Reborn
After what has seemed like and age, TerraMUD (tMUX) is once more.
For those who are unaware, originally TerraMUD was “hidden” on a school server, back when they were a thing. Sadly the school had an IT review, instigated and carried out by an outsourcing company who – surprise, surprise – recommended that everything was outsourced. This meant that ALL of the local services of the college (state of the art at the time) were dismantled and replaced with less bespoke solutions that almost, but not entirely, did nearly nothing like the services they were designed to replace.
With the change went a HUGE collection of educational innovation, resources and services – that is progress…. I guess. tMUX was one of many victims of the apocalypse our school is still coping with.
Thanks to the kind intervention of Ado (Adrian Malisano) and Mazil (Michael Smith), tMUX is now hosted on a server not affiliated with the school, open once again to players.
After some farting around, fucking stuff up then getting technical support, I have managed to get some DNS entries to make access simpler, so tmux.wonko.info and terramud.wonko.info now point to Ado’s server, port 4042 is the gateway for a glorious text-only telnet interface.
telnet:tmux.wonko.info:4042
Try it, it is so deliciously nerdy old school and just plain cool
There is a noobies guide also – HERE
Let the chase begin …
…so in my text-based world (tmux), players like a group challenge – oddly (or more correctly characteristically) they like to band together to defeat a common enemy.
a textiverse
Now, borrowing heavily from Monty Python and “Ripping Yarns” by Palin and Jones, I had created an arch memesis – “The College Leopard” – a cute idea that there was an aging, mangey, near-toothless college mascot that would roam the corridors menacingly – the first leopard hunt was great fun – stuff of legends.
When the leopard retired – toothless and all shagged out, a new nemesis was born – a mascott from a rival college “The Nudgee Ocelot” arrived on the scene and has visited in-world a few times, causing great excitement and smiting many noobs. I am yet to understand inter-school rivalry, but am the first to hijack it when it is convenient 😛
For those keeping up, an Ocelot is a curiosity in itself – names a “big cat”, it is in fact the smallest of the big-cat family, and usually actually smaller than a domestic moggy – which I find amusing. I have touted the idea of the IGS Iguana, Grammar Aardvark and the TSS Thylacine – all of whom may make a cameo appearance soon also.
Friday evening (yes, after a long week at school, kids choose to play a school-hosted, school-themed MMORPG – weird but wonderful, hey) the community called for another hunt, the Ocelot was suggested as a foe so it was on.
Now I like to mix things up a little, but being a responsible DM (Dungeon Master, yeah, I know, doesn’t sound right to me either) I tweaked the ocelot so it was killable, eventually, but not without a fight. I gave it a bunch of magic points, allowed it to cast restorative spells on itself and some offensive spells on whoever chose to attack it, but had to be careful that it would not be too ferocious. I manufactured a weapon (an ocelot claw) that I then gave to the ocelot – I figured 20 of them would be useful and, depending on whether many punters showed up, there would be enough to go around.
monster/object stats
Role-playing as the ocelot is exahusting, but sort of fun – the balance between damage and sport, defeat and victory is delicate, but as the battle raged in and around St. Joe’s eCampus (did I mention this MMORPG is actually set in a future version of our school?) and as the ocelot took major hits, it discarded claws to it’s attackers.
In this round the Ocelot was defeated, but vowed to return some day (yes, it …talked, sort of, and goaded the eager terrace students on during the battle). Unfortunately, just after it was all done and dusted, my wireless dropped out and I lost my log, else I would have posted it – players were wanting to know who did what damage, who hit, when, what spells did what damage and so on.
We had a pack of kids on, some veterans, some noobs – interesting mix of classes, abilities and approaches.
The hunt involved HUGE amounts of reading, typing, and imagination, but was also a load of fun – wonderful that kids choose to immerse in this sort of world, conjuring up pictures of their surroundings using their imagination – it is refreshing to think that some of the youth of today still have imaginations that do not revolve around visual imagery.
…just thought I would share – this is ONE of the worlds I inhabit daily after all.
Mud Puddling
…now I had this idea for a unit, taught at Year 9 level, involving students creating a virtual environment. It was part 3D, part Browser-world, and mostly in a text-only world. Their task was [I thought] fairly simple: design and make a place, embed a narrative so you have a sense of being there.
Text only? Surely those things have not existed since the mid 90’s, when graphical interfaces took hold?
After wrestling with an odd command set, and a partially hacked version of a Mordor MUD [a textiverse], allowing “builder” class players to construct objects, creatures and feature rooms, groups set about imagining an alternative reality.
The design spec was fairly open-ended [I was determined not to hold those motivated back]: at least 25 rooms, 5 objects and 3 creatures – could be set in past, present, future, could represent fact, fiction or anywhere in-between. Each room had to be described – 5 lines of text minimum [a juicy paragraph describing what it was like to be there]. Once they had done this, they had to echo this textiverse in a browser-based, multimedia capable MOO with the aim of getting them to reflect on the effects of interface on the quality of the experience.
The results astounded me. Honestly.
Year 9s usually hate English, more specifically, they go through a sort of larval stage where a grunt is considered an extended conversation, writing is not something they do [except on their mobile phone]. One group wrote a 45 page planning document, 38 of which were room descriptions – 10pt Courier New … do the maths. Some groups did a good job, most were extraordinary in their writing. Rich, interesting, narrative-laden descriptions, character-based non-linear fiction that you could get lost in. I meddled in the middle, helped them out with the obscure command set, fixed stuff that went pearshaped but the effort and work was theirs. They brought their friends in to see what they had written.
This is new to me, and I like it. Year 9 kids getting so involved with creative writing and constructionist/constructivist learning that they were in during lesson, chose to continue before school, lunchtimes and in the evenings making stuff, trying things, crafting. It was not even like I spent a whole lot of time with the command set, just gave them the basics and wrote a reasonable reference book with some exemplar code and left them to it.
Some struggled with the game-place divide, and had difficulty just describing the place [they had the full set of building tools, so could craft weapons, armour, monsters and rewards] and I sort of let them play, realising that it takes a level of maturity to conceive pure narrative space in what was essentially a game environment, but wow – no, I mean WOW. Some randomly picked rooms from the hundreds made include:
a cruise-ship journey from hell:
Reception
You look around and your eyes are drawn to the lion’s head on the wall that takes away from the free mints on the counter. The timber flooring is wet. It looks like there are wet footprints coming from the south. The curved desk with a glass finish and wooden vinyl façade makes you feel like this cruise has blown your budget big time. But before you take a handful of mints and go steal some shampoo from your shower, a tuscan flower in a blue vase takes your mind off your financial difficulties. The floor tiles match together to make a snowflake. The scent from the flower smells like a cheap cologne. You can hear the buzzing of a fax from behind the desk. There is a painting on the wall which cost more than your house. The tiles look so expensive that you don’t want to stand on them and a marble arch reaches up to the ceiling making you feel small there is some computer equipment sitting on the desk that looks out dated compared to the rest of the room. To a give some extra flavor there a 55 inch LCD TV mounted on the wall. The TV, instead of showing the Rugby, shows a map of the globe and how far you are on your journey so far and how much longer before you hit dry land. The TV is lacking speakers but there is music playing from a radio that adds to the experience.
… a journey in time:
Inside a Worn Time Capsule
You stand still for few minutes before realizing that something has happened to you and your surroundings. You had walked through the door, yes, but.. Why were you in the same room? You closely examine the room that you are in, and you realize what has happened. The machines that were once buzzing and active are now in disuse – the casings have rusted, and the buttons and over half of the levers are either missing or broken. You.. have travelled into the future. The question you ask yourself is why you were the test subject for such an experiment? Were you sent here for a certain purpose? Is there.. a task ahead?
or a street market from a dystopian future:
Market
You stand amidst the northern part of a big market where trading, selling and buying takes place. The owners of the different shops are calling out and trying to attract more customers, while everyone else is talking extremely loud at each other. All sorts of people can be seen here, including doctors, businessmen, tourists, government officials, beggars and much more. You see scrambled rows and columns of shops and stores of varying sizes being set up here that sell assorted types of food, such as veggies, red meat, seafood, canned food, sweets, frozen food, and much more, and the mixed smell of all these food is making this area fairly unpleasant. Stores seem to be competing with each other, as they are paying close attention to each other’s prices and lowering their own, which in the end is good for the consumer. There appears to be a narrow pathway between two of the stores, but you are unsure where it leads to. The market continues south from here, and the exit onto Bails Street can be seen to the south-east.
I learnt a lot from this exercise. Most importantly, I learnt that students will engage if they have some control over what they are making, when they understand the guidelines and personally engage in the task. The enthusiasm and non-verbals from the teacher is also an important factor – assume they will have difficulty and guess what – they will. Tell them it is “hard” and guess what – they will struggle with it.
