Prelude of Prelude - Adagio

(italic text is from Blue* memories)

"Prelude was founded during Wrath of the Lich King when many guilds were trying to kill the Lich King - 25 man. It was me (Blueshield, GM of Chill) who suggested to officers of Memento that we should combine our efforts and merge guilds, as many of the members of both guilds were old friends since vanilla.

The main aim was to create a guild with a friendly atmosphere but for serious raiders. That was a very challenging task considering most of the serious raiding guilds are the opposite of friendly and usually being friendly and playful was not considered the way to go for progression in raids.

After a few days of discussions, with the contribution of all the officers involved, in the night between the 30th of June and 1st of July 2010, Prelude was born and here is our welcome  video from 10 years ago! It was decided that the new guild would be led by Arzach (former GM of Memento) with Fleur and myself (officers from Chill) and Syrsha, Marret, Avain and Auchter (officers from Memento) taking up officer roles within the new guild.

The name, itself, came from me being passionate about music (every kind) and for me, Prelude was a name that had multiple meanings. In music, Prelude is an introductory piece of music, it is also an introduction to something more important, and that was the perfect name for the new guild.

The guild tabard (our glorious onion flame) was chosen by Fleur and the colour and style of all the guild elements (including the design of the new website) has been though her hard work."

We opened the recruitment and got some new friends https://discourse.prelude-guild.info/c/recruitment/applications-accepted/
(scroll down to see 2010 applications).
Some of the very first applicants are still playing with us: Sfendourax, Stmaria, Cinque (our beloved gnome), Cearce, Leonz, Blindio (the Tooth Fairy priest), Baddi and Aluch

"It was a rough start... merging two guilds makes a lot of people unhappy. People have different goals and expectations, so the first few weeks were a bit of a journey and we learnt many of the hard lessons of what it takes to make guild successful. The officer team was a bit unstable at the start and after about a month, Syrsha, Marret and Avain left to pursue a different project. We managed to get the Lich King killed pretty soon and continued our journey in the Ruby Sanctum"

Then the Cataclysm came. After the usual levelling the raiding season was back!

We stormed through Blackwing Descent, The Bastion of Twilight and Throne of the four winds and then celebrated our one year anniversary!.

It was during this period of the guild that one of our best traditions started - The fun runs™, although it started out being an old school raid night and took place on Sunday nights.

Two of the best features of Cataclysm were the guild levels and the legendary weapons, and Prelude fared very well in both of them.

We dedicated some nights to level the guild up to the max, chasing achievements until we got our rewards: you can see in the video we lined up with our shiny golden Lions for a picture, probably the only time in our history we were able to get a nearly decent straight line. The missing link in the post was for the perk "Have group, will travel" that allowed any player to summon guildies anywhere in the world. Sadly the spell was used for exploits so Blizzard removed it, but it was handy and fun until it lasted.

It was the to catch 10000 fish achievement at this time that led the guild to be able to craft raid feasts, specifically the Seafood Magnifique Feast that generated the call for... sushiiiiiiiii!

Then Firelands opened the chance to get a legendary staff for casters. It was the last of "old schools" legendaries, avalaible only for selected classes through long chains, endless farming and the help of a whole guild to get them. Prelude was able to help not one, not two, but even three of our casters to get it: Sfendourax, Cnut and Dràgone.
We celebrated our huge success with an epic video, the Dragon rider

In the last tier of the expansion, Dragon Soul, Blizz experimented another kind of legendary weapon, locked to only one class and tied to their specific abilities: it was Fangs of the Father, a set of daggers for rogues, created with the help of the one and only Wrathion - just newborn at the time. Our first rogue to get them was Baddi and the second one was Mingan.

During the long wait for the following expansion, we downed some boss in Dragon Soul in what today would be the mythic difficulty, we had a transmog contest in what people showed their coolest outfits and we celebrated our second birthday with a video. We had also our first summer tour in old instances to get mounts and achievement that made many people happy, but caused the start of Ulduar hatred for Fleur...

to be continued...