Originally, MUD stood for “Multi-User Dungeons and dragons” … yeah, not much of an acronym but it hints of it’s genesis. D&D players are an amazing lot – paper/board-based variants of the multi-player rpg are the descendant of many current games. It was realised that most in-game occurrences could be reduced to numbers and probabalistic “dice rolls” and a geeky game was born.
Being based on narrative and imagination, when computer networks began internetworking and sharing textual data, MUD emerged from the IRC [Internet Relay Chat] stream as a way of getting multiple players into a “textiverse” travelling to exotically described places, meeting interestingly described opponents and battling them for equipment [armor, weapons, magical items etc], money and experience points to help your character level up.
TerraMUD – a world in progress
I host and have created “TerraMUD” – a heavily modified Mordor [the name of the opensource codebase] MUD whose world is modelled on my own school, post-apocalypse, future imperfect. This incarnation has been open to players for 7 years, has
583 original Monsters
725 original Objects (weapons, armor and other gear)
3162 uniquely created Rooms
The codebase has been worked on for more than 9 years now.
The current game database is 7 years old and 100% original.
Naturally, I am quite proud of this wee beastie, and we have waves of interest from players – interestingly our middle school students play it and enjoy it, and we have a large player base who play sporadically, some are students, some are ex-students who now have real lives.
Interested? Links to explore further:
- Noobies Guide: http://www.wonko.info/mud/
- Connect to the game: telnet://tmux.wonko.info:4042/
