In the beginning there was light… 

Well, no, that’s not quite right. In the beginning there was five miles of spinning metal, alone in space. Well, that’s not right either … it was more like a chat room about a television show, set on a space station. So what am I talking about? Why, the birthplace of IMC!

WBS Babylon 5 was fairly quiet, populated by fans and a growing number expatriates from Star Trek: Nexus Bar. In fact, we were growing so fast that we’d outgrown the one-night-a-week, one-Gamemaster system we were using. 

So in a bloodless revolution we deposed the evil GM … and elected the lovely fraggle-like being known as Cress, Tigger, TG, or just plain Tamara. She quickly discovered that she couldn’t do the job alone and appointed a committee of "Role Play Coordinators." I was one, and Tewson was another, Pieter jumped in later and we all signed a Principles of Role-Play. It was pretty basic, nothing fancy really. You can’t kill someone else with permission, you can’t have crossover technology, and be friendly to newbies. Oh yeah, and the Big Reset Button. That was helpful, because it meant if you thought you’d made a mistake in RP, you could reset it with the consent of the other players involved. 

So we blissfully started out our new system, and to our joy we had some really good role play out of it. Fortunately we also discovered that the roving bands of free form players who moved about WBS like hordes of locusts deemed that we were RP Nazi’s because we wouldn’t let them bring in their 21 year old pregnant vampire-Starfleet-captains with Dyson Spheres. To our great joy, they wouldn’t play with us. Ah, gee whiz, I tell ya, that hurt. 

Unfortunately, as RP rooms go through cycles the happy times ended. Tigger had to get on with sorting her dead leaves, and Tewson and Chance discovered X-Mansion. As far as I was concerned, it was the end. 

Then, about a year later I got an invitation from Tewson to come to this new "Nameless Chat Site" his friends were setting up to replace WBS. It was going to be everything we had ever wanted … the ability to enforce the rules and set up a great RP environment. And he told me that I had started all of this … 

That was news to me. Seems the old B5 Principles had been taken and used as a basis for Marvel Universes rules system, and as all of you know, it was MU players that started IMC. 

So I end this little tale of the little-known origins of IMC with a smile, and a bow to the great, the over worked, and the pregnant Tamara. The hyper graduate student with a tendency to play super gidgets. The first ancestor of IMC. 

New SysOp Kit is currently seeking a cure for the common twink.