On my last year of high school (ca 2011), this girl - who used to be my bully - had just recently come back from a year abroad to ✨America✨ and when she came back, and we realized we were both into the same shows, she told me all about AO3 and fanfic and omegle.
So I spent a few months on omegle, where we'd switch to emails if we didn't want it to end, until someone sent me an invite to chatzy. There, I found a lovely group of people, who I still think of fondly, who taught me how to write better and helped me understand the craft - and English!
That same group introduced me to tumblr, which remained my RPing spot for a good 4 years until people slowly moved to discord.
Sadly, life got far too busy to keep up with group chats that involve more than 3 people, so the few RPs I do on discord are mostly 1x1 nowadays.
So I spent a few months on omegle, where we'd switch to emails if we didn't want it to end, until someone sent me an invite to chatzy. There, I found a lovely group of people, who I still think of fondly, who taught me how to write better and helped me understand the craft - and English!
That same group introduced me to tumblr, which remained my RPing spot for a good 4 years until people slowly moved to discord.
Sadly, life got far too busy to keep up with group chats that involve more than 3 people, so the few RPs I do on discord are mostly 1x1 nowadays.
Man this brings me back. I started on this sight called Quotev.
an old Dutch RP forum called Wolf Story. my first character on there was this edgy but good-hearted white wolf called Amatariseu, because my 11-year-old ass didn't bother to Google how one would spell my favorite fictional wolf Amaterasu's name correctly. Wolf Story had actually been around since 2008 and probably earlier, but by the time my new friends and I blew some new life into it, it had been abandoned for a few years already. had an amazing time writing with those people, and I still speak to them every now and then!
in due time, the oldschool members rejoined the forum, a whole pack war broke loose, and at some point the original owner of the website returned, threw a weird temper tantrum when we seemed to be enjoying ourselves too much without her input, and out of nowhere she just nuked the entire website into oblivion. over a decade of ancient roleplay stories from ye olden forum days, just gone.
though my writing and character building has significantly improved since then, I do hold Wolf Story and its endless shenanigans close to my heart. nothing quite beats edgily busting out some Twenty One Pilot lyrics in the middle of (Dutch!) dialogue between angry angsty talking wolves. kid me had that WHIMSY on, man.
in due time, the oldschool members rejoined the forum, a whole pack war broke loose, and at some point the original owner of the website returned, threw a weird temper tantrum when we seemed to be enjoying ourselves too much without her input, and out of nowhere she just nuked the entire website into oblivion. over a decade of ancient roleplay stories from ye olden forum days, just gone.
though my writing and character building has significantly improved since then, I do hold Wolf Story and its endless shenanigans close to my heart. nothing quite beats edgily busting out some Twenty One Pilot lyrics in the middle of (Dutch!) dialogue between angry angsty talking wolves. kid me had that WHIMSY on, man.
So there's this game called Furcadia...
Furcadia, specifically Wolfs Moon Heaven, and after that, The Leaky Mug with my pirate character (Pirates of the Caribbean had just come out and I was.. a little obsessed lol).
avid gamer forums, neopets and then furcadia lol...
Ironically, Facebook pages 🙈 then here.
Endless Online around 2001, and entirely by accident.
I was walking by and someone rping wanted to buy my axe and I just sort of rolled with it. They mistook me for a friend of theirs because we were dressed identical so I got absorbed into the rp group and not knowing what was going on, just went with it.
6 months go by and the actual dude shows up, but by that point I'd already been deeply involved in the plot and was actively rping.
I joined furcadia like a year or so later.
I was walking by and someone rping wanted to buy my axe and I just sort of rolled with it. They mistook me for a friend of theirs because we were dressed identical so I got absorbed into the rp group and not knowing what was going on, just went with it.
6 months go by and the actual dude shows up, but by that point I'd already been deeply involved in the plot and was actively rping.
I joined furcadia like a year or so later.
Leaving aside stories and notebooks in which my sister and I would take turns writing, and brief ventures into Furcadia when I was much younger, using dial-up internet, and really shouldn't have been anywhere near the place, I believe my first proper RP experiences were branching out from Ye Olden DeviantArt OCTs and ProBoards forums! It was largely out of a sense of...well, we have these characters and settings now, and the tourneys are over, but I still want to play with them! There were also a few old Dragonriders of Pern and Neopets forums mixed in around that point, too.
I ended up copying the old Cloverfield campaign and making social media accounts for a few modern fantasy characters with a few friends and playing that way, and THAT eventually ended up intersecting with a few other people who were using places like Formspring (a now-defunct Q&A social media site) to play a mix of in-character answers and multi-para RP.
That eventually led to this brand-new, funky site called RPR because linking and building independent sites was getting to be such a hassle, which brought me back to Furcadia - and I'm still lurking in both places fifteen-ish years later.
I ended up copying the old Cloverfield campaign and making social media accounts for a few modern fantasy characters with a few friends and playing that way, and THAT eventually ended up intersecting with a few other people who were using places like Formspring (a now-defunct Q&A social media site) to play a mix of in-character answers and multi-para RP.
That eventually led to this brand-new, funky site called RPR because linking and building independent sites was getting to be such a hassle, which brought me back to Furcadia - and I'm still lurking in both places fifteen-ish years later.
Rigby wrote:
Leaving aside stories and notebooks in which my sister and I would take turns writing, and brief ventures into Furcadia when I was much younger, using dial-up internet, and really shouldn't have been anywhere near the place, I believe my first proper RP experiences were branching out from Ye Olden DeviantArt OCTs and ProBoards forums! It was largely out of a sense of...well, we have these characters and settings now, and the tourneys are over, but I still want to play with them! There were also a few old Dragonriders of Pern and Neopets forums mixed in around that point, too.
I ended up copying the old Cloverfield campaign and making social media accounts for a few modern fantasy characters with a few friends and playing that way, and THAT eventually ended up intersecting with a few other people who were using places like Formspring (a now-defunct Q&A social media site) to play a mix of in-character answers and multi-para RP.
That eventually led to this brand-new, funky site called RPR because linking and building independent sites was getting to be such a hassle, which brought me back to Furcadia - and I'm still lurking in both places fifteen-ish years later.
I ended up copying the old Cloverfield campaign and making social media accounts for a few modern fantasy characters with a few friends and playing that way, and THAT eventually ended up intersecting with a few other people who were using places like Formspring (a now-defunct Q&A social media site) to play a mix of in-character answers and multi-para RP.
That eventually led to this brand-new, funky site called RPR because linking and building independent sites was getting to be such a hassle, which brought me back to Furcadia - and I'm still lurking in both places fifteen-ish years later.
I hit the freewebs then wix pipeline for character sites in the 00's, then RPR came out in 2010 just as those sites were fading out and offered an easier experience for site crafting. I don't focus as much on it as I used to, but it's probably still the best site for character web pages to me.
America On Line, with internet access before DSL...
rolled 2d10 and got a natural 14.
8
6
AIM and Yahoo chat rooms, and forums. It's been so long that I can't remember which came first. I just know that I wrote Yu Yu Hakusho fanfic and someone wanted to RP with me! My first RP was as Hiei while someone else played Yukina, his sister. It was just ... she cried and made gem tears while Hiei (very OOC) comforted her. That was it.
It was very quickly that I made my first character, not part of any mainstream universe. She's retired, these days, but she had a pretty long run.
I ended up on Furcadia about 2-3 years after I started RPing, and that's when I got serious. Well. After a while. >>
It was very quickly that I made my first character, not part of any mainstream universe. She's retired, these days, but she had a pretty long run.
I ended up on Furcadia about 2-3 years after I started RPing, and that's when I got serious. Well. After a while. >>
MSN & Yahoo & AIM back in '98, and was on those for a while.. then bounced around as new sites popped up & people started using MMOs/social media sites for roleplay!
𝓜𝓲𝓼𝓪 𝓜𝓲𝓼𝓪.
𝓜𝓲𝓼𝓪 𝓜𝓲𝓼𝓪.
I got my start in... '93. collapses into dust
I got a copy of Darksun: Shattered Lands and had a blast, the disc even has a complete-ish PHB/MC/DMG for up to 9th level characters for the setting.
Shortly after I found the proper AD&D 2nd ed, and was obsessed with the adventure.
My character, Saberus, ended up on grand adventures with his custom class that took 10 times as long to gain levels.
Among his exploits he:
Slew an adult red dragon with just some pocket change
Helped distract a white dragon so a thief could land a blow that cause the dragon to... well finish the job of killing the white dragon.
Foiled a Drow plot to murder a Drow high priestess that had claimed him as a slave, and earned her respect and his freedom by stopping a second plot.
Talked a lich into helping the township that was building up around his lair.
Stopped the wanton slaughter of kobolds who were trying to be peaceful miners of shinies. (the local mayor wanted the wealth for himself, and staged 'attacks' to frame the kobolds)
Negotiated a truce with the orc tribes next to his homeland, and helped a wise chief unite the tribes under his banner. (despite Saberus' known hatred and racist point of view regarding orcs...)
I got a copy of Darksun: Shattered Lands and had a blast, the disc even has a complete-ish PHB/MC/DMG for up to 9th level characters for the setting.
Shortly after I found the proper AD&D 2nd ed, and was obsessed with the adventure.
My character, Saberus, ended up on grand adventures with his custom class that took 10 times as long to gain levels.
Among his exploits he:
Slew an adult red dragon with just some pocket change
Helped distract a white dragon so a thief could land a blow that cause the dragon to... well finish the job of killing the white dragon.
Foiled a Drow plot to murder a Drow high priestess that had claimed him as a slave, and earned her respect and his freedom by stopping a second plot.
Talked a lich into helping the township that was building up around his lair.
Stopped the wanton slaughter of kobolds who were trying to be peaceful miners of shinies. (the local mayor wanted the wealth for himself, and staged 'attacks' to frame the kobolds)
Negotiated a truce with the orc tribes next to his homeland, and helped a wise chief unite the tribes under his banner. (despite Saberus' known hatred and racist point of view regarding orcs...)
I got my start around .... 1997.. I think? If you count passing notebooks around between classes and 'rping' in a handwritten style. A small group of friends and I had some sort of story dealing with vampires and a vampire slayer that totally wasn't just a rip off of Buffy. Even before that, I suppose in a way I was 'live action roleplaying' because from the time I was a kid I would get very invested in the made up stories I had with the few close friends I had.
If we don't count that, text RP on the internet started in maybe late 98 when I actually had internet access. My parents did not want to bother getting internet back in the day. I won a webtv at one of my mother's work parties, and I paid for the dial up connection with my first part time job.
I RP'd on talk city chatrooms. What little I can remember of it was SO awful and cringe in hindsight, and there were a lot of really petty people and dumb drama, but I was hooked storytelling through RP.
Early 2000s for a good ... 4 years maybe? I RP'd on Neverwinter Nights. I would later occasionally go back to it for a while after 'quitting' This was actually where I first started sorta accidentally falling into doing paragraph RP. The stories I was telling with the handful of people I rp'd with just evolved to longer posts. We'd spend almost as much time RPing in town as we would going out adventuring and actually playing the game.
2006 - Furcadia. RP'd heavily on Furc, starting around this time. I was pretty active on there until just 2-3 years ago, when I realized I'd been logging on out of habit but hadn't really been RPing for quite a while.
I also joined RPR in 2010, before then I had used online journals, and webs dot com and a few other sites for character pages.
After giving up on furc, I've basically just RP'd through discord, occasionally RPing on RPR itself. I've sourced partners from a handful of other places. I don't RP as heavily as I used to in the past, since life tends to keep life-ing. I tend to keep 1, maybe 2 slow moving stories going at a time, posting a multipara to novella response a couple times a week.
Sometimes I miss the group settings on occasion (although I remind myself how often it could be a major headache) But there was something really fun about having a handful of active partners all interacting, and actually RPing out your character's day-to-day actions, where random characters might end up in the scene. But, I also love the sort of stories that can be told when you aren't limited by a static location and setting.
If we don't count that, text RP on the internet started in maybe late 98 when I actually had internet access. My parents did not want to bother getting internet back in the day. I won a webtv at one of my mother's work parties, and I paid for the dial up connection with my first part time job.
I RP'd on talk city chatrooms. What little I can remember of it was SO awful and cringe in hindsight, and there were a lot of really petty people and dumb drama, but I was hooked storytelling through RP.
Early 2000s for a good ... 4 years maybe? I RP'd on Neverwinter Nights. I would later occasionally go back to it for a while after 'quitting' This was actually where I first started sorta accidentally falling into doing paragraph RP. The stories I was telling with the handful of people I rp'd with just evolved to longer posts. We'd spend almost as much time RPing in town as we would going out adventuring and actually playing the game.
2006 - Furcadia. RP'd heavily on Furc, starting around this time. I was pretty active on there until just 2-3 years ago, when I realized I'd been logging on out of habit but hadn't really been RPing for quite a while.
I also joined RPR in 2010, before then I had used online journals, and webs dot com and a few other sites for character pages.
After giving up on furc, I've basically just RP'd through discord, occasionally RPing on RPR itself. I've sourced partners from a handful of other places. I don't RP as heavily as I used to in the past, since life tends to keep life-ing. I tend to keep 1, maybe 2 slow moving stories going at a time, posting a multipara to novella response a couple times a week.
Sometimes I miss the group settings on occasion (although I remind myself how often it could be a major headache) But there was something really fun about having a handful of active partners all interacting, and actually RPing out your character's day-to-day actions, where random characters might end up in the scene. But, I also love the sort of stories that can be told when you aren't limited by a static location and setting.
HOOOboy... I got my start in Yahoo chatrooms around 2004 with Pokemon RP. Nothing too serious or in-depth, mostly one-liners with someone who I guess thought I was a dude, 'cause she kept assigning all the male characters to me until I asked why. I had a trainer OC with a black braid and I thiiink yellow eyes? His name was Blackie because I was SO creative and original at the time. Ouch. Sometime later another person I'd met in a chatroom recommended I join Furcadia, and I ALMOST gave up after my first day. My life would've been ENTIRELY different if I had! Wild to think about. Anyway, RP'd there for a while until my muse gradually fizzled out. I did end up revamping that first character, though. He's less cringe now.
For me it started more than 20 years ago now in World of Warcraft.
I had never really heard of RP before but ended up getting very involved in my own character and her backstory and having all these ideas and meeting others in a similar boat and it kicked off a whole lot of things.
Since then it's put fantasy themed roleplay at the front of my mind and while I'm long past done with World of Warcraft I still keep the roleplaying part active.
I had never really heard of RP before but ended up getting very involved in my own character and her backstory and having all these ideas and meeting others in a similar boat and it kicked off a whole lot of things.
Since then it's put fantasy themed roleplay at the front of my mind and while I'm long past done with World of Warcraft I still keep the roleplaying part active.
I started RPing in TeenChat and a Wolf RPG on a forum. Then I moved into Furcadia with a friend from the wolf RPG and thats when I got pretty into it.
Now I just RP on discord. 😌
Now I just RP on discord. 😌
Mixpixi wrote:
I’m so fascinated by all these answers. I didn’t know anything about Furcadia before this, now i’m researching it and it’s such an interesting old online community?? AOL had a roleplay scene?? You guys were roleplaying on Neopets? That’s so cool!
I’m not a YouTuber by any means but man, now I’m kinda tempted to make a video essay about the history of text-based roleplay. It has such a vast community and a rich history, but I never see any content that talks about it as a whole.
I’m not a YouTuber by any means but man, now I’m kinda tempted to make a video essay about the history of text-based roleplay. It has such a vast community and a rich history, but I never see any content that talks about it as a whole.
that would be amazing tbh
i would watch the hecc out of that
I am also from Neopets at 10 or 11 years old in 2000/2001, which made me google "animal roleplay" and found Furcadia eventually. I joined Furc in 2004 and was doing RP I probably shouldn't have (ehem).
But I also frequented forums like MSN Groups, Proboards, and AOL/AIM chat rooms!
But I also frequented forums like MSN Groups, Proboards, and AOL/AIM chat rooms!
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