Our Beginnings

The Brotherhood of the Hand was founded by Echo and Uzeal , and based on the "Death Gate Cycle" book series, written by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. Our original ranks were also based on an element from those books, called the "Dagger" philosophy. In this system, each member represents a different part of a dagger. While some parts of the dagger are certainly more vital than others, each part has an important role, and each rank reflects this role. Without the sheath, the blade would rust away, and eventually become useless. Without the hand to guide the blade, it would never be able to attack an enemy. Without the crossguard, the hand and arm would become ingured in combat, and the blade itself would lack balance, and so on. Members also attained ranks, such as sheath, tip and blade.

The ideology behind this system was wonderful and worked smoothly. However, as circumstances changed, our House elected to move to simpler ranks, which require less upkeep from our leaders.

House activity and membership increased dramatically just around the time of the Expansion release. As more people were online and more "forced" by Blizzard to party in order to function in harder game difficulties, they sought out friendly groups to help them out. Just after the Expansion came out, we were receiving new members very frequently, and subsequently we had a period where we enjoyed as many as 3 to 4 full Hand games every night.

From around a couple weeks to a month before the September 11^th Terrorism attacks, membership activity was decreasing noticeably as members became busy with school and other activities that forced them to spend less and less time online. Many of our highest ranking members (crossguard, hilt, etc.) were suddenly slipping into obscurity, and many of our new members had no idea who these people were. One of our Lords, Echo, was in the middle of moving to Oregon and hadn't been online for some time. It soon became apparent that he became very busy even after the move when he wasn't online very often at all, and sure enough, he announced his resignation by email soon after.

At this point, members of the Hand had a few choices: Reorganize our leadership and become a guild in our own right (rather than a house of a guild), reorganize our leadership and remain a house in Guild Medieval, or disband and strike out on our own.

As a tight group of friends, we talked over our choices extensively, and eventually decided to remain a House of Guild Medieval, as it would best benefit our members and keep administrative duties to a minimum, allowing us all to do what we want: play, and play often. We decided to change our ranking system to make it simpler, and we elected new leaders. Leiahs was elected the new Lord of the Hand as a result of being abreast of Guild issues and generally well-known by all the members. Midnightguard eventually became Co-Lord. Bhima, who is now moving on to newer and brighter gaming worlds, was elected Master-at-Arms, and Sean, who had brought up the idea of a House Armory, became our House Armorer. Uzeal became known as a Scribe, as webmaster. However, Uzeal also soon became busy and announced his resignation as well. Leiahs had been working on a Resource webpage for Brotherhood members, and as a result of Uzeal's resignation, decided to make it the home page for the Hand, moving all resources and information to the new location.

Since many members hadn't been seen for a while, just after reorganization of the Hand, Leiahs took an account of all the Hand members, and soon discovered that there were only about 15 members who would remain active in the Brotherhood. Since many of our activities (mainly, All-Class teams) involved a good chunk of these members who would no longer be playing, we consolidated our All-Class team into 7 members who came from the previous Blue, Red, and Gold All-Class teams. The All-Class team now plays weekly instead of bi-monthly.

Our Game of the Week events were also becoming very poorly attended, but as new members are coming in, it is beginning to return to its former glory of large group games.

After things in the Guild settled down (there had been a few instances of ex-guild members doing malicious things to guild members, which resulted in a purging of guild members) and the new guild site went up, there began to be more players applying for membership. We are beginning to see the fruits of that in the Hand now, as we are getting new members to replace those who have moved on and aren't with us anymore. We look forward to our activities become more attended, our resources growing, and our friendships becoming stronger with those who remain with us, and also those who join us now.