Minotaur Chronicles
During the mid-to-late 1990s, I alpha-tested/played a game in development called “Illusia: Quest for the Eternals” which was being produced by Living Mask Productions. It was a tile-based RPG based loosely off the old tinyMUD programming scheme, and was among the first graphical MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) being created.
The premise was a medieval/fantasy world at war, with two factions opposing each other: the Human-Aligned Races (the HAR), and the Vampire-Aligned Races (the VAR). Each faction had 5 playable races you could choose from, with a like number of character classes.
Being the chaotic-natured person I am, I naturally chose a VAR races – but as I was supposed to be testing this game, I decided to go against my usual choices and went for brute strength, picking a Minotaur as my character race. Since I was moving away from my expected choices anyway, I went with a Knight for his character class.
But the Trickster in me couldn’t help but have a little fun with the character, so I took this gruff brute of a Man-Bull and gave him the most unlikeliest (or obvious, depending on your view) of names:
“Kowh”.
It really was intended as a joke; a bull named cow. I had no intention of keeping the character, it was just something to get me going until I learned the game mechanics and could swap out for something more to my liking.
A Minotaur Knight
Funny how that never quite happened. Kowh became my trademark character, my “main” as it’s called. He became, himself, a well-known and respected character within the game itself.
Kowh took on a life of his own; he became more than the character I envisioned. Rather than this evil-aligned creature he was instead a noble, honor-bound being torn between duty and a sense of wrongness about his people’s cause. He was a warrior who yearned for peace, a creature trained to destroy the very races he’d come to respect. I was so enamored of the character that I started writing stories about him within the Illusian game world, most of which I’d managed to keep copies of.
This was eons ago, and I haven’t bothered to edit this stories. I’ve recently considered the idea of turning his stories into a full novel, but if I do that’s much further ahead in my future.
The Minotaur Chronicles are a series of shorts that follow Kowh’s life from a young calf to veteran warrior. I didn’t write them in any particular order and some series are incomplete, but the compilation of them fell into a natural progression of history for the character, with some obvious gaps. Included is one poem (ak! poetry) I modified from a holiday classic, edited to fit the game world.
As always – enjoy.
