I. Forword

Welcome to VERGE, and to The Sully Chronicles. Here's some history for y'all. Oh boy, Learning!

VERGE was created by the deranged whim of one Brian "Hahn" Peterson who, while Gamemastering an IRC RPG, suggested that it'd be neat if there existed a game-creation suite to aid in the creation of console-style RPGs on PCs. Unfortunatly for the rest of us, his thoughts were heard by Ben "vecna" Eirich (a player in the RPG), and together their twisted, depraved minds gave birth to VERGE.

VERGE stands for Vecna's Extraordinary Roleplaying Game Engine. It's of note that it was suggested by an onlooker in jest, and stuck as a working title, but it was vecna's intent for a long time to find a less egomaniacal name for the engine. However, no catchy name came, and after a while of calling it VERGE, the name stuck.

My involvement with these miscreants began in the summer of 1997 with VERGE 1, and a little game called The Sully Chronicles. The Sully Chronicles is VERGE's Packin game. That's just a short way of saying it's a playable demonstration of the engine's capabilities. As far as demonstrations go, it's entertaining and has it's own weird charm.

I originally set out at the beginning of this year to create two things for VERGE when it became apparent that vecna was going to see the third version of the engine made public: A functional website (the terrible one we had for years was half of the commonly cited reason for the years of suck known as The Sucking) and a new useful packin (ie, the other half). I figured it'd be nice if I did these things because 1) vecna'd already done a ton of work on the engine and 2) it was my fault that VERGE 2 never had a good website nor a finished packin demo. Pride and Shame all in the same package; How efficient!

Originally, I consulted Hahn for the ideal system to create an awesome gaming backend being able to be easily changed into anything a modern RPG would need. The battle system and abilities were a thing of brilliance, being able to emulate concepts from disparate games from across the ages. It was also way more than I could handle myself. This Sully 1.5/Sully Complete lost momentum because I was the only one working on it, and I became disgruntled after months of plugging away at it. It's tradition to bite off more than you can chew here in VERGE!

Determined not to let VERGE 3 go without a real packin demo, and annoyed with the complexity that was bogging me down, I approached vec with the idea of making a "v1 emulation" suite. Something that kept the good parts of the simplicity of VERGE 1, while evolving the annoying parts. He thought it was a good idea and we started work on it. Shortly thereafter, I asked a newish community member named Martin "Zip" P. who had (in the previous months since verge 3's first public release) been exceptionally helpful and energetic, if he'd join in our little quest to make a simple packin. He agreed, and I charged him with the creation of the parsers and the menus; both tasks that I was completely burnt out on from the previous attempt, and both tasks that Zip would come to hate me for issuing to him! :D

If there is anything safe to say at all about this project, it would be that the game you have in these folders right here would not be public without Martin's hard work. He took the task and kept at it straight through the end, through much barking and chafing. The next time you see him on IRC or on the boards, remind him how cool he is for completing something of this magnitude so early on. If you ever see him in person, buy him a beer or three... he's already earned some distinction from us lazy bums.

So, six weeks and a whole lot of code later, we've got this all. It's still rough around the edges, and the paint's still fresh. Hopefully some of you cats find it useful. Hopefully I'm not the only one who ever will use some of these libraries again. And hopefully y'all will pitch in and help rewrite sections and/or make patches for specific features. That'd be super great, and I honestly hope this codebase becomes a living entity instead of a dead lump of not-very-useful. Time will tell.

There will be at least one more iteration of the Sully Simpletype codebase, and when it's released it will have everything that man and clam has wanted for seven years. If everyone claps extra loud, maybe we can even convince Hahn to take over eventscripting duties once again. After that, if there's enough interest and some people want to join me in the fool's errand, I'll work on completing the madman's Sully Complete libraries, and all you deranged people who want FFT-like complexity in your subsystems can have a prebuilt as well. We'll see.

A lot of people have spent a lot of time with VERGE. My life, and many of my friends lives, have been dramatically altered over the years by our involvements in this community. I sincerely hope we see more people join us in our fool's quest for free oldschool games. May it be 1997 all over again, except productive this time. ;)