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 first one for today is Moriendor, who actively searches the web for news and has been promoted recently to the head of the newsteam.

My early years
Well, most of you probably only read our news and don't give a rat's bootie about who has written them. If you still don't care, you should tune out now because I'm one of those guys who do the news for RPGDot. However, if you want to find out about how and why someone finds the motivation to crawl the web each and every day in the search for RPG news, the following might be worth reading.

I was born in 1972 and first got in touch with computer games when my parents bought a C64 in the early 80's. From that day on, gaming became an essential part of my spare time. I played a lot at home and visited friends to play at their place because my parents were rather conservative about "violent games". The C64 kept me busy until around 1989. I didn't have any genre preferences back then. I played all good games, no matter if they were action games, sports games or RPG's.
I then spent a year as an exchange student in Roswell, New Mexico, USA in 1989/1990. That marked the preliminary end of my gaming activities for a while. None of my host families owned a computer and I didn't really miss gaming that much. It was exciting to be abroad and I spent a lot of time doing other stuff.
After I returned from the U.S., the C64 got shelved. It was old, boring and as a typical 17 or 18 year old male I had other things on my mind like err.., well, … chicks, beer, my 1st own car and stuff like that : .

It was a rainy afternoon in 1993 when I returned to the gaming scene. I was bored and visited a friend at his place. He owned a 386 or 486 PC and was playing this RPG that caught my attention right from the start. It was "Blade of Destiny" from German developer attic and the 1st part in the Realms of Arkania trilogy. It actually caught my attention so much that I didn't get home before the next morning. I slept a few hours and then returned to my friend's house and once again we spent the entire afternoon, evening, night and the whole next day with this wonderful, deep RPG. These were the days I fell in love with RPG's…

I bought my first own PC in 1994. The second part of the Realms of Arkania trilogy ("Startrail") was released in the same year and it kept me busy for a long, long time. I played lots of games from all sorts of genres throughout the following years. I never was a hardcore RPG junkie and I wouldn't even consider myself as being one today. I just love good games.

I exchanged my aging 486DX-40 for a Pentium 166 in 1996 and finally got hooked up to the Internet in 1997. In the beginning, I mostly used the web to search for gaming news, hints, cheats etc. but it didn't take too long before I joined my first ever forum in 1998.
It was the forum for "The Lady, The Mage & The Knight" (LMK), a Realms of Arkania based RPG, developed by German attic Entertainment and Belgian Larian Studios.
LMK was cancelled in 1999 and the whole community, including myself, wandered off to Larian Studios who began work on a new title, "Project C" which was later renamed to "Divinity: The Sword of Lies" and then once again renamed by its publisher (CDV) to "Divine Divinity".

Wait a minute. "Divine Divinity"? Doesn't that sound cheap and ridiculous for a true fantasy RPG? It sure does… Something had to be done about it and the Divinity community started a crusade around the net to make people aware of the name change. I posted to all kinds of message boards and directed people to threads at Larian's forums and CDV's message boards.
One of the sites I visited and posted to was RPGDot.

How to become an editor
The attempt of getting attention at RPGDot was very unsuccessful. I don't remember exactly but I don't think that anyone even replied to my request.
However, I found an e-mail from Rendelius, Editor-in-Chief at RPGDot in my mailbox a few days later. He asked me if I would be interested in working for RPGDot. My first thought was: No way. That's too big a thing for me. I don't have any experience and totally lack the skill to write stuff. But I thought about it. It was a new challenge. Something completely different. It took me two days before I replied to Rend that I wanted to give it a shot. He gave me his phone number and after another couple of days I called him in Vienna to talk about the details. That's how I became an "Editor @ RPGDot" in February 2001…

… and that's what I still am today.
I have a RL job so you will mostly see postings from me in the evenings or at nighttime in Europe. My current "news setup" consists of roughly 110 websites and I check each and every one of them each and every day.
I should probably reduce the amount of sites because I still find myself with zero time to play the games I cover. It's strange but I know nothing about most of the RPG's in our news. The last RPG's I finished were Dungeon Siege this year and Gothic some time last year. Except for that, I have only touched some others (like Morrowind) on the surface.

So, what is it that keeps me away from the games and makes me want to search for news? Well, this may sound strange but it is almost all about competition. I get a huge grin on my face if I find and post important or interesting news that none of the big, commercial gaming sites has posted yet. None of you will probably even notice when that happens but for me it's very satisfactory when I know that I've been faster, better than them.
I hope we're going to be faster and better on many occasions in the future. Rest assured that I want to contribute to RPGDot becoming your no. 1 RPG news resource.
We won't settle for less… :-)