In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I found myself (a fantasy obsessed teen, of course) introduced to roleplay via forum RPs revolving around magical creatures. They weren't high art by any means, but they were fun, and they formed their own specific genre. Probably the biggest and most influential of these was the Draekard roleplay, which ran from around 1999 to 2003 and inspired many similar settings. There aren't very many records left of these games. A few websites are still floating around, but the forums the stories played out on are gone, and archive.org's records are patchy if they exist at all.
Why document them? Most of these have been forgotten as old, embarrassing material or worse, "cringey". And it's true that many of us, myself included, didn't have a lot of experience in creating well rounded characters (although there were definitely skilled storytellers among the ranks who did bring out the best in the settings). Yes, there was a lot of over-dramatic cheese. But that's also forgetting a lot of the earnestness and fun that went on in these spaces. Sometimes I think we're at our best when we make things without worrying about how palatable it is. Besides, you have to write a lot of crap before you start writing anything good, so why not have fun with it? My intention isn't to poke fun at the genre, it's to remember the fun that happened.
In addition, many retrospectives of the early creative internet focus on fandom and specifically transformative fandom. I have no problem with fandom, but it's not the only creative community out there, and I feel that it has a habit of eclipsing the smaller, often forgotten communities out there. They deserve a little love too. Think of this as a spotlight on a lost community before fandom and social media ate everything.
Features
There were a few tropes common to these games, which mostly originated in the Draekard roleplay and spread as others were inspired to create their own:
- The main species is based on a large, charismatic animal or fantasy creature, such as dragons, wolves, or big cats, with added magic and 'cool' features such as bright colours, horns, wings etc.
- There is a range of subspecies/breeds for players to choose from, often with different habitats, personalities, alignments, elemental affinities or other distinctions. They can usually crossbreed, giving more options for character design.
- A self contained world in which these creatures lived, with maps and different regions, and some sort of history of how it came to be. Contact and travel between different worlds was rare, and fandom content virtually nonexistent (although a few games did include D&D monsters).
- The creatures are the main draw of the setting - humans and stock fantasy species (e.g. elves, dwarves) are either nonexistent or minor background details.
Other common tropes (showed up a lot, but didn't specifically define the magic creature genre):
- Different factions, such as large clans or good/evil organisations.
- A meta-plot of some kind involving struggles between these factions. Not every character was part of this plot, but it was in the setting background. Often this took the form of an impending war or collapse.
- Character adoptions, where people would design characters and put them up for other players to adopt and flesh out with a personality and backstory. Unlike the modern adoptables scene, this wasn't for money, and all you had to do was ask for the design and fill out a character sheet.
- Certain powerful characters, such as faction leaders or even godlike entities, are available for adoption to skilled roleplayers. (Sadly, as can be imagined, this could lead to favouritism and nasty drama...)
Like many internet roleplays, these communities sat on the boundary of true games and collaborative storytelling. There were no dice systems, at least not in any of the games I played, and all play was written as prose. There was usually a meta-plot with influential factions struggling for power, but characters were not necessarily a part of this. Occasionally smaller guided plots appeared, but there was no GM as in a tabletop RP. Instead everyone had their own character and the plot played out with some behind the scenes discussion between players as to where the story should go. But a lot of the time, most gameplay consisted of freeform encounters between characters, with any plot being emergent and revolving around the individual characters and their interaction.
This could be good or bad - freeform was welcoming to those of us coming in from writing backgrounds with little experience of tabletop games. In fact the playerbases included everything from experienced tabletop gamers to people who had never roleplayed ever. But combat was difficult to write out without a little randomness from dice. Freeform was also quite difficult when dealing with plots; with no GM, it was easy for threads to fizzle out because of lack of guidance. These two factors sadly caused a lot of stagnation and meant that many promising storylines never quite got off the ground.
On the other hand there were many opportunities for worldbuilding, and many of us spent a lot of time adding to the game with different settings, characters and factions. Perhaps it would have been more accurate to think of them as collaborative worldbuilding exercises instead?
But still, let's not forget that this was all about fun. We were young people who'd shown an interest in art and writing, and gotten pushed into school classes that emphasised Deathless Art and deep allegorical messages. Who wouldn't want to break free from all the dourness and listen to the part of you that says "dragons COOL!"? And the internet was new to us; many of us were discovering shared interests for the first time. Building worlds around superpowered big cats or dragon-wolves IS pretty silly, and you probably shouldn't take it too seriously, but in a world where things get darker and more serious day by day, maybe we could still use a bit of cheese.
Moving on
Toward the mid-00s, as these games died away, there was a brief trend for collaborative "dragonbond" communities, with some influence from Pern and similar settings. These were closer to collaborative storytelling worlds, where people would write stories about "candidate" characters who would then be given a dragon companion by the webmaster. The characters' story might then continue, although the storytelling was usually a solo effort as opposed to the back and forth roleplays of the past. There isn't much else I can say about these communities, as I wasn't part of them, and they too seem to have fallen into obscurity. Since then most of the roleplayers I knew have moved onto fandom based RPGs.
A remnant of these roleplays still exists in the species adopt communities, particularly on DeviantArt. Typically, though, it's rare to see any sort of storytelling, world, or lore surrounding the creatures, and they're paid for with real money - something that would have been unthinkable to the roleplays of the past. Character vetting systems did exist in the old roleplays to ensure prospective RP characters fit in with the world lore, but the "closed species" trend where you have to actually buy a slot to be allowed to make a design is quite different, and one that I'm not a fan of. People will always make fanworks of things they enjoy - telling them they can't is quite petty.
Could a revival ever happen? With how dark the world seems sometimes, magic animals sound like a fun distraction, and despite (or because of?) the cheese there were a lot of interesting ideas and plotlines left hanging that could be the basis of something cool. Might the genre make a comeback in the same way that handwritten web pages are cool and retro now, or did the community get eaten up by pay-to-design closed species? I sometimes wonder about the feasibility of a revived community building on some of the lessons learnt from past failures - more guided plots, actual DMs, maybe a basic dice system to generate some randomness. But given how many people have moved on, perhaps these communities are just to be left as an obscure little footnote in the history of the internet.
Nevertheless, go forth, make things you enjoy, and have fun!