RIVENDELL

Written by Belgarion (#28242), with very slight editing by Chubbles.

I joined KoL on April 1 of 2004. As soon as I was lvl 3, I went looking for a clan, and discovered to my delight that there was one called Rivendell. This was in the days when Clans were listed by size, before the searchable database. Rivendell had, at that time, some 22 members, and was led by a dude named "Legolas." (#8867)

It appeared when I joined to be mostly asleep. But someone else had joined at about the same time, Elarrina (#25272; also a well-known forum poster). We got talking, and decided we wanted to do something to wake the clan up. At this point we're about level five. Legolas gives us a bunch of privileges for our donations, eventually enabling us to admit and boot members. We go on a huge recruitment drive, and the story starts to get interesting.

As Rivendell's membership improved, we drew up a fairly restrictive and directly karma-based advancement policy. We poured the profits into war, created truces and enmities, and pissed a lot of people off. We never got in the Hall of Records for Goodies, but I bet if wins had been tracked then, we'd have done pretty well. Elarrina took care of recruiting and HR, and I ran the war room and pretty much all external affairs. Legolas signed in every four days or so and rarely talked to either of us. He didn't seem to mind what was going on at, so we pretty much took over actual leadership from him.

In the space of about three weeks, we became one of the largest clans in the Kingdom; 160 members put us sixth or seventh on that size-based clan list. I continued to fight and defend members against scammers via war and PVP. I built a five-clan coalition that struck against anyone who annoyed any of us. I don't remember enough names from that time, but the BluD 3AguLz were the first of our allies.

Eventually, we were infiltrated by someone who said one of our guys had ripped off his clan-leader (ElectricBrain (#26861) was our guy, Emerald (playerid unknown) was the clan-leader; don't remember clan name or infiltrator) who bode his time, then attacked the War Clan as soon as he was granted war-room priveleges. He cursed us out in our Board, then was able to hit WarClan again, devastating our army, before anyone who could boot him signed in.

People were angry to see all the work they'd put into our clan taken down that easily. They were angry that they had to do work at all to advance, but with so many, it was very hard to come up with another system for them to gain our trust.

Elarrina and I were so new that the fundamental pointlessness of clan-war hadn't yet occurred to us; and it *was* a useful device for the protection of our members from scams, etc. Or at least for serious retaliation, in those days when almost all clans had armies. But not everyone saw it that way; eventually we (Elarrina and I) decided that this was just too much work.

We left and founded Lothlorien, with our favourites from Rivendell and a few IRL friends. We instituted a strict "invitation" policy and foreswore clan-war forever. We concentrate power at the top so that everyone will know what's being done and why. We've got Fnord7 (#122332 ; Chatbot developer), Seraph (#20401), and Pocket Hell (#229214; RoF superstar), several other serious movers to this day. But most of Lothlorien is dormant, since most of the people who remember these events have left KoL.

Meanwhile, Kung Fu Joe (see Warehouse23) decided at a fairly low level, as an initiate in Rivendell, that if I was going, by damn, so was he, and he founded W23 with Marshall (see Warehouse23) and a few others who'd all started in the clan that was briefly my greatest achievement and legacy for KoL. Rivendell. And they now have the influence over the Kingdom that I wielded long, long ago.