History: The Jacket and Cloak

History of the NOR Jacket & Blue Cloak

I think I can clarify the history of the NOR jacket and blue cloak. I joined NOR in late ’93, while Baldrak was still around. I knew Elidriel and Damian and Baldrak and Chani, because I played in Mace Manor originally.

Lady Elidriel was a biker fan, and often roleplayed entering the tavern on a Harley motorcycle. So the name “New Outriders” had a biker connotation originally. In keeping with that, NOR referred to members as wearing a NOR “jacket”, in the same way that people in biker clubs wear club jackets or club emblems on their leather jackets. There was a particular quest in Yserbius that resulted in a cloak or piece of armor being dropped as loot, and this was adopted as the NOR jacket quest. New members would be taken on this quest by an existing member to get their “jacket”. When a member resigned, they did so by handing in their NOR “jacket”.

When NOR expanded to NWN on AOL, this same terminology was used there. NOR grew fairly rapidly in NWN, and quickly eclipsed the INN contingent. When INN shut down, NWN became NOR’s home base. Because NOR was a friendly and helpful guild, it attracted a lot of attention, not all of it good. Anti-NOR or fake NOR guilds were started, such as ANOR. By this time, Lord Avatar has resigned and Lord EdU was the dominant member of the High Council. Lord EdU authored or revised many of our NOR documents, including the Jacket Creed, which was aimed at fake NOR members, and the recruit quiz.

When AOL shut down NWN (so it could replace it with pay games), NOR member scattered to several different online games, including Dark Sun Online (“DSO”), The Realm (“TR”), Ultima Online (“UO”), Empiriana and the Lords of Empyria (“LOE”). DSO, Empiriana and LOE all shut down eventually, but NOR had a large contingent of members playing UO, and not only got certified as a guild but accumulated enough game cash to buy and equip a NOR tower. It was in UO, with its many tradeskills and dye tubs, that NOR decided to have its members wear a cloak dyed light blue, so they could spot each other more easily. This blue cloak became so distinctive that it resulted in NOR members in UO being targeted by PK’ers and others hostile to NOR.

That is how the original biker jacket of NOR morphed into a blue cloak. When NOR came to DAoC, the guild emblem and colors were selected by Lord Aglavalin, who had been duke in UO at one time. He chose to continue the tradition started in UO by making the guild emblem cloaks blue.

*History recorded by Lady Emeritus Mookster