It has been three years since RPGDot's first appearance on the web. So we thought to give you some inside information on the teammembers that have been active here for a large part of these three years.

The third one for today is Myrthos, who spends most of his time on the forums and the background of RPGDot, trying to keep things running and updating the site.

It started with my own site
After I've played Planescape:Torment in the beginning of 2000, I decided that this game would be the game I would create a website for. And so The Locus Inn was born in June 2000 (yes it took me a couple of months to make it). After a few months the amount of content I was adding maxed out the webspace I had at the moment and I started looking for a place to get hosted. After checking out a few of the possible hosts, I ended up at RPGSites. A server that was owned by Rendelius and that harbored several other RPG related sites.

RPGSites also had a forum, which didn't attract too many visitors at that time but there were a reasonable number at that time. Near the end of 2000 we got into a discussion on the forums about RPGDot, the sites hosted at RPGSites and RPGDot. I don't really remember exactly how it went, but I ended up disagreeing with Rendelius and continued the discussion via e-mail with him. Too make a long story short; he invited me to join RPGDot to implement what I thought could be improved, which was an effective way to keep me quiet of course :-)

So I started hunting news and tried to bring some content to RPGDot.

The last year
In the early spring of 2001, Rendelius went on a holiday and as usual when he does that he comes back with a lot of ideas for improving the site. So we thought about what we wanted and I got someone from outside RPGDot interested enough to implement most of this. We created a new gallery and a new backbone for RPGDot, based on a mySQL database and PHP and in July 2001 we launched with the new design as we have it now.

The one who basically laid the foundation for this (Stijn Teijssen) went on to do other things and Garrett and me took over and improved a lot on the basis. There hasn't been a month without some sort of improvements in the last year (even though you might not have noticed all of them).

One of the things I did was setting up the forums and continuously improving on them. We get a lot of feedback on possible improvements and if they are viable I like to implement most of them. Another thing I worked on was getting the hosted sites up and running, allowing us to create a completely functional hosted site within hours instead of days. Luckily Garrett has taken over several of the activities in programming for RPGDot, so that we could work together on the improvements, which made it all go faster.

It has been a very busy last year. Like everyone at RPGDot I have a real life with a job and all activities for RPGDot have to be done in the evenings and nights. At times this means that playing games is out of the question as there is simply no time left for them. I'm not complaining about that, there has been much I've learned and there have been many contacts with developers and publishers I was able to make. It has been great fun actually and very rewarding when the stuff I made was welcomed by our visitors.

The future
We are currently working on a list of improvements that we want to make for RPGDot. It's not an extremely long list, but it promises to be a lot of work. We are attempting to integrate everything much more and having templates for RPGDot in a similar fashion as we have on the forums. You can login with one account on RPGDot and the forums and configure what you want to see on RPGDot and what not. This is of course optional; we will not force you to login.

We will also be integrating the gallery better with RPGDot and integrate the forums with comments on newsbits.

As usual this is what is scheduled and we sure will be trying to implement most of it as best as we can. Luckily we get your feedback on what we are doing and how we can improve RPGDot. After all this is a site created by RPG fans for RPG fans and we would like to keep it like that.