A Brief History of Slobfest

Slobfest and Clan Apoc are intimately linked, sharing both members and a common history. It all started around the millennium, when Rob and Jesse (Death and Famine) decided that a lan party/rpg fest would be a great way to celebrate. Planning started in late Oct or early Nov of 1999, and the gathering was soon dubbed Slobfest, in honor of both the quality of the people attending, and Rob's childhood nickname of "Rob the Slob". We gathered friends from college and high school, met at Rob's parent's old farmhouse and took over the basement. We had a fair number of computers, (I'm guessing 6-7, tho we did have one that we never got on the network due to hardware probs) and a decent AD&D 2nd ed campaign, although the alcohol haze in the room meant that nobody really remembers what happened that night. (Aside from waking the cleric up to heal people and having him not realize that he slept through the first AND second fight...)

As it was, the first gathering was a success, with quite a bit of drinking and gaming, as well as a huge millennium party put on by Rob's parents. With such a success behind us, it was easy to begin planning Slobfest II, which was held in Jan of 2001. It was during this gathering that Clan Apoc was formed, originally calling ourselves The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (our nicks still survive from those days).

Around Mayish of 2001, we "officially" claimed our current UT nicks, calling ourselves "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" with an abbreviation to [Apoc], as we began our sad little quest to chase each other around public UT servers, looking for good pings and team games to kick ass at. We had a "pathetic little web presence" as a subdirectory off of Famine's webspace, and in general had a decent time, never expecting it to last very long or go very far. However, that all changed one fateful day in August of 2001, when Death was contacted by a colleague of his who happened to be a founding member of the Brotherhood of Chaos clan. They had a computer available to run their clan server on but needed a decent internet connection for it.

Through Theosis, who wasn't currently a member of Clan Apoc but joined soon after, we traded a connection on our network for a UT server on the donated BoC computer, and Apoc's Clan Server was born. This was followed soon after by Theosis joining our rank, whereupon our website moved to Theosis' FreeBSD-based webserver under the newly registered Apoc.org domain. Slobfest III at the end of December of 2001 brought us Cataclysm, and another damn sweet weekend of roleplaying and LAN games.

Slobfest IV was held on Fathers day, in June of 2002, since few members were currently involved in any RPG campaigns, and there was a general need for a D&D break. It was at this time that Slobfest made the major shift from primarily a LAN party with D&D breaks, to D&D one-shot campaigns with LAN breaks, since broadband and VoIP programs allowed us to play UT and chat on a regular basis.

Slobfest V was held in mid-jan of 2003, where it was decided that Dec/Jan was just a bad time to try to get together. The decision was made to hold Slobfest twice annually, around May/June and Oct/Nov. This freed up Rob to do observing runs in the winter (the prime time for astrophysicists to play with telescopes) and everyone to go to the various family events that always coincide with the winter holidays

Since the creation of Apoc.org, Slobfest has been housed in the "everything else" category on our boards. Finally, in the middle of July, 2003, we got around to making slobfest official. At that time, the slobfest.org domain was purchased, and all the crap on this website thrown together. (Yes, that's why this place is a wreck. We'll have it in good shape within the next 4-5 years or so.) Theosis is again donating use of his web server, and has been nice enough to map apoc.org user accts to the slobfest.org domain. Slobfest finally has a home deserving of it, and we hope that the site will take off, giving all us lazy slobs more resources for our campaigns.

So there you have it - a brief history of Slobfest. Each slobfest, we've have a steady 6-7 people that show up for lan gaming and campaigns. It's a decent number, since campaigns with more than that don't manage to go anywhere, and besides, we don't really have the space for more people and computers. While it's tempting to go larger, we'd need both more space (rent a conference room? ugh!) and more campaigns, and it's hard enough for us to get just one campaign...

If any of the slobfest attendees have different memories of how, when, and if these events happened, drop a complaint in the forum. In all honesty, we were drunk. Memories have changed, and might have been fabricated to make it sound better than it really was. I'm guessing....you see, I had been drinking all afternoon....