About The Dawn of Sylvan Hold

I started playing Utopia in the Second Age, early 1999. The Third Age, however, was my first full Age playing the game. In my first experience with Utopia I had selected dwarf for race, and named my province Mithrils Hold (no punctuation, since Utopia doesn’t allow for punctuation in names). By the time the Third Age was going to start, I had already grasped some of the basics of the game. Since I had faced difficulties with a dwarf province, I selected the elf race for the Third Age.

My ruler name for the Second Age was Dhuergar Warhammer, a reference to AD&D gray dwarves (duergar) and the Warhammer fantasy world. Plus, the warhammer was often associated with dwarven characters, so that seemed to fit. My province name was just a quick nod to the mythical metal mithril, from Tolkien’s LoTR universe.

When I created my account for the Third Age, I was a little stumped for a ruler name. Then I decided to maintain the one I had used previously, for continuity sake, as well as for role-playing reasons. To this day, I have not changed my ruler name in Utopia. For my province name I just changed the reference from a dwarven reference to an elven (forest) reference.

As an introduction to my Kingdom, I wrote a short story to explain how an elven province came to have a dwarven ruler. I posted the story in the Kingdom’s forum at the beginning of the Age. I can’t remember the reception it received, except that it didn’t start a flurry of role-playing in the Kingdom. Somewhat discouraged, I realized that people played Utopia more for the strategy than anything else, so my role-playing took a backseat. In those early days though I made all my forums posts IC (in character), rarely posting OOC (out of character).

As a bit of Utopia history, in the Third Age, Mehul (the game’s creator) did away with ruler titles. Players were free to prefix their names however they saw fit. The standard titles made their reappearance in a later Age. That bit of history fit well with my story, as I explained how Dhuergar Warhammer would carry no title, having earned none in the eyes of the elves.