A Dreamers Introduction to MU*s

Iron Realms

    So you've just finished having a monthlong text based roleplaying experience and you want more. You're casting around for other places to be deranged online. You're still dreaming in dark grey with white text. Well do I have good news for you.

Something's gotta be better than nothing.

    Nothing will match what Over/Under was but as there are parallels in other places. While I have no doubt that people will be able to discuss online wargames, discord roleplaying groups, tabletop games, and LARP better than I, I am well positioned to talk about MU*s. So let's do that. Starting with...

In The Beginning

    There was Adventure. From Adventure was born Zork. In 1978 came Multi-User Dungeon which is better known as Essex MUD or MUD1. The goal of MUD1 was to gain points in a text based adventure game until you earned enough to become a wizard, giving you powers over other players. A similar early game includes Scepter of Goth which supports 10-16 users connected via modem. By 1985 the space had exploded and included dozens of online games including branching out from fantasy dungeon crawlers into other genres. So popular were these games among college students that they were sometimes said to be "Multi Undergraduate Destroyers".

It does not put you on a van, sadly.

    To this day, nearly fifty years later, this style of game still exists with thousands of players daily distributed around the world. It is the root of modern MMORPGs to the degree that early MMORPGS were simply called Graphical MUDs. It has far decreased from its former popularity (peaking in 2004 and into shadow of itself by 2009) but it is still a rich and highly customizable space. Many games in the space allow for player creation of plots, places, and have rich internal histories and cultures of play. 

    Here is a chronology of notable MUDs from the first thirty years of the genres history. Some of them are still running today in one form or another. Much of the space for MUDs has been eaten by the popularity of MMORPGs, but people still crave typing commands in.

Even when it hurts us, we crave expression.

 

    The space has its own language (which I won't discuss so much) and a taxonomy of sub-genres. Lots of these sub-genres are determined by either the amount of combat mechanics, such that you could consider it a sliding scale between MUD and Talker. MUDs are more mechanically driven and can include hack and slash and player versus player. There are also RP MUDs which encourage or enforce playing out characters. These are sometimes differentiated with the terms MUX (multi-user experience) and MUSH (multi-user shared hallucination). Talkers are functionally online chat environment. 

    I would propose that looking for MUXs or MUSHs as a good starting point for experiences more close to the Denizen version of O/U play.

In The Now

    The r/MUDs subreddit has 4.6k users active right now as I write this. The largest active MUD, as tracked by MUDstats has an average player count of 628. Several modern MUDs are played with online clients but if you play a MUD for long you will want to download and run a local client. You can often contribute creatively to servers, up to the point of building custom code objects for execution on the server. 

Learning a bespoke scripting language for a MUD feels like magic hacking at some points.

    If you want to explore a MUD yourself there are many many many options. These cover lots and lots of genres. Some of these are subscription or otherwise pay to play. Several of them are first and foremost "adult" spaces. With that said I think this is a great starting place.

    To recreate some of that content, the games made by Iron Realms include a very solid web based client. They are not roleplay required and do incentivize real world payments. However they remain a good place to get your feet wet and decide if the space is for you at all. Lots of places have zero mechanized fighting but walking around bopping is parts of many others.

    Silent Heaven is a cool silent hill themed RP focused game while Procedural Realms is kind of like text based Runescape, on opposite sides of the spectrum. There are Star Wars based games, Shadowrun based games, games where characters experience aging and permadeath and many many many others.

    Eventually you'll want to get your own client rather than relying on web clients, for flexibility and your own comfort. I prefer MUSHclient, but Mudlet is popular. It's not at all necessary from the jump, but it is a great way to explore the hobby deeper and deeper. If you've grabbed a client, it really opens up your options to check MUDVault or MUDStats. One thing I don't have a good solution for, alas, is playing on your phone. 

    With all that said feel free to reach me via Discord if you have more specific questions.