The History of Trench Wars/Writer's Note

March 15, 2002

The history of Trench Wars stretches over almost five years, from Trench Wars’ humble beginning as a hated “newbie” zone, to its current position as the most popular zone in all of Subspace. To present a fully accurate and complete history of all of Trench Wars is inevitably impossible. No, if few records survive from the early periods, or even a couple of years ago. The histories and stories live in the players, which unfortunately are never perfect as they are distorted by time, perspective and personal exaggeration.

Even with all of these difficulties, I will attempt to present a history as complete and accurate as possible. Unfortunately as I do not have the time to do a fully complete survey, I will rely on my own personal knowledge with some help from outside. If you do spot an error or omission, please feel free to let me know, as I apologize in advance for any errors I might have made. In fact in light of the fact that the history mostly lives inside all of us instead of having real solid written evidence, I will attempt to portray this history in the style of the great Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides.

No history of Trench Wars is complete if we do now know about the history of the game and see how we got here, and how it was Trench Wars that ultimately became a leader in Subspace. This will be a bit long, and I’m sorry if you don’t like reading, but I feel that it’s necessary to have a lot of material in order to cover the complex history of the zone. Yet even though it is so long, I will not be able to mention every single player who ever played in the zone. I will concentrate on what I think were the greatest trends and events in the zone and focus on that, with mentioning names to humanize the context.

I would also apologize for the lack of history for the last year, but this is mostly due to my leave of the zone and so my lack of knowledge of events. Hopefully most of you know enough about this time that it doesn’t matter.

Finally I will have to state that this history is presented in my own view of things. This means a view centered mostly in Elim, in the Warbird leagues and in the workings of the middle levels of Staff of which I was part of for over a year. This by no means represents the view of an unbiased observer, but I have taken great pains to present both sides of the store. Yet for all of that, I will refer to myself in the third person, as this isn’t really my story, but the story of the zone.

As readers of the Trench Wars UBB undoubtedly know, I do like writing a lot, but I am by no means an English major. I also do enjoy history, and so my aim in writing this is to share all that I have learned in my years in this zone, and that hopefully after reading this, you the players of Trench Wars will learn a bit more about how the zone got to where it is today.

-Epinephrine

Originally Written: February 23, 2002