Riptide Gaming was a project of several people after the fall of Sidewinder.net (which is another story). The group existed for quite a while, and racked up about 17000 posts to its message board at the time. All of those are archived here.
There is a search engine as well.
One of the major features at Riptide was the stories that were posted. You can view a collection of those stories and some of the character descriptions. There are other stories in the larger database not in that collection no doubt, but it gives a good (poorly formatted) overview.