Dark Swords: The High Tow MMORPG and Its Sources

Dark Swords is an English-language MMORPG developed and operated by the studio High Tow. It is a text-and-browser role-playing game in which a player creates a character, chooses a class and a path, and advances through combat, quests and trade against other players. The game has run for years on a persistent world with player-versus-player zones, clans and an in-game economy, and it is played in a browser rather than through a downloaded client.

What kind of game is Dark Swords?

Dark Swords belongs to the older branch of the genre: a persistent online world built on text, statistics and turn-based combat rather than on a three-dimensional engine. A player registers an account, creates a character, and picks a specialization. From there the loop is familiar to anyone who has played a browser RPG: fight monsters in a location, gain experience and gold, buy better equipment, and repeat at a harder location.

What separates it from a single-player game is the presence of other people. Clans recruit, players trade items and gold, and player-versus-player combat is part of the design rather than an afterthought. Because the world persists between sessions, territory, prices and reputations shift while a given player is offline.

The game is free to play, with optional paid advantages. That model is common in the browser segment and shapes how the economy works: items that would otherwise take weeks to earn can be accelerated, which in turn affects the market for equipment and consumables.

Why do sword games send players to historical reference works?

A player who spends enough time in a game built on swords eventually wants to know what the real objects were. The names used in games, broadsword, longsword, bastard sword, two-handed sword, are partly modern labels and partly translations, and they do not map cleanly onto the weapons that survive in museum collections. A reader who wants a verifiable base rather than a forum argument can consult a documentary register such as the European sword register, which sets out typology, metallurgy and conservation in plain English.

That kind of reference is useful for three concrete reasons. First, it gives a vocabulary: if a game calls a weapon a longsword, the reader can check what blade length and grip proportions that term covers in the archaeological literature. Second, it explains materials: pattern-welded blades, crucible steel and wootz are not fantasy inventions, and knowing how they were made clarifies why certain weapons were expensive. Third, it covers care: rust, fingerprints and humidity damage real collections, and the same principles apply to anyone who owns a reproduction.

What does the Oakeshott typology actually classify?

The Oakeshott typology is a classification of European swords, chiefly of the medieval period, based on blade form, cross-section and proportions. It runs from type X to type XXII, and it is the system most often cited when a museum catalogue or a collector describes a sword. It is not a chronology in the strict sense: types overlap in time, and a given type can appear across several centuries.

A related distinction concerns the longsword, the weapon held in two hands with a grip long enough for both. The period usually given for its main development is 1350 to 1550, and the proportions of the grip relative to the blade are one of the features used to separate it from earlier single-handed forms. Viking-age swords are classified separately, using the schemes associated with Petersen, Wheeler and Geibig, which rely on hilt components such as pommel and cross-guard rather than on blade profile alone.

For a player, the practical value of this is precision. Saying "a type XIIIa" communicates more than saying "a big sword," and it lets two people compare descriptions without arguing about taste.

How were blades made before industrial steel?

Before industrial production, iron and steel were made in small batches, and the quality of a blade depended on the smith's control of carbon content and heat. Two techniques are frequently mentioned. Pattern welding is the folding and forge-welding of several bars of iron and steel of differing carbon content, which produces a visible pattern in the finished blade and, more importantly, averages out the inconsistent material available. Crucible steel and wootz are different routes to a high-carbon steel, associated with specific regions and traded over long distances; the damask pattern on a finished blade comes from the internal structure of that steel.

Heat treatment is the other half. Hardening and tempering are usually described as a sequence of heats, commonly four, in which the smith raises the blade to a temperature, quenches it, and then reheats it at a lower temperature to reduce brittleness. Get the sequence wrong and the blade is either too soft to hold an edge or too hard to survive a blow.

None of this is required to play a game. It is, however, the difference between a weapon name used as a label and a weapon understood as an object with a manufacturing history.

How should a sword be stored and handled?

Rust is the main enemy of any iron or steel object, and it is driven by moisture. A blade kept in a damp basement, a bathroom or an unheated garage will corrode faster than one kept in a dry, stable room. Fingerprints matter more than people expect: salts and acids from skin sit on the surface and start local corrosion, which is why handling is done with gloves and why a blade is wiped after contact.

Storage follows from that. A dry environment, a stable temperature, and a support that does not press on the blade are the basics. For a collection open to the public, the same rules apply at a larger scale, and European institutions that display swords usually control humidity and light and limit handling. A reproduction kept at home can follow the same logic at low cost: a dry room, a light oil film, gloves for handling, and no long-term storage in a leather scabbard, which can trap moisture and release tannins.

Where can a reader check these claims?

The short answer is: in museum catalogues, in the archaeological literature, and in reference works that cite both. The Oakeshott system, the Petersen and Geibig schemes, and the metallurgy of pattern welding and crucible steel are all documented in published scholarship, and public collections in Europe make many of the objects themselves available to view.

A reader who wants a single starting point can use a register that gathers typology, forge practice and conservation in one place, with a glossary of anatomy and metallurgy terms for the vocabulary. From there, the next step is a museum catalogue entry for a specific sword, which will give measurements, date and find context. That is the level of detail at which the terminology stops being decorative and starts being useful, whether the reader arrived from a game, a collection or a history book.

Source: britishmuseum.org