The Necromancer Guild was originally created by Iso during the fall of 1995 for IcewindMUD. At that time, IcewindMUD was fairly newly created, and needed more guilds. It was maintained there by Bone. (amoung others?)
During the summer of 1998, the future of IcewindMUD was uncertain, as the MUD was to lose its host.
Iso decided to remove the Necromancer guild and the city Parlainth (the neighboring area to the guild, also created by Iso, with contributions from Bond and ?) from IcewindMUD and allow it to become a part of Viking, where it is today. Akron and Luna were responsible for removing the guild and areas from IcewindMUD and recoding it to fit the Viking mudlib. Luna was acting GuildMaintainer, although in actuality, Akron was equally in charge. At this time, extensive recoding was done, though the appearance of the guild was left much as it was before. Knubo took responsibility for the QCing of the Necromancer Guild code, and Zabard for the guild area.
The guild was removed from Icewind around the middle of August 1998, and the Icewind players were reinbursed the xp they had used on skills. It opened for playtesting on Viking on the 7th of September 1998. with a few selected playtesters (Ry, Deathful, Rokash, Frechdachs, Karr, Mystikal, Gloomy, Deadhead, and Globar). The play testers did an excellent job of testing, finding bugs and features, and contributed a great number of good ideas for improvements and balancing of the guild.
Due to a bug in the corpse object in the frozen Viking mudlib, a new 'prepare corpse' spell was created. Shortly afterwards, the mudlib freeze was lifted in part, and the bug was fixed. The prepare spell remains in the guild today.
Luke stepped in at the end of playtesting and helped expediate the QC process by checking the helpfiles and at the same time double checking the functionality of the spells.
On November 4th, 1998 the Necromancer Guild opened for the general public on VikingMUD. The first apprentice Necromancer was Corinthian.
Helgrim joined the Necromancer team November 13, 1998 to help with some planned changes. During the course of the coding of the changes, he recoded and reorganized a significant amount of the Necromancer code. This included the Necromancer familiars, and at this time a new familiar was added.
On December 15, 1998 Helgrim took over for Luna as Necromancer GuildMaster, when she stepped down due to lack of available time to spend on VikingMUD.
Luna created these Necromancer Guild webpages in May 1999, after Viking was moved to its new home on Dios' new machine at UiB in Oslo and the Viking webpages came online after many years of being unavailable to the public.
Helgrim and Luna steped down from the throne and gave the guild maintaining to Postkasse. He ran the guild but got a real life for a period of time and hired Okjuna as a maintainer. This resulted in the approval of adding Montbrison into the guild as an advisor and a supporter. After a while Okjuna steped back down from the throne and gave Postkasse back the job of maintaining the guild. Due to lots of work to keep the guild up to date Postkasse hired Diablito and Ziraili as co-maintainers to keep the guild fresh with ideas and to keep the code up to date.
-Postkasse-