About Reveille

[Lhorgrim]

It's not that implausible that a gamer girlfriend would hear her boyfriend muttering FR gods in his sleep, recognise them, and post that to her favourite RPG board.

Here, we have a supposedly non-gamer girlfriend, hears words she doesn't recognise, and feels it's so important that she recounts them - lots of them - here, onomatopoeiacally (sp?), where posters can recognise them. It wasn't plausible at all.

The thing that tripped my sensor was the exactness of the pronunciations, and the fact that they happened to be listed alphabetically. My experience has been that people generally repeat things like that in an "easiest first" list.

 

[Bront]

Not just personal to me but also to Blackrat, Aeson, Ginnel, The Warlock, Hafrogman, Goldmoon, Galeros, Knightfall, Shabe, Lord Tirian, Phaezen, and countless others who all thought we knew him.

Knightfall was one of his alts...

Edit: Oops, it was Knightfall1972. My bad.

 

[jdrakeh]

Knightfall was one of his alts...

Really?

 

[Imperialus]

And it's not like it didn't happen before that community members got _really_ ill - and even died. I still remember the case of angelsboi - it was in a time where I was more a newbie, so I don't have such a deep connection to his case than others might have, but... it was a sad moment where the community showed its strength. And we wouldn't want a "joke" like this destroy that. Well, I wouldn't want to.

I can, to this day probably quote you the post when Angelsboi told us he was sick word for word...

I felt the same way when Mandy posted about Rev...

Then it turns out it was a joke.

Not cool, not cool at all.

 

[Knight Otu]

Really?

No, Bront is mixing him up with an actual alt, Knightwind[somenumber]. Which seemed the point of some of those alts.

 

[Ginnel]

Really?

I'm pretty dam sure knightfall is cool, there was a knightfall1979 or something like that as well who was the fake, it seems this Rev guy made a lot of paradoies of regular Hivers.

I haven't been on long enough or he didn't know how to parody a ginnel for future reference Rev alley would probably work

 

[jdrakeh]

No, Bront is mixing him up with an actual alt, Knightwind[somenumber]. Which seemed the point of some of those alts.

I saw that on PC's list of known alts, though the other Knightfall1972 account claimed to be an alt for the poster previously known as Knightfall. Bront might not be entirely off base.

The original Knightfall and Reveille had long been the only two users on my 'friends' list here and, when the original Knightfall was banned, Knightfall1972 appeared several months later and asked if he could be added to my 'friends' list (making the aforementioned claim to identity).

In retrospect, the infrequent conversations with both Reveille and Knightfall1972 were eerily similar.

If they aren't the same person, well, that's just another great example of how stuff like this really fouls an atmosphere of trust in a message board community. Pretending to be other people or creating other accounts to deliberately impersonate or parody other people, harming their credibility in the process?

Man, the more that comes out about this, the more apparent it is that the whole situation is just messed up. I am totally dumbfounded and confused.

 

[Relique du Madde]

I'm pretty sure knightfall is cool, I think there was a knightfall1979 or something like that as well who was the fake, it seems this Rev guy made a lot of paradoies of regular Hivers.

I haven't been on long enough or he didn't know how to parody a ginnel for future reference Rev alley would probably work

Or maybe he did parody you but no one figured which name it was. In hindsight mine were easy to figure, but some of the names/personalities he created on his list were head scratches.

 

[Jack7]

On a different note, I wonder why a person in a coma talking about the gods of faerun would set off alarm bells? A person in coma does talk, and they often talk about things that happened in their life, or things that make no sense to family members. So a gamer, talking about deities from a game he was prepping for while in a coma, is a very real possibility. So I am curious as to why that was suspicious to people.

I can tell you my personal suspicions on the matter TB.

Of all the things that a person could mention clearly (or clearly enough to phoneticize them) while mumbling in their sleep, during a coma,and then have reported on a message board by a person who seems not to be a gamer, and then to present those "relevant to gaming clues" to a gaming community is far from coincidental, it is demonstrably suspicious.

Acceding to some of her stories they were soon to be married and she had children.

Such things would relatively speaking be of far greater concern to the sub-conscious mind of most normal people than a D&D game or campaign.

I have to be honest about this entire affair myself. I enjoy gaming. I enjoying exploring the subject, but only in relationship to what it implies about real life. That is to me gaming, like anything, art, science, religion, etc, is of relative value only to "real life." And I use the term real life in the widest possible application.

If gaming in any way interfered with my family, my livelihood, my health, my friendships, my relationship with God or my fellow man, my scientific interest, my philanthropic pursuits, my inventing, my writings, my casework, my service to my country and community, even my other hobbies, then it would quickly become a casualty of far more important and relevant interests in real life. That being the case if I were in a coma it is hard to image that gaming would be the chief priority of my subconscious any more than it is the chief preoccupation of my waking consciousness or psychological state. I can certainly not imagine if my wife were to hear me mumbling things in a semi-conscious state then the only thing worth reporting would be gaming equivalent phonetic structures, nor can I imagine her saying, "Oh, I wonder if the fellas on the gaming boards he visits would understand what this means?" If I mumbled her name, that would be worth reporting, mumbled my kid's names, that would certainly be worth reporting, spoke about my work or some other important matter, okay... If I mumbled Tiamat or Aboleth or anything like that then that would be meaningless to her, and I doubt very seriously it would be at the tip of the spear in my mind either. Given a state of coma. I doubt she even knows of this board or any of my other internet pursuits, which, truth be told, the internet is really nothing more in most cases than a virtual world anyways, much like gaming itself. I strongly suspect that particular posting (the fake deities) was his way of "disclosing himself," of deliberately leaving clues for the suspicious as to what he was really up to. Much as a criminal or confidence man will often leave clues to see "if anybody else is as smart as I am." It is a sort of game many people who abuse the trust of others pull, it is not good enough merely to deceive, one must deceive to make a fool of and to prove that they are the superior and far more clever man. (Of course other things are possible as to motive and I am still suspicious of one possibility, but, we'll see in time. But the method of operation to me bespoke of a man who thinks he is smarter than most people around him.)

Well, he found out, and now that I am aware of his other confidence activities, and once I discovered this particular event to be a hoax I very much suspected there would be other older and more recent incidents of related behavior, I see he has a long history of leaving counterfeit and confidence clues. I suspect he has a history of "testing the confidence of others" as well.

It is just a suspicion, but the weight of evidence seems to confirm my suppositions and deductions. Along with the deductions of many others. No doubt this was the way he was discovered in this instance, maybe also in other instances.

My personal feeling is that this is the work of a man who spends far too much time living in a fantasy world and who spends far too little time concerned about the way in which his actions are perceived in the real world by real people.

Now that being said I don't want people to think I think gaming is a silly and time-wasting pursuit in and of itself, or that communities like this are by necessity that way either. That is not my point, and I wouldn't bother being here myself if it were. Like any activity it is of relative value to what it contributes to real life. Film, books, games, fiction itself, etc. may all have value for real life as well as "add-on" to the value of real life. But I try to never confuse fantasy or fiction with reality.

And to me this event, and the related events, demonstrate the actions of a man who treats the concerns of others as basically unreal and not really worthy of "real consideration." It seems to me the actions of a man who confuses fantasy with reality, and characters with Character.

That is not necessarily a damning thing in and of itself, but it should be a very real and fair warning to the man about where he is placing his priorities and what kind of constructive, or destructive use, he is making of his "real time."

If he is still able to read these boards, then this is my advice, take it for what it is worth. Get real interests in real life, concentrate your time and energies constructively there, assume that you should treat others in the same way you wish to be treated and just assume everyone else is at least as smart as you are, if not smarter actually (most are smart enough not to pull this kinda thing, aren't they? - if you're really honest about it), and then come back to things like gaming when you understand your best priorities. And the best priorities of others who despite your seeming underlying assumptions probably do have at least as important a set of things to do in real life as to spend their time and energy trying to really assist you when your only real interest is to falsely deceive them.

One last thing I'd like to say.
Even the wisest man or woman can be deceived on occasion.

All of those taken in at any point by the hoax, and until evidence became more plain I was at first, don't feel very bad. Compare your wisdom in being concerned enough to want to help with his level of wisdom in being concerned with wanting to test your willingness to help in a false and self-serving manner. (When he could have been using that energy for some realistically beneficial purpose.)

Then ask yourself who was really duped, and to what end?

He found out something about himself, and he found out something about many of you.
And you found out something about him, and you also found out something about yourself.

If I were keeping score then I'd say many of you rolled a natural 20.
As for him, he gets to keep what he earned.

Now I'm gonna go have some pizza and a beer and toast some of you ladies and gentlemen, and the way you acted.
Gives me hope for my nation, and hope for the world.

Apparently there's a lot more of you out there on the internet than I had supposed. Evening all.

 

[guivre]

Now being made aware of what he was doing in the HIVE I am now OK with permanently banning him. I am far less interested in forgiving him as well, and definitely have no interest in ever visiting him in Phoenix and participating in any games with him. Trust will never happen.


On a different note, I wonder why a person in a coma talking about the gods of faerun would set off alarm bells? A person in coma does talk, and they often talk about things that happened in their life, or things that make no sense to family members. So a gamer, talking about deities from a game he was prepping for while in a coma, is a very real possibility. So I am curious as to why that was suspicious to people.

Is it a possibility yes, is it likely, no. The posts as a whole read like badly written fiction. It was like someone was trying to roleplay the events.

Personally my meter was up already and that was the final straw. It was too convenient. The alphabetical order, the phonetic spelling, the line about "the experts say he'll wake up when he's done talking to them".... it had gone beyond believability previously, that post pushed it over the edge.