User:Coreth

Titania: You wish to see the distant realms? Very well. But know this first: the places you will visit, the places that you will see, do not exist. For there are only two worlds — your world, which is the real world, and the other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. These worlds provide an alternative. Provide escape. Provide a dream, and power, provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters.

—Neil Gaiman, The Books of Magic, Vol. 1, Issue 3 (1991)

This page is about the user Coreth on this wiki. For other uses, see Coreth (disambiguation).

The Man Behind the Mask (Kind Of)

Coreth
Global: @CorethL
Personal Data
Age:	Older than I care to admit to
Biographical Data
Base of Operations:	Washington DC area
Interests:	Speculative Fiction novels Tabletop Gaming Comics (Duh) MMORPGs (Another Duh) Some programming/writing
Userboxes
EST This user's time zone is Eastern Time. ALTAHOLIC This user only wishes he had a "main" character; the altitis is strong in this one. This user has a character in the Hyperspace Outlaws. GOLD! This user is a Gold player in Champions Online. This user has a character in the Paragons of Virtue. TREK This user is a Lifetime Subscriber in Star Trek Online. This user has a character in the Corps of Discovery. CoH This user fought on both fronts in Paragon City and the Rogue Isles. CoV VIP This user was a VIP player in City of Heroes. This user had a character in the Union Supreme. This user had a character in the Entropy Legion. This user had a character in the Adventurists. This user had a character in the Tavern on the Edge. This user had a character in Hyperion Force.

Coreth started out messing around in the MMO world with Star Wars Galaxies in 2005, with his main character Coreth Landwalker, a Master Ranger/Master Rifleman...at least, until the hated New Game "Enhancements" which removed his main profession entirely, trashed the game interface and combat system, and drove off a very large chunk of its playerbase-including him. He'd gone back a couple times after a year passed and having heard of design changes that made it tolerable...but the damage done to his friends lists and the continuing direction of the devs there finally permitted him to leave it behind forever.

Okay-that's enough with the third person.

In that bleak year, I spent my time in World of Warcraft using Coreth as a Protection Spec Warrior. I actually enjoyed my time there, but the raid-centric attitude of the game at maximum level and an inability to get into a guild that I felt comfortable in eventually led me to exit that game too. I bummed around a bit in Lord of the Rings Online as well, poked my head into EVE Online, but none of them really seemed to offer what I was looking for.

Enter City of Heroes. I'd started playing CoH sometime in '06, but hit the unofficial RP server there in mid '07. And it was awesome. That was where I started messing with wiki stuff in earnest (I'd dabbled in Wikipedia, but that was all). When CoH closed its doors in '12, I spent some time in Champions Online to try to recreate the magic there (it...didn't work). I've gone back and forth with assorted MMOs, and in some of them, created characters with a decent amount of backstory. And I didn't want to lose what I had if (God forbid!) sites like Virtueverse or the PRIMUS Database shut down. (And in fact, a similar site for STO did shut down-but not before I'd already saved my work elsewhere.)

And so the idea came to me: I'm a kinda smart guy. Sometimes. I could set up my own wiki. It still has certain downsides (such as "yes, this can go belly up, too"), but as long as I do regular backups and store it offsite, I should be able to recreate it at need. In the meantime, I now have available access to a not-inconsiderable amount of characters and backstory-and I've been expanding it to go beyond my days in the MMO-sphere to my days in paper and pencil RPGs as well. (At least for the sheets I still have lying around somewhere; time hits everything...)

And that's all there really is to know.