User:Subvisser5

Hello all! I first experienced The Gamers on Youtube at 240p in the mid-2000s. Now, I'm super into Hands of Fate and Countermay.

I cleaned up the R9E Wikia/Fandom.com wiki (the one created to add a mythic history to Romance of the Nine Empires in 2013) with lots of sources and stuff in 2019 and was pointed here from the ZOE Discord (I'm random-allium-table there) by User:Moritz.schubert.pb. My wiki passion is in citations and internal hyperlinks. Hope to talk to you soon!

Articles to Create

• Alaric Buxtehude (appears in the card game and DVD bonus short film)
• Myriad Buxtehude
• The Emissary of the Dread Army
• Ulix of Ixhasa, the Eternal Emperor
• Salia the Slaughterer - https://www.instagram.com/p/ob2WqpQD-7/
• Skafla (appears in the movie and the comic)

R9E Fandom.com Wikia: Origins

The old Wikia was created by a professional creative team to promote the movie and game (confirmed by the ZOE team in a Youtube comment). Most of the content on the old Wikia can be traced back to faction descriptions in the AEG card game manual. However, there's a peculiar amount of content that doesn't seem to come from anywhere outside of the Wikia. Here are my most recent notes trying to squeeze every last bit of lore out of the remains of that project, trying to parse out what was written by the professionals and what was fanon.

Bread Crumbs: The Search for Elbeth

Here's where my latest search started. There is no mention of Elbeth in official ZOE releases as far as I know, so I went looking for where she came from. If she's a fan creation whole cloth, there's reason to delete her article. However, there is another mention of Elbeth on the internet: a Fantasy AGE homebrew item credited to Ajay Pollarine. The R9E Wikia article on Elbeth was created by shadesofkin (likely also Ajay) and Utherseth73 (likely this ZOE fan). Also, the Wikia article content was mostly added in June 2013, before any public HoF screenings. Were they jumping in on the online promotional campaign (which started in Jan. 2013 and picked up speed in May) as fans or were they brought in as part of the promotional team officially?

This got me going...

More Digging

In the storyline AEG created to give the real R9E card game a sense of history, they pretended that a database of R9E info had "crashed," the backups "fried," losing all R9E information---their blog post sharing this story is archived and available. A "replacement" Wikia was created in early June 2013 by a small number of accounts:

• Utherseth73 (164 edits, mostly adding images and dumping faction descriptions from the AEG rulebook, which had been released in May)
• Roborangutang(48 edits, mostly wiki maintenance and admin duties)
• Otteriffic(46 edits, mostly adding images and a fictional story about Ord players)
• MKgorgone(11 edits, dumping a large amount of Shad-Hujem lore. UPDATE: I reached out to a Twitter account by the same name in June 2020, and they confirmed it was fan fiction.)
• Shadesofkin(3 edits, all to the Elbeth article)
• Shad-O-Facts(3 edits, all to fictional tournament info)
• Ordislife(1 edit, adding a category to the Ord article)

Activity didn't pick up again until Oct. 2013, after HoF was already released. This is reason to believe that content posted to the Wikia in June 2013 might have come from a promotional team, rather than AEG or ZOE fans. Roborangutang posted in kayfabe that the old Wikia was "the rebirth of the [R9E] wiki," but there was no way to know whether they were a pro or just an altruistic fan...

Then I found this bombshell conversation. Roborangutang was in familiar contact with AEG! If no one else, we know they were coordinating with pros if they weren't a pro themselves.

Who was Rhea?

Suddenly, in mid-Oct. 2013, a newcomer leapt onto the scene. Rhea Flint is a fully kayfabe account, from the profile to a couple comments they left. This account is in-character as if the game's history is real, and while most of their contributions were formatting edits for readability, they added seemingly original content to various pages. Less than two weeks later, their R9E Wikia activity stopped. They included a link on their profile to an R9E RPG campaign at Obsidian Portal that includes some Countermay lore not hosted anywhere else, and it seems that's where they took their creative activity.

UPDATE (7/2020): I reached out to their Obsidian Portal account in June 2020, and they've confirmed it was fan fiction.