Online Gaming Guild · Established 1997 · Still Here
The world’s #1 online PvP guild is here to receive your tears.
The Record
Guilds die when their game dies. TR moved, and kept the roster. 29 years of it, Britannia to last spring — this is where we went, who was waiting, and who was standing next to us.
Formed during UO by Jakkard Hawthorne, Stoneman, Repent, Jazz and Meth — a player-killer guild in the era when PKing was the whole point and the whole controversy. TR established itself as a PvP mercenary outfit with a code of chaos and camaraderie: contracts taken, grudges kept, nothing personal and everything personal.
The hardest open-PvP server of its generation, and TR’s proving ground. Running against The Mercs, The Begotten, FoH and the rest of Norrath’s apex predators, with Dynasty of Blood and fierce Euro squads alongside. tB — the fearless PvP crew led by Death Row’s Gieger, a.k.a. Zelnik — folded into TR for a time before flying its own colors again. TR came out of Rallos Zek dominant, and permanently.
Beyond the guild tag. TR ran a cross-guild raiding coalition with Gravesson Little of Dynasty of Blood, coordinating Plane runs, Dragon runs and PvP tournaments across Chosen Exile, Paradigma, Crimson Fate, Mystic Decree and more. Written loot rules, enforced event discipline, a standing roster sorted by class — a raid guild before raid guilds existed.
A side deployment during the EverQuest years. TR fielded a division in Segasoft’s persistent-world land-grab shooter and ran it off the same site and the same command structure as the main guild — a habit the guild would repeat for the next twenty-five years.
TR ruled Albion on Merlin. With Mantus, Enott (Touchtone) and Hawthorne leading, the guild countered Conquest, PRX and Angry Elves across the frontier. Realm-versus-realm was built for exactly the kind of guild TR already was. The name still echoes on that server.
A game where guilds built cities and other guilds burned them down. TR became part of the legendary Rolling 30’s — one of the most powerful PvP nations in MMO history. Rome rose. Rome burned. Rome came back with KOC and TB 187 and toppled the R30 giant. Compton fell after a week-long siege against what felt like the entire server. Sieges measured in real weeks, alliances measured in real betrayals.
Imperial, obviously. TR built and held the city of Mos Exigo and ran the server’s PvP through BloodfinPVP.com. The defining rivalry was against FIGHT, led by Delz — Delz and many others would later join the guild. Game leadership at the time: Hawthorne, Touchtone, Deveon, Maggie and Sauceress.
Back to Norrath, back to a PvP ruleset. Nagafen handed the old Rallos Zek core a second war in the same world, five years and one engine later — and a lot of the same names showed up to fight it.
The most economically ruthless game TR ever played, and the one where the guild’s organizational structure paid the biggest dividend. With the CBA alliance, TR held multiple castles and controlled Sieghardt both militarily and economically for months, led by Ossoi and Hawthorne. Sieges, taxes, and a stranglehold on the market.
The one time TR turned the ship. On Laughing Skull the guild adapted to PvE and became an instance-first outfit, racking up server firsts through Molten Core and Blackwing Lair — while allied with PALS 4 LIFE, the guild that gave the internet Leeroy Jenkins. Eight years of PvP, and the crew could still out-execute raiders at their own game.
Richard Garriott’s sci-fi shooter, and a world first on the board for TR. Small game, short life — but the guild showed up early and cleared content before anyone else on the planet, and the screenshot is still in the archive.
Siege warfare in the Border Kingdoms. Guild city construction, keep assaults and open-world PvP against the server’s heaviest hitters. Some of the best-documented fighting in the entire TR archive comes out of this era — and most of it is somebody else’s corpse.
Purpose-built realm-versus-realm warfare, which is exactly what TR had been doing since Merlin seven years earlier. The guild ran US RvR campaigns and keep takes throughout the game’s competitive window. Destruction, naturally.
A return to a galaxy TR already had history in. Ilum and the open-world contested zones, plus a chapter the archive files under nothing but the word Turncoats — which, if you knew the guild, tells you enough.
Full-loot, open-world, top-down — a deliberate echo of where the whole thing started. TR recruited under the same pitch it has used since 1997: people who like PvP and enjoy the chaos that comes with it.
The most recent one. A co-op pirate survival game — ships, base building, drowning — with no PvP in it whatsoever, which for this guild is either a punchline or a retirement plan. Twenty-nine years after Britannia, the crew that spent three decades taking other people’s things spent a few months sailing around taking nobody’s. It was a good time.
No campaign, no siege calendar, no recruitment. What’s left is a Discord full of people who spent twenty-nine years in each other’s groups, and every so often somebody names a game and enough of the old crew turns up to make it worth logging in. Less often than it used to be. Still more often than most guilds this old can manage.
The Creed
The guild charter was written once, plainly, and then everyone went back into character. Twenty-nine years later it still explains everything TR has ever done.
“No matter what game you play, the end game and most challenging intelligence to play against is that of another person.” Not someone who tolerates it — someone who understands it without a doubt and willingly engages.
Nearly every organized guild picks the side of Good. TR picked the counterweight — deliberately — so that beating us would mean something beyond the pixels on the screen.
In game, in the role, and on the message boards. Wherever our role is personified, we play the part. Mistaken for arrogance more times than we can count. Fine.
If you can’t get your hands sweating and your heart pounding after killing three people who came to take your stuff, you are missing the best part of any online game.
The style was forged by KAAOS and The Mercs before us. What TR did that no one else managed: carry the core of players intact from world to world, for decades.
One direction, never in question of how to proceed. That structure is why TR achieved what it did — and why people who joined stayed for fifteen years.
Artifacts
TR never just showed up to other people’s games. It ran the events, the comms and the server’s record of who did what to whom — and it kept the receipts.
The EverQuest event coalition. TR and Dynasty of Blood ran Plane runs, Dragon runs and PvP tournaments for anyone who could hold a spot in the line — written loot rules, enforced event discipline, a class-sorted roster. Organized raiding before the genre had a word for it.
irc.enterthegame.com · #tre, then irc.stratics.com · #theregulators, a Ventrilo server, and a message board with two decades of grudges preserved in amber. Now: Discord.
TR didn’t just fight on Bloodfin, it ran the server’s PvP scene — the site, the rankings and the record of who did what to whom. Standard practice for this guild: build the venue, then win in it.
Screenshots, guild movies, kill footage and forum history going back to Britannia. TR documented its own wars because it assumed, correctly, that they would matter.
Footnote · Winter 1996
The guild starts in Britannia in 1997. A few months before that, one of the five founders was running a Quake tournament that turned into something bigger than he planned.
In late 1996, Michael “Hawthorne” Shearon started the Kings of Capture Quake tournament — a national, bracketed Capture the Flag competition. Blue’s News carried the announcement on December 26, 1996: opening January 18th with 256 teams, prizes on the line, and match updates broadcast over Pseudo’s Online Network. A bracket, a broadcast and a prize pool, at a time when “national” meant ISDN lines and POTS modems.
their tournament is going to start on January 18th, with 256 teamsBlue’s Quake News · December 26, 1996
He approached Intergraph about sponsorship. Intergraph said yes, then said more than yes: Kings of Capture was folded into a far larger production the company was assembling for the E3 show floor. That production was named Red Annihilation, and it is now routinely called the first true esports tournament.
Intergraph ran the event from there. In May 1997, sixteen finalists played on the E3 floor in Atlanta and Dennis “Thresh” Fong took home John Carmack’s Ferrari — the first trophy in esports history. Hawthorne handed the thing off and went back to playing. Months later, on the Britannia shard, five people put a name on a guild charter.
That is the whole connection, and it is worth exactly one section. Everything above this line is the part that took twenty-nine years.
Still Standing
TR isn’t recruiting. There’s no application, no trial run, no roster spot to earn. What there is: a Discord where the crew still turns up, and the occasional night where somebody names a game and enough of us show up to make it interesting. If you fought us on one of these servers, you already know where to find us.