Site History

Shadowlack was first established online in July of 2002 under the name Ramath-lehi. In October of 2009, Ramath-lehi changed its name to Shadowlack.

Past Layouts

Here are some screenshots of several of Shadowlack's past layouts. Visit the layout gallery.

Game Origins

The concept for Ramath-lehi started the summer of 1997. It was not known as Shadowlack or Ramath-lehi then, but was simply referred to as The Comic. The Comic was just that, an ongoing pencil comic book (on lined paper no less). Its three main writers (or artists) were Andrea Laughlin (Wolf Paws), April Phelps, and Jodie Struthers (Shriker). There were a few “guest” artists as well, but none of them really played any significant parts in order to be mentioned.

Most of the time the artists felt like fugitives. Passing The Comic during school while the teacher was talking in order to add more to it. On several occasions it was even confiscated and the three were forced to look at it longingly, sitting on the corner of the teacher's desk, until the end of the day when it could be retrieved.

The Comic itself consists of around 220 or more pages, each divided into 6 panels and drawn on front and back. So we're looking at over 2,600 individual panel drawings here!

The earlier drawings in it were done in pen (and later made the transition into pencil). Hasty scribbles with goofy characters that contained a lot of jokes about games, blowing things up, shadow creatures, and Science experiments. Then came the Pendragons. Jodie's parents went on a vacation to Germany, leaving Jodie and her siblings with their Nana. However, one of the siblings was infested. With head lice. Which… led to a not so fun vacation at all for everyone involved. There were a few highlights though. Like the trip to Collingwood's Scenic Caves, and the playing of many, many, PlayStation games (which sort of sucked because they didn't have a memory card). Like Final Fantasy 7. You'd have to be blind to not see the resemblance between what we call “Pendragons” and Red XIII (Nanaki) in Final Fantasy 7. I mean, a flamed tail is really hard to not notice.

All of this sprouted the creation of the very first Pendragon. Seth Lorax Dragyn. Seth made his first appearance in The Comic as a “not so lost” little alien with a strange fetish for marshmallows and shapeshifting. Anyway, it's safe to say that the introduction of Seth caused some major changes to The Comic. Within no time at all, Pendragons had inflitrated its pages and completely took over. Seth's family, the Dragyn's (a family dedicated to space exploration and colonization), were looking for him. The planet Seth was on (called “Earth” just because it was similar to our own planet) was in danger. A plague-like race (think of soul stealing locusts) called the rapine were set to invade. The Graders were introduced as well as a few other prominent figures. There was a strange incident involving eating clams and then hallucinating. Karryasa Grader blew a few things up using her telepathic powers. All in all, it was pretty cool.

So then comes this thing called the internet. For a while Jodie had been joining, running, and maintaining a wide variety of online roleplaying games. It took a while, but then kind of hit her: Gee, I wonder what a Pendragon game would be like? So July of 2002 swings around. Jodie, with permission of The Comic's co-creators of course, begins construction of the game, from here on in known as Shadowlack. For the longest time they were leery of putting things online, but it all worked out somehow.

In October of 2009, Ramath-lehi underwent a re-branding and is now known as Shadowlack. To reflect this massive change, its URL was also updated to shadowlack.com.

Ever since then, Shadowlack has been growing and developing as it continues to be shaped by its players.

Forum History

• Ramath-lehi's first forum in 2002 was an ezBoard. It was short-lived.
• It was quickly replaced by the Perl based Ikonboard with a flat file database.
• In 2003, when new resources allowed it, Ramath-lehi switched over to using a mySQL database with Invision Power Board.
• In 2009, Ramath-lehi migrated to phpBB.
• In 2010, Shadowlack moved to its own custom forum and site, built using 100% custom code.