RK - The Galloway Regiment - Origins

Galloway is one of the three present counties of RK Scotland. It was the original one, founded in August 2007, and has seen its original population disperse to the newer counties of Ayr and Glasgow, as well as the foreign counties of Ireland.

The RSA was, therefore, first formed in Galloway. For several months the history of Galloway and its Regiment was, effectively, the history of the RSA. Led by Scotland's prominent colonising citizens, mainly level 2 with a couple of level 3s, the original Regiment was of a size where everyone could know everyone, and the development path of soldiers was a broad continuum from 'just started' to 'been playing a year or more' of fairly equal distribution - albeit with a big 'lump' at the base ranks.

This last came about because, once a colony has reached a certain size, players from other places are no longer able to 'teleport' themselves and all their possessions in. After the initial colonisation period, in other words, it takes a lot of time and expense to move in. Therefore, after that moment, the new county will have to rely on newborns (people who are starting the game) for new population, and will have to wait for these indigenous inhabitants to level up and grow strong.

Thus, early Galloway was led by a bunch of expatriate colonists from elsewhere and it would be awhile before indigenous characters came to assume leadership or develop.

It was in this era that the orginal structure was devised and Charter risen. Much of the effort was spent in basic recruitment and transmitting the knowledge of how to travel, watch the roads, defend the power, etc.

There were no external borders to Scotland and hence no need to raise an ingame army for defence against conquest (luckily). Cumberland's roadlink from (English) Carlisle to (Scottish) Dumfries was not yet in existence, mainly because of a meta-game balancing requirement of preventing bandit armies plundering a defenceless colony of mainly newborns . In fact, now that I think of it, there were no ingame county capitals at either Carlisle or Dumfries (with attendant castles) until several months later.

The Bandit armies of England and elsewhere had not colonised into Galloway (perhaps because they were busy at the time) so the indigenous rebels and thieves were also starting from a low organisational and demographic base. In retrospect, quite fortunate.