Time to go for now…

We started the Fort Bloodshed PennMUSH shell on April 11 1999, so it has been up and running for eight years now.

I’d been working on the background as early as 1995, with actual coding and laying out the streets in 1996 and 1997. In that time, we have gone through two Red Hat Linux servers, an All-In-One Power Macintosh G3, a Power Macintosh G3 Mini-tower and now an Apple Xserve G4 rack mount server. Since we started, we went through a number of friendships and my grandmother’s catching cancer, 9-11, my grandmother’s death from cancer and now at the end my own illness.

I really should have used the excuse of my illness to close, but I was so frightened from my illness, to me closing was a failure, and at that time, I could handle failure.

Now, I am beginning work on an educational version of my work here. At www.1492.org I will be working on an interactive web database of all things related to the Northern Great Plains Indian Wars from 1860-1890 and the culture and development of the American Indians and European Settlers in the region.

Now…the fork in the road.

Right now, I am leaning towards shutting Fort Bloodshed down as a MUSH, and starting a new project for historical role-play. We have been playing with the idea of a pirate game for some time, in fact, we have http://bloodbay.bloodshed.org/ up already but that didn’t really pull me in. The Golden Age of Piracy in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico is classic, but there is too much out there, just like basing an Old West game during the Golden Age of Gunfighting, or the 1870-80s was too easy, I have to do something different.

Bloodbay, unless I get a better name, is going to be a piracy game, but will take place where the real piracy took place, the Barbary Coast of North Africa. I’m sure that lost a few right there, but hold on and give me a moment…

HISTORY ALERT
Starting in 14th century piracy was gaining in popularity. Thanks to the progress of technology better, bigger and faster ships were built. Colonial expansion was beginning with all the shipping it created carrying gold and other goods. Competing interests and ambitions of colonial powers made it easy for ambitious sailors to always find a way to legalize the cruelest acts of piracy. English privateers could for instance attack and rob, with impunity, Spanish shipping. On the other hand, North African pirates had a license to rob English ships and Madagascar pirates of the XVIII century represented French king’s interests. The continually, since ancient times, notorious was so called Barbary Coast, name formerly applied to the coast of North Africa from the western border of Egypt to the Atlantic Ocean. From the 1500s to the 1800s, the coast was occupied by independent Islamic states under the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire. In the early 1500s, these states became centers for pirates.

Barbary pirates were any of the Muslim pirates operating from the coast of North Africa. Captains, who formed a class in Algiers and Tunis, commanded cruisers outfitted by wealthy backers, who then received 10 percent of the value of the prizes. The pirates used galleys until the 17th century, when Simon Danser, a Flemish renegade, taught them the advantage of using sailing ships. North African piracy had very ancient origins as we described above. It gained a political significance during the 16th century, many of the Muslim pirates operating from the coast of North Africa, at their most powerful during the 17th century but still active until the 19th century. Most notable leader of North Africa was Barbarossa, who united Algeria and Tunisia as military states under the Ottoman sultanate and maintained his revenues by piracy. With the arrival of powerful Moorish bands in Rabat and Tetouan (1609), Morocco became a new center for the pirates and for the 'Alawi sultans, who quickly gained control of the two republics and encouraged piracy as a valuable source of revenue. During the 17th century, the Algerian and Tunisian pirates joined forces, and by 1650, more than 30,000 of their captives were imprisoned in Algiers alone. Piratical practices were the cause of several wars between Tripolitania and the United States in the 19th century. The British made two attempts to suppress Algerian piracy after 1815, and the French finally ended it in 1830.

North African pirates abducted and enslaved more than 1 million Europeans between 1530 and 1780 in a series of raids that depopulated coastal towns from Sicily to Cornwall, according to new research. Thousands of white Christians were seized every year to work as galley slaves, laborers and concubines for Muslim overlords in what is today Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Libya.

Scholars have long known of the slave raids on Europe. But American historian Robert Davis has calculated that the total number captured - although small compared with the 12 million Africans shipped to the Americas in later years - was far higher than previously recognized.

HISTORY OVER

Basing a game in North Africa is better than the Americas for a number of reasons, it shortens traveling time, allows a wider range of cultures to be represented and will allow slavery to be put in a historical context. Instead of slavery looming over the setting as it would in an America’s game with the current racial and cultural baggage that any discussion of slavery in the United States has. The Mediterranean basin will allow many more backgrounds and stories to be told. Lost son of a Polish count? We can do that here, along with a camel herder from some Oasis in the middle of nowhere Tunisia.

Let me know what you think please.