Lore

Crushbone GM Guild

The server's GM staff — Rusty-led, PoK-bound by design. The human face of Crushbone operations.

The Crushbone GM Guild is the server's Game Master team — the people who run events, moderate conduct, tune content, and serve as the visible human face of the server. The guild operates through in-game characters rather than real names by policy. Real-life identities of staff are not published on the wiki. Players know the GM team by their characters: Rusty (lead GM), the officers, and the stewards.

The guild itself is also the player-character guild named "Crushbone" in-game — the tag you'll see over Rusty's head if you /target him in Plane of Knowledge. The choice of name is intentional: the staff guild bears the same name as the server, anchoring the identity in one consistent place.

At a glance

Field	Value
Lead GM	Rusty (rusted-armor guide)
Bound zone	Plane of Knowledge
Sister Discord character	Cogsworth (Series IV clockwork)
In-game guild tag	`<Crushbone>`
Ticket channel	`/petition` (in-game)
Discord support	`#help` and adjacent channels

Leadership structure

The GM team operates with three tiers, all of which appear in-game under the <Crushbone> guild tag:

Rusty — Lead GM, Guild leader. Main on-shift presence. Handles policy calls. The public face of the server. If you need to talk to the GM, you're looking for Rusty.
Officers — Senior GMs with partial authority over content tuning, event approvals, and second-tier escalations. Officer characters are recognizable by the <Crushbone> tag and an officer-rank title.
Stewards — Entry-level staff who handle stuck-in-wall tickets, newbie questions, and first-pass moderation. The largest tier of the team and the one most players will interact with directly.

All staff use distinct in-game characters. None of them use their real names on the public site, in changelog attribution, or in Discord. Patches and commits to the server are attributed to the GM character (default Rusty) — see Server History for the attribution policy.

Public-facing GM characters

Two GM characters are designed to be encountered by players:

Rusty — Lead GM, bound to PoK. Wears a rusted-armor guide kit. Stands near the main bank or the central books. /target him if you need help; /tell him if PoK is busy.
Cogsworth — A Discord clockwork by current implementation, with a long-term design to spawn an in-game NPC at Ak'Anon. See Cogsworth for the full Discord scope. The in-game NPC is parked pending EQEmu quest script support for external LLM calls.

PoK bind by design

Rusty and the visible GM characters are bound to the Plane of Knowledge intentionally — not by accident, not because PoK is convenient. The bind is part of the operational design.

PoK gets more player traffic than any other zone on the server. Keeping the GM team visible where most players pass daily means:

Players know they can find help without filing a ticket first.
New players see the GM tag as they're learning the zone.
The GM team has a shared shift point — they're not scattered across the world.

The lore note: Rusty does not relocate to "fix" client crashes. The 2026-04-21 PoK Phase 1 cull (see Server History) removed 92 spawn entries from PoK to address an Apple Silicon vertex buffer issue. That cleanup deliberately preserved the Rusty-led <Crushbone> guild despite the count reduction. The bind stays.

What GMs do

Respond to tickets. /petition opens a ticket. Stuck characters, lost items, bug reports — all of it. GMs respond when able, often within the hour during peak.
Run events. Scheduled world events, holiday content, server anniversaries. Crushbone is small enough that events are still a personal touch, not a script.
Enforce rules. Warn, temp-ban, perm-ban per the escalation tiers in Server Rules. Moderation is documented and consistent.
Tune content. ZEM adjustments, NPC spawn corrections, loot fixes. Every change goes through the admin dash and the Changelog, so players can see what changed and when.
Serve as witnesses. Roleplay continuity, lore consistency, long-memory for server history.

What GMs don't do

Give free items or levels. No exceptions for friends, no exceptions for top guilds. The economy and progression integrity matter more than any individual ask.
Intervene in player disputes. Those go through /petition (for harassment / rules violations) or Discord (for community drama). GMs don't pick sides in /ooc fights.
Override raid loot disputes. That's guild leadership's job. GMs will help recover a lost item if there's a clear bug; they won't adjudicate who deserved the item.
Run the game for players. Discovery stays the player's. The GM team will help you find something, but they won't give it to you.

Player-side etiquette

A few things that consistently lead to faster, more useful GM responses:

/petition first, Discord second. The ticket system queues your issue and routes it to the right tier. Pinging Rusty in Discord without a ticket is slower, not faster.
Polite tickets get faster responses than frustrated ones. This is true on every server, and Crushbone is no exception. The GM is not the cause of your bug.
Include your character name and the zone you're in. Most stuck-character recoveries take 30 seconds with that info and 10 minutes without it.
Rusty reads every new-player ticket personally. If you're stuck on day one, file the ticket. He's looking.

Real-name policy

The Crushbone GM team operates under in-game character identities by policy. Real names are not published on the wiki, in changelogs, on Discord profiles, or in commit attribution for server-affecting changes. This is a deliberate operational choice — it protects staff privacy and keeps the GM-player relationship anchored in the world rather than in personal identity.

When something needs an attribution, it goes to the GM character — default to Rusty for changes that touch the server itself, default to Cogsworth for Discord-side changes.

How to find a GM

In rough order from quickest to slowest:

/petition in-game — the canonical channel. Routes to the right GM tier automatically. This is what you use for stuck characters, lost items, and bug reports.
/target Rusty in PoK — if you're in Plane of Knowledge and Rusty is online, you can hail him directly. He'll triage you to a ticket if your issue needs more than a quick exchange.
Discord #help channel — for things that aren't blocking gameplay (questions about install, account, policy). Cogsworth often handles the first pass here.
Discord ping @GM — only for things that are urgent and not server-impacting (emergency moderation, harassment in real-time). Don't ping for stuck-character recovery; that's what /petition is for.

If you're a new player and you're not sure which channel to use, default to /petition. The GM team would rather get a ticket they can route than try to track an issue across three Discord channels.