The Foundation of Santharia
A first very basic version of the site was put up on the web, back then simply and not very imaginative called "The Santharian Site". It was nothing fancy, really. It was in general a simple personal homepage of an individual called Christian Strobl from Austria. It was completely in German and featured among other things a list of games the creator has played and completed and where he gave his personal opinions on the games. You could also find details on what this certain individual enjoyed to read, the computer system he used and lots of other completely boring things nobody was ever interested in. I assume you've seen quite a lot of such homepages already.

Of course the site already bore the title "Santharia", because it contained already some German background information on the book the certain individual had started to write. The URL of the site back then was nothing one could keep in the head for more than a few seconds, and as free webspace was rare, there were advertisments banners on the frontpage, but at least the main page was already completely banner-free right from the start.

The first version of Santharia on the net contained at least most historical tables (which have remained unchanged until the day of the 5th anniversary), the main Santharian map, a few rough ideas on the elvish tongue and some sketchy details on important Santharian personalities.

Translation to English
In early 1999 when I was pretty bored, I thought that a German website is pretty much a waste of time. The internet is accessible from all parts of the world, but only a few German speaking countries would actually be able to read and understand all things written on the site.

I intended already to find some more people to help with writing up some background information on the world the book was intended to take place in. I also vowed that I would make the site a living project, which should be updated regularly every week. And indeed, weekly updates without exceptions should take place for more than 4 years - till the day when we decided that development strategies needed to be changed in order to favour quality over quantity.
 

Site at 12/1999. Click image to view gallery (2 pics).

A first Message Board
Around this time the Bravenet Message Board  became the central communication plantform, where a small bunch of Santharians used to have a good deal of fun. The message board was very basic, just like the site itself, but it did a good service for quite a while. The beginning was though, though very funny, as various newbie members came in and disappeared again as quickly as they had showed up. But the main core consisting of Dalá, Vaeleron, Coór'Efér and Artimidor remained unchanged for quite a while - until Coór'Efér decided after a quarrel to leave his parents and get married somewhere in Denmark. Quite a while we didn't know at all what had happened to him, but fortunately the situation was finally resolved. And as Coór'Efér made his living now in Denmark, he couldn't manage anymore to spend his time in Santharia. However, the Dream continued.

More members: Curgan & Greybark
More members joined the Dream in the 2000: Curgan (Greece) and Greybark (China, but hailing from the US). While Curgan concentrated on western Santharia, working on the Centoraurian kingdom and the Helcrani men, Greybark became the local Brownie expert, which should become one of the most elaborated - though often underestimated - races of the Dream until late 2003.

Curgan, by now turned to lawyer, also was forced to disappear for a year due to military service, but in the meantime has started again to work on Helcrani-related entries to get the westernmost Santharian region done.
 

The ezBoard Message Board
In April 2000 we finally decided to switch Message Boards, turning away from the simple Bravenet solution to a brand a much more professional one, which also offered a lot more of customization. The board should undergo a lot of re-designs, just like the site itself, and similar to the site, the development board grew constantly and was finally split into own sections corresponding the menus on the main page as well. Moderators would handle their own realms at the Forum, and development work got more efficient and better organized than ever before.

Until this day the Development Board has seen 52.453 posts and a total of 869.713 visits with times when more than 100 posts were made a day.

The Great Faugar - Santharia conquers Poland
One evening when I was surfing the web, I found a wondeful website of a Polish artist, who had made several excellent custom portraits for Baldur's Gate. Form, size, color and style would fit perfectly into the Dream, I thought, and instantly wrote a mail to the owner of the site, who should become one of the main lead artists of Santharia, Faugar the Great. Since he joined Faugar has delivered an incredible amount of artwork in support of the Dream, be it dragons, demons, undead, portraits of famous persons, game NPCs or illustrations for Dalá's or Artimidor's work in-progress novels. A living Santharian legend so to say, whose deeds will never be forgotten... Probably he'll get an own statue somewhere in New-Santhala one day...
 

The Role Playing Board
Only a few months after we've registered for the Development Board, the decision was made to create a new board harbouring play-by-post role playing only. Initially the development board also served as role playing area, but the amount of people interested in role playing grew to make this step necessary. Just as the Development Board, a lot of changes were made at the Role Playing Board in the course of time, and Administrators and Moderators were substituted in regular intervals as the workload became too straining. Though functioning as a seperate, independent forum from Santharia, the RPG board has always remained an important part of Santharia since its very beginnings back in July 2000.

Until this day the RPG Board has seen 67.400 posts and a total of 1.017.590 visits with times when more than 120 posts were made a day. Currently the amount of daily visitors is around 2.800.
 

Coat of Arms for Santharia: Koldar
A very valuable addition to the team was Koldar (Germany), who had always played around with creating a fantasy world himself, but now found the perfect opportunity to help out in Santharia. He very soon developed to our Coat of Arms and runes/font designer. Much, much later his initial ideas and sketches for an own world were merged with the Santharian one, and the continent of Nybelmar was occupied ny Koldar, for which he made not only tribes and history, but also a very detailed map. Another map of Koldar is uncompared till this very day: the enormous map for the City of Death, Nyermersys.
 

Site at 11/2000. Click picture to view gallery (10 pics).

Artimidorian Dream
At the end of the year 2000 Santharia was still basically a site not only maintained by the webmaster, but also a page, where most of the entries were still done by the creator of the site himself. Koldar, Greybark, Curgan, and Gean Firefeet  however, already started to secure their area of expertise.

At this time no defined rules existed for entries and though the entries back then were quite simple compared to the requirements we have today, they were much more focussed on integrating artworks, which artists already provided, and on writing entries in context, connecting pieces of history with each other to elaborarte e.g. more details on the Second Sarvonian War. It has to be noted that Santharia was still much more open for greater changes concerning history, geography and tribe development as a whole, but the first big outlines were still made by the webmaster himself to provide a background for other developers. Within the next months, the team aspect of the project would more and more increase.
 

Enayla providing Artwork
In December 2000 I contacted Enayla (Linda Bergkvist, Sweden), whose Elfwood gallery I admired like many others on the web, and asked her concerning the usage of some of her artwork for the Dream. Indeed, after checking out the site, Linda agreed happily that her sometimes nearly (too) perfect Photoshop drawings would be a good addition to Santharia. Though Enyala provided special pieces and slight re-works of existing pictures of hers for Santharia at the beginning, she soon founded an own highly successful ezBoard for people interested in art and smalltalk in general and unfortunately got very busy with own commissions and book projects. You might consider Enayla already something you could call an "internet celebrity" by now, and of course we are happy to still have her support for Santharia, even though her newer works will only be exclusively reserved for her own book projects. Representative excerpts of Enayla's artwork can be viewed e.g. at the Santharian Teaser Movie.

Site at 03/2001. Click image to view gallery (11 pics).

Development Focus
In this time the entry on Fá'áv'cál'âr was elaborated (AvFlare) and it was the most active time of Stormcrow (beasts, plants and weapons), Gean Firefeet (southern Santharia), Xenos Ravenbeack (R'unor) and Gnufruk (Ogres, Gorbas). Aside from Coat of Arms, Koldar alos tries his hand on the coloring of the Mythe map. Dalá just finished Chapter 3 of her Dragonseeker story and a new Workshop section was just added in order to provide tutorials on map making and general Photoshop drawing. Faugar, who at the beginning only gave permission to use his artwork at the Dream, starts to work on specific Santharian illustrations, e.g. of the Santharian Goddess of Destiny, Seyella.
 

History Archives
Until May 2001 updates hadn't been historically archived. However, the amount of regular contributions to Santharia grew constantly and requests were uttered to give people, who have been away for a while from development, the opportunity to catch up with the changes which have been made in the meantime.

First Santharian Flash Movie
Searching for new ways to improve the site's presentation, I dug into some Flash books to evaluate on how difficult it would be to make a nice Flash movie for the site. The outcome was the "Santharian Teaser Movie", providing an atmosopherical introduction into the Santharian world. The movie found great acceptance, so I used my scarce freetime to further improve my Flash talents in order to realize more movies later perhaps.

Search Engine
Another important feature was finally added to the site: a Search Engine. With the help of this tool, developing in the constantly growing Santharian environment, life gets much easier for many members.
 

New section: The Herbarium
In June 2001 I received a mail with another joining request. The person in the mail stated that she sees a certain lack of plants developed in Santharia, and that she'd like to help in order to fill this gap perhaps. In this first mail there was already a very detailed overview of completely original Santharian plants included, written with so much love for detail and categorized thoroughly that I was very soon convinced that we need a new section: the Santharian Herbarium. And of course I was very happy to accept this obviously exceptionally talented newbie into the team...

The legendary Bard Judith
This person was a certain "Bard Judith", who after taking her time to read in detail through most parts of the site, would start to develop in full for the Santharian Dream when she finally joined in September 2001. Judith has not only done excellent work in many very different fields for the Dream, but also became master developer and commenter in the course of time, removing a lot of weight from the webmaster's shoulder. Judy is mainly responsible for Santharian dwarves and became Library, Bestiary and Herbarium Moderator.
 

The Sorren Cooperation
2001 was the year when the Santharian team decided to start a co-operation with another site, the Lands of Sorren. The goal we had together was to create a game in our joint world, a textbased MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) in MUD form, the Santharian team providing the background, while the Sorren side realizing the programming side of the project. As a result of the cooperation the name of the world (where the kingdom of Santharia is only a small part of), which until July 2001 was Aér'aí'chán, should be changed to Sorren.

In the following months many Santharian members worked diligently to realize a Sorren MUD game, but inital promises on the Sorren side could not be fulfilled. Nearly 2 years later, the Santharian team should be forced to put an end to the cooperation, as the promised first playable version (schedulded fo 2003) was only existing in fragments and the intentions of the Sorren side turned out to be nearly exclusively of commercial nature. Also Santharian works shouldn't be integrated at all until 2003. The cooperation produced a higher amount of regular visitors, though, an advantage we had to give up finally to stay true to the Santharian cause.
 

More legends: Wren and Drogo
2001 was definitely a good year... Aside from Bard Judith, more long-term members have found their way to Santharia, especially Wren and Drogo, who came to Santharia through the role playing board. Drogo, our barbarian, has developed to the Lord of Northern Sarvonia, while cosmic Wren grabbed all things elfy she could find and helped tremendously to elaborate various Sarvonian tribes. She should also become newsletter secretary and Santharia's first audio-studio recorded singer.

Only a few days later, long-term member Thuja became official Santharian developer as well. Thuja's main focus is the work on a variety of complementing entries of seemingly not so important things, which help a great deal though to establish a much more elaborated picture of Santharia.

Development Focus
While Koldar starts with developing first things for the new continent of Nybelmar (Aca-Santerra), Drogo works on beasts, plants, religion, tribes and and a history outline for Northern Sarvonia, while Wren works feverishly on the Ylfferhim elves, including first musical examples.
 

First Detailed Town Map
After months of work, long-term member and coat of arms specialist Koldar finished the first and until the end of 2003 also only detailed Santharian town map (designed with Photoshop and 3D Studio Max). This absolutely magnificent piece features not only all town parts, but also street and building names as well as more detailed descriptions in the interactive web presentation of the map, which I've realized with the help of Koldar.
 

Capher member of the Team
Another important addition to the Santharian team was Capher (Wisconsin/US) in September 2001. Not only did he start on a novel based in the ancient kingdoms of Santharia (which by now has reached Chapter IX), but he also helped a good deal to elaborate the human tribes of the mentioned ancient kingdoms and was an avid role player at the RPG Board. Unfortunately he had to leave the Dream due to problems of personal  nature.
 

Thergerim - the Dwarven Font
Bard Judith was busy again and following Koldar's first attempts to create an elvish font, she did the same for her dwarves. In the following months a whole basic dwarven dictionary, along with rune tables and writing examples would be added to the site.
 

Menu Redesign
In November 2001 the menu structure was changed completey to an icon-based system. In 2001 the existing menu icons weren't all unique Santharian pictures, but they should be replaced withing the next half year with typical Santharian ones.
 

Another artist: Fiorellina
In December 2001 Fiorellina (UK) gladly gave permission to use her works in the Santharian Dream. Fiorellina, probably the world's best rat-drawing artist, should - among a lot of other illustrations - be responsible for the design of the new Santharian titlescreen, which was realized back then with a soft fade-in animation on mouseover on the title-picture.

Development Progress
Aside from dwarven language issues, late 2001 was the time when Santharian games were developed. Members like Xarl (US), Tarquet Galbar (US) and Theodorus (Netherlands) worked on druidic orders, the Mullog race or on demons, which until this time weren't very well integrated at all in Santharia.

In December 2001 Uragel (Australia) joined the team, who would do a good deal of herbarium entries, before taking over Admin position at the RPG Board. Unfortunately she left after a while to concentrate on her own site.
 

Welcome to Talia Sturmwind!
The not so recent picture of Talia to the right shouldn't fool you... Talia (Germany) is one of the wisest persons here around in Santharia, helping out with comments on the Development Board wherever she can. Additionally she's expert on the Santharian south, namely the Raház-Dáth region, and the Shendars living in this territory. Talia is also one the main developers for the Legendary Tales game in development.

The Sarvonian Continent Map
So far the main developed was focussed on the United Kingdom of Santharia, which in fact only represents the southern part of the Savonian continent. Until January 2002 only the general shape of the whole continent was done, but we were still lacking an overall map connecting the single pieces.
 

Spell Expert Silfer
Another long-term member joined in February 2003, namely Silfer Darklflare, hailing from Norway. He should focus his attention soon on the development of spells of various kinds, so that we already have a pretty thorough collection by 2003.

Definition of the Magical Canon
In the same month, after long discussions, the main magical canon entry was finally put up on the site, explaining in detail the differences between the elemental ways of magic and the Schools of Xeuá and Ecuá. From now on magic in Santharia has much clearer defined outlines. Entries for the single Schools of Magic should follow within the next year.
 

Removing Placeholder Links
So far Santharia still had been a larger construction yard. The menu was still full with placeholders to entries which didn't exist yet, but were planned to be made in the near future. However, in order to avoid confusion and in order not to link to empty pages, the placeholder links were now finally removed - and the Santharian web slowly became more and more whole, a unit.
 

The Santharian Hall of Fame
Nearly one year after the first Flash movie was made for Santharia, another one was completed, honoring dedicated Santharian members. The movie features photos and descriptions of 16 members: the webmaster, 4 artists, 2 RPG admins, 6 Compendium wrriters and 3 story writers. All other members are mentioned in the movie as well as are those who aren't part of Santharia anymore due to various reasons, but have once shared their imagination with us for the sake of the Dream.

Modern Elvish Font
Another very important brand new contribution is the modern Styrásh font made by Koldar, which from now on should be used throughout the site whenever elvish words are referenced.

Master Quellion on Board
March 2002 was also the time when Quellion (Spain), an exceptionally talented artist, found his way into the Dream. Right from the start Quellion contributed perfect digitally painted drawings in record time. Along with the already long-serving Faugar, Quellion should become mainly responsible for the new Santharian look, which more and more turned away from pencil and greyscale pictures to colorful epic ones. Quellion's landscapes, tribes, plants, beasts and God pictures give a unique life to many thorougly elaborated Santharian descriptions with an astounding amount of details.
 

Site at 5/2002. Click picture to view gallery (11 pics).

Design Changes
The Bestiary is finally split into a Herbarium and a Bestiary part. The site's header part was also made graphical by now, so that the turn to color graphics also reflects in the design of the mainframe.

Development Progress
Development highlights are a flood of bestiary entries, the work on the gnomish race (Avis), but also on various elven (Wren, Viresse) and orcish tribes (Koldar). The races and tribes get more and more illustrated (Quellion, Faugar).

First official Musician
In May 2002 we have our first Santharian member, who is a musician. Ralrok provides a complete MP3-soundtrack for many places and tribe entries.
 

Busy-Bee Rayne
In July another Californian came on board of the Santharian ship, establishing her a reputation of cat expert for the Bestiary, but also did a lot of Herbarium stuff. Well, Rayne is much more than that as she showed later: Rayne became Bestiary and Magic Moderator at the Development Forum as well as RPG Admin and also is one of the most proficient poets in Santharia, delighting us regularly with wonderful lyrics. Rayne is among the most active members, having produced an extraordinary high amount of entries and is known for her acribicy to organize entries till the last detail.

A few days later Fox, now Co-Moderator with Rayne at the Magic Forum joined the team, who would be a great help to elaborate the entries on the Schools of Magic.
 

Site at 8/2002. Click picture to view gallery (12 pics).

Further Design Changes
In order to complete site re-design changes, Quellion worked on a brand new header pic for the mainframe, while Faugar contributed new, original Santharian icons for the menu. Additionally, a graphics  preloader was put on the frontpage, so that a more graphical design of the site's mainframe could be realized. A month later, own menu navigation pages were added in order to explain menu navigation, so that new visitors can find what they seek faster. In addition Santharian FAQs were added to the website menu as well.

Wren sings Santharian Songs
Another absolute highlight of August 2002 were Wren's fabulous Santharian audio studio recordings. Wren sang 5 songs of Bard Judith, Lucirina, Viresse, Anaea and Xarl, publishing the MP3 files on the site and astonished all Santharians with her talents.
 

Aeruillin Mistress Artemis
September 2002 brought Artemis (UK) on board. Together with Amuwen she soon took over the southernmost continent, where she started diligently to work on a new tribe and religious matters including the Fae Gods of the Void.
 

A new Server for the Santharian Dream
Approx. 80 MB of data at more than 1500 single pages were uploaded to the new location. The new hoster provides 500 MB of webspace, guarantees 99% online time, offers 150 domain POP3 e-Mail accounts for site members, unlimited forwarding e-mail accounts, support of Frontpage extensions, MySQL, PHP, a bunch of free promotion/marketing possibilities etc. - and last not least fast and easy site setup as well as a reliable support. Thanks to the new server we also finally could add a brand new Santharian Guestbook, completely free of advertisments.
 

RPG Game Works
Though there still is no visible progress on the Sorren side concerning the "Heroes of Sorren" RPG, Santharian members try their best to prepare material for a possible game. Artimidor works on programming a Dialogue Editor, also providing detailed instructions, and Bard Judith (village description), Thuja and Artimidor (dialogues) write lots of game-related text, which would never be integrated from the Sorren side due to the lack of programmers on the Sorren part.
 

Treeview Structures
The Herbarium and the Bestiary menus were completely reworked and could from now on be viewed as a 3-level-category-treeview or sorted alphabetically. The category-treeview can also be expanded in full to see subcategories and entries in one menu.

Bestiary and Herbarium Offensive
Early 2003 started with a massive Bestiary and Herbarium offensive. Especially the cat species were elaborated (Rayne) and illustrated (Viresse, Fiorellina), new dragons, hounds and deers were added and a lot of existing entries were now re-worked according to the new development scheme in order to maintain the same design everywhere. More weapon entries were written as well and the first deseases done, culminating in Faugar's pest columns picture.
 

New and returning Members
In Feburary 2003 Curgan, a member of the "first hour", who had been away for over a year serving the Greek military, found his way back to the Dream, continuing his work on Milkengrad and the Helcrani. Also Greybark - after a longer break - returned to the Dream to get all the Brownie things he had started on in early 2000 finally completed, so that we now have 4 fully elaborated Brownie communities on 3 different continents. Later this year, the long-term absent Drogo would return to the development team as well.

Of the new members especially Amuwen (Arizona, US) would prove to be among the most valuable additions to the team. Amuwen and Artemis joined their forces and intensified their works on the continent of Aeruillin. Unfortuantely Amuwen's joining of the navy didn't permit her to comit to further larger development projects. It would last till November until Artemis would get a new Aeruillin assistance, Lady Tiaa.

Other team developments of notice: T'olar (Arizona, US) should return after nearly 3 years of absence for a few additional entries, and Vladeptus (UK) would provide us with more downloadable music for Santharia.
 

Wallpapers and Screensavers
In 2003 we also started to work towards some more "corporate design" of the Dream. In this respect we also added some more additional freebies to the Dream, which people could use to make their desktop more "Santharian". Various wallpapers were uploaded in March, a first screensaver would be added in September. Responsible for the images are mainly Quellion and Isilhir, who should join Santharia in the second half of the year.
 

Bi-weekly Update Interval
As the weekly update intervals meant a lot of stress to your poor webmaster and development issues needed to be addressed, the interval was changed. From now on Santharian updates should take place every second week. However, entries to upload wouldn't decrease as a result of this measure - April 30th brought a new record of 23 uploaded entries in one single update. More than 20 entries per update wouldn't remain a rarity in the coming months.

Discontinuing the Sorren Cooperation
The cooperation of Santharia with the Sorren site, which should have had resulted in a multiplayer MUD, finally had to be terminated by team decision after 2 years due to continuous inactivity on the Sorren side and the intention of the other partner to completely commercialize the project. This meant: back to the roots for Santharian development! Though this decision of course also meant a reduction of visitors, who came to Santharia through the Sorren link exchange, the decision was necessary to avoid further damage of the Santharian image as a non-commercial project.

The discontinuation with Sorren also led to a renaming of the world. While the very first name "Aér'ái'chán" is still used currently as the elven expression, the human name was now changed from "Sorren" to "Caelereth".
 

The Legendary Tales Cooperation
Only a few weeks after our decision to discontinue the cooperation with Sorren, another opportunity to realize a game with Santharian material was discussed. Finally it was agreed that Santharian members would try to realize such a game (this time a single player RPG adventure) with the LT engine. To avoid difficulties the Sorren cooperation had entailed, we decided right from the start to define the terms of the cooperation precisely. At this new cooperation Santharian members would have more responsibilities in game development itself, while the creator of the LT editor, Humangus (Greece) promised to integrate new stuff in regular intervals and update the engine itself according to Santharian needs. So far the teamwork proved to be very efficient.

A Muse with a Mission: Eratinalinfalah
Our staff of artists was further expanded when we established contact to Jeff Lee Johnson (US), who would take the name of his "muse" in Santharia, the unpronouncable Eratinalinfalah (short "Eratin"). Ranging from illustrations for fairy tales till portraits, everything Eratin tries to realize with his drawing tablet and Photoshop, doesn't fail to impress the viewers - since his joining, Eratin has been a very valuable contributer to the Dream, surprising us regulary with wonderful pieces.
 

The Santharian Tour
After several requests to realize some sort of interactive introduction for the Dream uttered by newbies, who had some troubles with the first steps on the site, the Santharian Tour was finally realized. The tour covers topics like General Introduction, Navigation, Development, Role Playing and FAQs, featuring lots of graphics and dynamic picture presentations, providing in-depth explanations on the most important Santharian issues everybody should know.

Complete Role Playing Board Re-design
The Role Playing Board had been neglected for too long, which led to developments, which turned out to be counterproductive to the general fun level, e.g. resulting in a too strict character approving process. Therefore the board was completely re-designed - a new menu structure was added with explanatory pages, the character approving process was concepted anew, graphics were substituted etc. The players soon reacted to the re-design and made the RPG Board a lively Forum again - sometimes even too lively...
 

5th Santharian Anniversary
On November 1st 2003 the Santharian Dream turned 5 and this nostalgic timelines was made. However, there are still a lot of very important things to be realized in the future, ranging from adding final details to existing tribes till a complete historical timeline for Sarvonia, and a necessary focus on more consistency and integrity in general. We also hope to finally make a great Santharian real-life meeting come true, which we have scheduled for July 2005 in Germany. Hope to see you there!