Non-German Speakers - Please read!

[Admin Arakiel]

Hello and welcome!

Thank you for your interest in Arx Obscura!
We are building a non-profit, free-to-play online roleplay-platform which is simulating the Dark Ages. As we are a relatively "young" project, information about the game, the content and the world we are building is currently available in German language only - we haven't had the time to translate anything yet

I will try to outline the key information here - if you have any further questions, or would like to request specific translations, please don't hesitate to send a Personal Message to either me, Cerades (coordination of concepts and content) or Arlin (member of support).

Arx Obscura was founded in November 2009 as a "very small and specific project, assumed to have less than 30 players", and has ever since grown and evolved to be one of the most hopeful freeshards in German language.

We concentrate on Low Fantasy, so there will be no elves, no orcs and no dwarfs on our shard - everyone will start as a normal human being, but some of the characters will be able to become a vampire or werewolf in time.
The background, history and society created for Arx Obscura are spread over more than 140 separate internal webpages, describing everything from the common snail to historical events that happened in that realm 1400 years ago.
The main continent, called "Amhran", is subdivided into 6 fiefdoms (Servano, Candaria, Ravinsthal, Hohenmarschen, Nortgard and Silendir), each controlled by a single lord that swore allegiance to the king. Unfortunately that king went on a crusade a couple of years ago, and propably won't come back - if he hasn't already died.
3 of the 6 fiefs decided to split from the kingdom recently, declaring the king dead and electing a new king, the lord of Silendir. The other 3 fiefs are partially still loyal to the king, or in the case of Ravinsthal, simply don't care enough to choose a side.

In the last 1.5 years we created more than 10.000 new arts, animations and graphic files, modifying the game in every aspect we could think of. We use RunUO 2.0 and a newer version of UO: Stygian Abyss we found to be working best with our software.
In all that time our devs have written approximately 10 new programs especially for Arx Obscura, and our homepage design was changed 3 times - we strive to improve every day on every aspect.

Please note:
Our general terms and conditions (AGB in German) protect our project from being harmed by unrightful or destructive behavior, and accepting them is mandatory to be able to play on our server.
Since we can't assure that our AGB are valid anywhere outside Germany, Austria, Switzerland and surrounding countries, we unfortunately won't be able to allow non-german speakers to participate (yet).
We do regret this very much, since we'd be more than happy to let everyone with the right heart and mind into our community, and we sincerely apologise in advance.

Please forward any questions concerning this decision to my Personal Messages Inbox.

Best regards,
Arakiel

PS: I tried! If you find any glitches or errors, you may slap me with a LARP Sword.