Son of Boar Child

Son of Boar Child was never really a newbie. He was the second character of a high-level anti-PK, a player who spent his main's evenings defending towns and rolled Boar to do the opposite: run around and kill people for no reason at all. Because the main was high level, the new character came out wearing Shadow Armor when almost nobody had it. When the DNN asked him in March 2001 about the rumor that he had once been an avid defender of Sawato, he wouldn't say yes and he wouldn't say no. "Boar has been killed so many times in Sawato it might just be his ghost that's floating around."

He met Dranven in the grass outside Sawato in 2000, two PKs working the same road. They should have fought. They became friends instead, close ones, and started raiding together, and then they never stopped: nearly every night for years, against Blood, against GEN, against the antis, against whoever held the town that week.

For most of that first year it was just the two of them. Then Boar found a tusker spawn way out in the southern Direlands, two hours from the nearest portal, somewhere in the dunes about half an hour's run from where Candeth Keep would one day stand. Nobody else knew it was there. They rerolled and levelled on it, Dranven's Og Mage included, until they were a very respectable level, and then they simply didn't leave. For the best part of a year they lived in the middle of nowhere and came in out of the desert to hit whoever held the towns. The camp didn't stay secret. By 2001 The Gimps had found it, and the two of them fought The Gimps over it again and again. When Rak called the camp an exploit that June, it was Boar who answered him on the DNN: "I have been there longer than the gimps," the portals were random spawns, "even Dranven II from my monarchy has tied to the summoned portal."

He came up the way the Band of Thugs did. He fought Kewtsquirrel as a lowbie, respected him for it, and swore to him in Shoushi, groveling at his boots: "Let Boar serve you, and your master Og!" Og said exactly one thing to him in all that time. "Welcome to the Band of Thugs." By the end of 2000 his friends had talked him into a monarchy of his own, and by March 2001 it had 54 followers, its own XP chains, and, in his words, a war with the whole server. Tou-Tou one week, Fort Tethana the next. That month Dranven II and Mojo killed Alberon Mindeater, the rank 5 monarch at Tethana, and Boar told the DNN about it the next day, between the grunting, the slobbering and the case for renaming Sawato Boaropolis.

He built Boar's World, the gang's website: kill shots, serialized adventures with Dranven written into them, a black-market list for buying your own loot back, and Blood himself lying dead on the front page. He played El Chango too, 62nd on PK Hunter in September 2003, before he left for Star Wars Galaxies. Years later, when somebody asked who was the most respected PK in Darktide history, Boar didn't have to think about it. "Dranven/Lo Kahn, Lotus, Genos, Blattos."