The Warlord

Since at least the 19th century, there has been a man who has been present throughout the Loonivearth's battles: the man called the Warlord. Wearing a knight's armor which conceals his face, he has been sighted at many significant historical events. Much of his methods and motivations remain unclear, but one thing is constant: many of his plans and devices revolve around sig files.

In fact, the Warlord is a legacy of warriors who preserve the illusion they are a single immortal being. Much of the Warlords' history remains mysterious, but it is known that one faced off with the bounty hunter Jonah Hexadecimal in 1871, one died a bloody and pointless death on the European front of World War I in 1917, and one battled a Nazi supervillain in 1944.

The Warlord who held the title during the LNH's founding was a net.hero who took on Sig.File Man as his sidekick. After he lost the Sig.Force, he became obsessed with trimming down excessively large sig files and, characteristically for the 90s, took a murderous anti-hero turn. He tried to compress his former sidekick using an ASCII bulldozer before facing off with his sidekick's sidekick, Sig.Lad, who had taken on the Sig.Force himself. After this, he realized the error of his ways and stepped away from the role of Warlord.

Years later, Jubatis found the Warlord's abandoned base and took the role for himself. He plotted to create a more efficient universe by retroactively imposing the McQuary Limit on all of reality, ensuring no one could take an action longer than four lines, but Dvandom Force put a stop to his plans. The Warlord lineage seems to have ended with him.

Notes

Based on the usenet newsgroup alt.fan.warlord, dedicated to making fun of excessively large .sig files. Posters with huge ASCII art illustrations and such in their sigs drew significant animosity, as in the old days of Usenet it could cost people running servers signfiicant money in bandwidth, not to mention being a pain to scroll through in early newsreaders.

According to the Jargon File:

The original ‘Warlord’ was a B1FF-like newbie c.1991 who featured in his sig a particularly large and obnoxious ASCII graphic resembling the sword of Conan the Barbarian in the 1981 John Milius movie...

The McQuary Limit, named after alt.fan.warlord's founder, is a netiquette rule that sigs should not be longer than 4 lines of 80 characters each.

The Classic LNH Warlord was introduced as something of a red herring: someone who could have been Acton Lord after entering the Source Code, or even a resurrected Sig.Lad. The actual fate of Acton Lord was quite different.