excesses of whining and gossip in the community as a whole. A lot of the rooms will close, others will go to other servers, and there will be an influx of goreans to other servers such as GRP (where I have a membership and am a Moderator), which is both good (more people) and bad (some of those people are complete assholes).

For my part I'm going to miss the Crossroads room. It was owned by the site, rather than by any one person, and it represented a large area of open space between cities and campsites (each of which had their own room connected to it). It was an open capture area, to enter it was to put yourself at risk of capture or being killed. I loved that room, and would happily spend hours roleplaying hunting on tarnback in there (for the non-goreans reading this, a Tarn is a bloody massive bird, think a Roc and you're on the right lines), swooping down and netting prey (women, my character is a slaver).

With the closure of the site, this room that holds so many good memories for me (I caught at least two of my now ex-girlfriends characters in there) is going to be gone. I don't know where I'll be going to, to roleplay that kind of experience anymore. I'm sure someone somewhere will open a similar room eventually though, but it won't be the same. I'll miss places like Jo'Sephe's Rock, Bastian's Cabin (I never did investigate inside there), the Pilgrim's Road, and the roads on the north and south banks of the mighty Vosk river.