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.
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.