Dark Messiah wasn't the game of the year, but it was behind of the biggest happenings of the Might and Magic community, the Disciples of Sareth missions. What started as a simple marketing gimmick of Ubisoft (there were similar sites for Ghost Recon and Company of Heroes, among others, and we found out that Phenrig wasn't the real Phenrig!) quickly turned into a friendly forum visited by very creative community members. Considering that a lot of prizes were won by a relatively small number of people, we will never know if "DoS" generated as much hype as Ubisoft hoped it would do.

The most valuable disciple of the event and winner of the Dark Messiah computer, arturchix, didn't stop his work when the site closed during the holidays. Today, he put the final touches to a memorial page for the Disciples site that includes a large gallery with all contest entries, with permission from the DoS administrator. The wallpapers, the coloring contest, the banners and the dress-up pictures, they are all there, yet another page of the big history book of Might and Magic.

To remember the best of Disciples of Sareth, Celestial Heavens with the kind permission of Disciples of Sareth community admin Phenrig has created a small memorial and stored all of the DoS gallery entries to ensure they don't go wasted. In the memorial site everyone can evaluate the gallery submissions, watch the submitted videos, leave their comments for any entry or even participate in a forum talk about Disciples of Sareth. Interested? Here we go!

Gallery | Videos | Forum | Guestbook

About Disciples of Sareth

Maybe you don't remember what was Disciples of Sareth all about? It was an exclusive fanclub of Dark Messiah, which was opened in summer of 2006 to promote the game and build up the hype with the help of the fans before the game release. While doing it, everyone could win various cool prizes, starting from simple mousepads up to the grand prize, a Dark Messiah modded PC for ultimate gaming. The lifespan of the site was exactly 5 months – the first members joined the community in July 28 directly from the closed beta and the site was officially closed in December 28. Those were amazing 5 months of new experience, meeting new friends and above all – winning prizes for having fun with Dark Messiah!

Prizes and ranks

In order to claim prizes, Ubisoft had thought of an interesting system – participating in various missions, polls, submitting to the gallery and other stuff was rewarded with virtual gold and everyone could spend it to buy certain prizes in the Disciples of Sareth shop. The prizes were more than awesome: the Dark Messiah modded PC, 5 iPods (though one mysteriously vanished in the end), 10 Ubisoft gift cards worth 100$ each, lots of Dark Messiah Limited edition game copies, Logitech keyboards and Dark Messiah modded mice and hundreds of Dark Messiah T-shirts and mousepads. In addition there were some Heroes V related prizes as well like Heroes V Limited Edition, T-shirts, mousepads (together with Heroes Fables storybook!) and a beverage cooler.

In the beginning earning any gold at all was going slowly as mission prizes were quite small and there were only about two new missions per week. Also claiming the prizes required a certain rank – for example, only a member with 50000 gold AND the 4^th rank could claim one of the best prizes - an iPod. Only 13 members in the end achieved the final 5^th rank which was Hero or Grand Sorcerer, depending on a choice made earlier. Those members, except the site admin Phenrig who was a Grand Sorcerer since the very beginning, were:

Avatar	Username	Registered	Posts	Comments
	Alderbranch	29.07.2006.	255	60
	Angelspit	28.07.2006.	133	62
	Arturchix	30.07.2006.	371	141
	DiscPete	10.08.2006.	323	46
	I.G.	03.08.2006.	245	48
	Ikillanything	20.08.2006.	297	27
	Justice	28.07.2006.	693	209
	Labyrinth	04.08.2006.	832	189
	Mana_SG	11.08.2006.	194	42
	Oakwarrior	29.07.2006.	768	159
	Sejin	18.08.2006.	472	106
	Stratosht	22.08.2006.	169	20
	YvonnelBaenre	11.08.2006.	137	16

There were over 1500 registered members in total though only about 100 of them were regularly active.

Missions

In total there were 33 regular missions and 5 special missions, four of them were announced during the week Dark Messiah was released, offering lots of gold just for proving that members have bought the game and are playing it. All of the missions could be split in two parts – first part were about promoting Dark Messiah and the Disciples of Sareth site itself, and other were about Dark Messiah, recording most funny kills, submitting the best stories on killing poor goblin Kevin, even dressing him up, creating new spells, writing a story for Dark Messiah 2 and other funny stuff.

Winners

In Fall, when it was more than clear that no member will achieve the fantastic sum of 375000 gold in order to claim the PC from the shop, (the top gold scorer at that moment had clearly below 80000), Phenrig announced that the PC will be awarded to the most valuable member of Disciples of Sareth, and this title in the end was awarded to arturchix, who in the Dark Messiah release week had won an iPod as well, just for being most active member during that day! The other 3 iPods were claimed by Mana_SG, Oakwarrior and Sejin who were as well arturchix’s main rivals to win the PC. In December most of the prices of all prizes were significantly plummeted and those who had spared some money for this moment, had to spend less gold for prizes than those who did it earlier, assuming the particular prize was still available. Very quickly all of the prizes were sold out and in the end remained only about 30 Dark Messiah mousepads. By unofficial information Sejin was the top gold scorer with slightly more than 100000 career gold, following by arturchix with 94000 gold, Mana_SG with around 90000 gold and Oakwarrior a little less.

Future

Many members who took part at Disciples of Sareth have expressed their wishes that they would like to participate in such an event again. Perhaps Dark Messiah 2? Might and Magic X? We hope so, time will tell...