About the Fortress of Shadow
The Fortress of Shadow is intended as a starting point for newcomers to both Feng Shui and Hong Kong cinema. It's also a resource for experienced game masters and players, focusing on adventures, settings, and play advice, with some house rules thrown in for good measure.
I'm Kevin J. Chase, the maintainer of this site, but I'm not it's creator. Credit for that goes to David Eber and all the fans who contributed material to this site over the years.
History
The Fortress of Shadow was created on 31 March 1997 by David Eber as a Feng Shui, Shadowfist, and Hong Kong cinema fan site. It looked something like this:
The site got its name from the Fortress of Shadow card from the Shadowfist collectible card game, and from David's former email address. When he switched ISPs, his old name “shadow” was already taken, thus the new name “noshadow”, both a reference to the famous No Shadow Kick of HK cinema and a pun on the fact that he couldn't get the name he wanted.
In early 2001, David joined the Shadowfist design team, putting the Fortress of Shadow on hold. About a year later the site's ISP went belly-up, and the Fortress of Shadow disappeared with it.
In early 2004, the current maintiner, Kevin J. Chase, hunted down the original Fortress of Shadow site on web.archive.org. After cleaning the old code up a bit, he had a mostly-functioning web site, but no permission to post it anywhere.
Some more digging turned up David Eber's whereabouts, and he graciously consented to re-floating the site on the condition that the Shadowfist section remain buried. Fair enough, considering how behind the times it had fallen in three years. (There are plenty other Shadowfist sites out there, anyway.)
The Fortress of Shadow is back. I'm looking forward to several more years of butt-kicking goodness.
Copyrights
The original Fortress of Shadow was a collection of works by many contributors. I've kept all original author credits intact, but have not contacted those authors since re-floating the site. I'll start hunting them down as I get the chance. Until then, I believe I'm using the material I have in the spirit in which it was originally donated.
If I'm using your material and you want it back, just email me and I'll remove it, no questions asked. Put “Fortress of Shadow” in your email's Subject: line so I can separate it from the spam.
Technical Details
This site is written entirely in XHTML 1.0, using CSS for colors, fonts, positioning, and all that jazz. The PHP code is just a glorified server-side include system at this point, but I'll be making more use of it as I go.
The simple layout is partly because I don't have permission (yet) to use any Feng Shui trademarks, and in part because I want this site to be easy to navigate and to read.
I edited every file on this site with gvim, a slightly more modern version of the venerable Unix text editor, vi. I used PERL for the really messy editing when I first snagged the source off of web.archive.org.