Game 579: Multi-User Dungeon (1978)

 

          

Multi-User Dungeon

AKA "MUD1" 

United Kingdom

Independently developed

Written in 1978 for a DEC PDP-10 at the University of Essex 

Date Started: 12 June 2026

      

*****

 

MUD Day is Saturday, 20 June 2026!   

 

Join me in the Multi-User Dungeon as hosted by British Legends.

    

I will be in the game from at least 18:00–22:00 UTC. 

 

See the bottom of this entry for further instructions and matters of etiquette.

 

****** 

     

In some ways, the entire history of CRPGs can be seen as an attempt to mimic the narrative flexibility of a tabletop RPG session. If we were to judge CRPGs solely against this aspiration, however, we must regard them as a dismal failure. Fifty-one years after the first "pedit5" player fought a goblin in a hallway, the average CPRG player still can't smash a window, light a fire as a distraction, or trick a bandit by pointing behind him. Not only can the most powerful character in Skyrim not make his own bid for the throne, he can't even speak his own dialogue to his wife. If he could, she wouldn't be able to respond.

      

CRPGs have always worked within these limitations by adapting only certain aspects of the tabletop experience. In the early days, some games focused on logistics and combat. They let the player imagine his own game world, motivations, and dialogue, stuck him in a wireframe dungeon, and simply tried to replicate the mechanics of tabletop combat. These games, for whatever reasons, are the ones that were affixed with the "RPG" label. A second effort, just as valid, involved minimizing the mechanical content and emphasizing the narrative content and flexible role-playing through verb-noun commands. Its flagship product was William Crowther's Adventure (1976), later called Colossal Cave Adventure, the inspiration for Zork (1977) and an entire line of adventure games, both text-based and graphical. Although we later regarded them as a different genre, the intention of the creators was no different than that of the creators of Wizardry or Ultima. Here's a quote from Dave Lebling, one of Zork's creators, in the December 2015 U.S. Gamer:

      

The kind of D&D I played was sort of a slight twist on regular D&D, which at that point was still in the boxes. It was the old, old, old D&D. The dungeon master who ran our group way downplayed the number parts. It was all about storytelling for him, because he loved to just talk and evoke the environment you were in and all that, instead of, oh, well, you have a +1 and he's got a -2 . . .

     

All that numeric stuff really pushes you away from the story and into the nerdiness, if nothing else. I mean, it's nerdy enough without the numbers, but it gets even nerdier with it. That was a good D&D sort of background in terms of trying to create a story, instead of trying to just be obsessive about the numbers.

       

If history had gone another way, we would regard Zork, Spellbreaker, and King's Quest as "CRPGs" and everything this blog has been covering for the last 16 years as something else. "Battle simulators," maybe. Quest for Glory would be regarded as an "RPG-battle simulator hybrid." This blog would be the "Battle Simulator Addict."

     

Although later commercialized by Infocom, Zork began as a team effort on the PDP-10 mainframe system at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before TSR, owners of Dungeons & Dragons, threatened the creators with legal action, there was a period in which the game was called Dungeon. It was this version that made its way over ARPANET and various other file-sharing networks to University of Essex student Roy Trubshaw. An instant fan, he started building his own adventure game in 1978. Because he envisioned it as a game in which multiple players could interact in a Dungeon-style game world, he called it Multi-User Dungeon (MUD, later MUD1 to differentiate it from other games of the same style). He was joined in 1979 by Richard Bartle, who took over as the primary developer of the game when Trubshaw graduated in 1980. That same year, the University of Essex connected directly to ARPANET, and Multi-User Dungeon was playable by a global audience (for more on the birth of MUD, I recommend Jimmy Maher's excellent article on the subject).

     

MUD retained Zork's well-written and evocative descriptions of places, inventory puzzles, and a general "main quest" to collect as much treasure as possible (oddly dumped into a swamp instead of stored carefully in a trophy case). But it also added elements more suited to CRPGs, including experience and leveling. The multi-player aspect ensured that each player faced a world of human-controlled NPCs whom he could fight, engage in alliances, and rob.

        

Starting out in MUD.

       

The official MUD changed hands several times in subsequent years, from the University of Essex (1979-1983) to the Dundee College of Technology (1984-1987), to CompuServe (1987-1999). CompuServe renamed the game British Legends, which was subsequently adopted by Viktor Toth when he rewrote the game in C++ and made it available online starting in 2000. (During this time, "MUD" changed from a single game to a genre with many descendants; we'll cover that next time.) That brings us to the present.

    

The game begins with a quick character creation process. The player gives himself a name and designates a sex, and then the modern incarnation, at least, emails a password that will work until the player does something to kill his character permanently. The character has attributes (strength, stamina, and dexterity), and the game tracks a score based on his various accomplishments.

      

My mess of a partial map.

       

Exploration in MUD takes place in a world called The Land, not as interesting as Zork, but realistic in its general design—except that dozens of adventurers are for some reason tromping through its fields and forests. Every player begins in the safety of the Elizabethan Tearoom but is flung into the world when he exits the room to the west. From wherever he lands, he can explore a world bounded by dense forest to the north, a wall to the east, more dense forest to the south, and an ocean to the west (the ocean is not actually a boundary, as we'll see). Within this world are a mine, a railway connecting the mine to a jetty, a crumbling ruin, a mausoleum, a misty graveyard, a cottage with almost 20 rooms, a hut, a cave, and various other features. Because the scale is inconsistent and directionality is not always reciprocal (i.e., you may leave one area to the east and arrive at the next via the north) or even two-way, the game is difficult to map. I did it (using Trizbort), but the resulting mess makes me think that the map is better thought of in figurative terms than literal ones. Indeed, if you Google MULTI-USER DUNGEON and MAP, you are less likely to find a neat arrangement of blocks a la Shay Addams's Quest for Clues and more likely to find the conceptual map created by Trubshaw and Bartle and published by Bartle in the September 1984 Micro Adventurer. It was this map that alerted me to additional explorable space beyond the western jetty.

    

The map referred to in the preceding paragraph.

       

Descriptions of these locations are generally well-written and evocative, which is slightly ironic because when many people are playing, so many messages are flying by that it's hard to remember where you are at all, let alone read the description. Some examples:

    

• Study: This is the old study used by the gravedigger who once owned this cottage, where he read up on his craft. It is decorated in sombre colours, and the windows are small and dirty. On the south wall is a large bookcase reaching up to the ceiling, made of an enchanted oak.

• Sundial in pine forest: This is part of  a large pine forest. To the northeast, the forest opens up onto a magical glade, but in the other directions is more forest, some of it too dense to allow passage. Before you stands an old, stone sundial, overgrown with ivy. The sundial has no gnomon, so cannot tell the time.

• Waterfall: Before you is an awe-inspiring sight; a waterfall plummets over a cliff and explodes in a dazzling crescendo of rainbow colour on the menacing rocks below. 

             

To the west is more game to explore.

        

Navigation in this world is with commands of a few words. Directions are simple: N, E, W, S, NE, NW, etc. If you get lost, OUT will move you, screen by screen, back to the Elizabethan Tearoom. SWAMP will move you, screen by screen, to the swamp. Other commands will be familiar to players of text adventures: GET, DROP, INVENTORY, LOOK, OPEN, UNLOCK, and so forth. The game deliberately hides some commands for puzzle-related reasons. For most commands, you only have to type as many letters as are necessary to distinguish a unique keyword: DR(op), L(ook), I(nventory), and so forth.

       

Of course, many of the commands are used to solve puzzles. Twenty years ago, on a blog called "kfsone's pittance," Richard Bartle offered: "The mausoleum is the only place in MUD1 (or MUD2) that has actual puzzles in it. I put it in specifically because people wanted puzzles and I didn't, so I showed them what a pain the world would be if it were all puzzles by giving them the mausoleum." There are indeed a bunch of puzzles—or perhaps, more properly, "riddles"—in the Mausoleum, each one written on the wall next to a tomb:

   

• MUD's rats reproduce fast! They reach sexual maturity in 35 days and give birth to 14 pups every 21 days. If you took one newborn rat home with you, how many rats would you have after 98 days?

• In what year was the following phrase first documented: tent all all all all tent (& / pospos)?

• K rymsramo vkx k uajcan dkcmocmf tcov ovuaa xvadvauqx dycmocmf ko k oyrw. Wamakov co kua acfvo jaooaux. Tvko kua ovaz?

• Find Milne [NDDL XKXAYB DX NK TAH JIWCO RZBS AZ B JASVKUFH JL VD] [ZLNZ HELAMH NN ZS TOB DIUGM LBHS AL B FAQNGQXT HZ RZ]

• Leave the Mausoleum by way of the cricket chirps: 19.64/s, 0.36/s, 19.64/s, 19.64/s, 0.36/s, 3.57/s. Where are we?

• For your birthday, I can make you the 52607th Duke, the 31870th Queen, the 1835th King, or what numbered prince?

          

The mausoleum riddles.

         

Typing the literal answer gets the associated tomb to open up, with some kind of treasure or encounter on the other side. I solved three of these but have no idea on the rest. 

   

But of course there are other puzzles in the game—those that involve the intuitive use of objects and the parser to produce results, just as in any text adventure. Some of the many that I annotated while exploring the land:

   

• How can I see in the dark, for all the many places that require you to see in the dark? 
• How do I get across the ocean to the other island or to the shipwreck seen from the shore?
• How can I pry up the golden bolt in the railway track? 
• How can I get a piece of valuable ore out of the mine's walls? 
• How can I survive the trip to the bottom of the cliff at Lover's Leap? 
• How can I unchain a sacrificial blade from an altar?
• How do I get the ruby out from the eye socket of an idol?

    

And this is in addition to all of the "what am I supposed to do at the . . . " questions that could be ended with a variety of locations (e.g., "sundial," "shrine," "badger's sett") and "what am I supposed to do with the . . ." questions that could be ended with a variety of objects and creatures. 

          

I have solved a number of these puzzles, and more besides, but I guess I won't be offering the solutions in my blog entries. It's against the etiquette of the game. While I normally don't shy away from spoilers for old games, here for the first time I'm entering a shared space, and I feel I must bow to the old adage of "When in Rome . . . " I suspect that somewhere out there in Internetland is a detailed spoiler site, but if so, it's not on the surface web. It's somewhat impressive that this information hasn't been widely spoiled on some GameFAQs site after nearly 50 years.

       

It was worth a try.

       

While we're talking about shared space, I should make it clear that these puzzles exist for every person simultaneously, and most of them can only be solved by one person. If someone else gets to the Mausoleum before you and opens all the doors, tough luck. If you need the axe to break down the door to the Royal Bedchamber but someone else got to it first, you'd better find some other place to explore. Resets of the game world do happen, specifically:

  

• When enough treasure has been dumped into the swamp that there's hardly any left.
• When someone with administrative power commands it.
• When nobody has logged in for a few minutes.

   

The third stipulation means that they happen relatively often these days, but it might be that they don't happen at all during the Saturday afternoon that many of us are playing.

   

For these reasons, many players eschew the puzzles and focus on the social interaction and player-versus-player combat. Talking with other players is a bit like having a conversation in the early days of chat rooms. Everyone is talking at once, some of them sending direct messages, some shouting to everyone playing the game. You talk to a particular person with the syntax:

 

TELL Chester, Hello! How are you?

   

Or you can just shout to everyone:

   

SHOUT I don't know how to play this game!

   

You can FOLLOW a specific user if you want to see how they do things. You can HUG, KISS, and TICKLE people, which seems to confer points to their score. You can GIVE them things and also try to STEAL from them. Of course, you can also ATTACK or KILL them. I'm told that it's against etiquette to attack anyone more than two levels below yours, but I don't think anything in the game prohibits it.

                 

A brief conversation with another player. She probably would have been creeped out if I'd TICKLED her.

        

Other players aren't the only ones you can attack. There are a handful of monsters in the game, including a zombie, an ogre, a dryad, a giant spider, one or more vipers, and a bunch of rats. Most of these enemies won't attack unless you instigate it. I had more success when I started combat than when the enemy did; I think it may be because when the player starts it, he can specify a weapon (ATTACK RAT WITH AXE), whereas the game doesn't always seem to assume the player is using a chosen weapon when he's just defending himself. I'm not entirely sure.

       

Once combat begins, it proceeds in rounds, sometimes dozens of them, as the game describes the action: "You narrowly side-step a limp slash by the zombie"; "You hit out at the rat with a mighty punch!"; "The savageness of a blow by the ogre sends you sideways." The underlying rolls aren't really transparent, but they seem to take into consideration your weapon, level, strength, and dexterity. Your stamina is your hit point reservoir, and you die if it reaches 0. You can FLEE combat to avoid this, but the action causes you to leave your entire inventory behind, and you lose points. To recover your stamina, you need to SLEEP and hope no one kills you in your slumber or leave the world entirely and don't log in for a while (you restore one stamina point per minute).

       

A very long, and ultimately fruitless, battle with an eagle.

          

Equipment-wise, you don't have much to help you in this game. There are sticks all over the place, and that's the best weapon that most players will get. Once you reach the third level, you can use an axe in combat, but as far as I know, there's only one of these in the game. I never found anything that seemed like a traditional RPG weapon or piece of armor, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. 

        

The overall goal of the game is to amass as many points as possible—or, more specifically, to amass as many points as necessary to reach the rank of wizard (i.e., "make wiz"), which essentially makes you invisible and gives you some administrative control over the game world. The three major ways to gain points are:

 

• Drop treasures into the swamp; the value of this is commensurate with the value of the treasure. I think the most I got was around 100 points, but there could be more valuable treasures than I've found. You can check the value of your carried treasure with the VALUE command.

• Kill Enemies, which give you a handful of points (e.g., 8 for the rats).

• Kill other players, which gives you 1/24 of their score.

• Solve certain puzzles.

         

I gain points, and level up, by setting a dryad  on fire.

         

Certain point thresholds are accompanied by title upgrades: "novice" to "warrior" at 400, to "hero" at 800, to "champion" at 1,600, and so forth. Leveling up is accompanied by increases in the game's attributes. "Wizard" or "witch" (for female characters) is at a distant 102,400 points. I managed to achieve about 1/100 of that score in a few hours of gameplay in which I explored mostly alone and wasn't attacked by any other players. I think a truly dedicated player, creeping online in the dead of night like me, taking advantage of frequent resets when no one else is online, and just dropping treasure after treasure in the swamp, might be able to make it to the top in a week or two of furtive playing. Obviously, it would have been much harder when players were always attacking and the treasure wasn't all yours.

 

My best score as of this entry. Shortly after this, I had to flee from a dwarf and got knocked down to about 1,260 points.

        

There are spells in the game, but not in the traditional RPG sense. They're all focused on interaction with other players. Each has a percentage chance of working based on the character level. SUMMON, when successful, will make a player drop his entire inventory and teleport to you. FORCE makes another player do a particular command. WHERE tells you a player's location. You can change a player's sex with CHANGE, put him to sleep with SLEEP, and DEAFEN, DUMB, BLIND, CRIPPLE, and (mercifully) CURE him. WISH, which works 100% of the time, lets you ask a boon from any player with the rank of wizard. That doesn't mean they'll grant it 100% of the time.

   

There are a lot of things I don't understand. Rules seem to change on the fly, I suppose based on a wizard who activates one of the game's switches. Creatures go from docile to hostile. Fighting between players is disallowed and then suddenly allowed. A B-52 bomber flies overhead and drops a payload (not kidding). You occasionally run into a beggar; sometimes KICKing him gets you points, and sometimes it provokes a tough combat.

      

There are two types of death in the game: One from battle, which is permanent (you have to create a new character), and one from environmental damage, which is temporary (you have to leave the game for a while). Environmental deaths include jumping off a cliff without a parachute, slipping on rocks, entering the gassy marsh with a lit torch, and a variety of other mishaps.  

      

Having played for about six hours now, and having mapped a decent portion of the game, I can't help but feel there are depths to it that the casual player doesn't experience. There are strange messages, entrances to the underworld where dangerous enemies await, and an entire continent across the sea that I still don't know how to get to. I feel a bit like the Man in Black in Westworld, insisting that there's a deeper level, a greater meaning. The distressing thing is, I'm not sure experienced MUD players will even tell me whether I'm right or wrong.

      

What is this "emerald and red" message about?

                

That will suffice for a long introduction. I'll have more after "MUD Day" on Saturday, 20 June, when I will be playing the game at least between 18:00 and 22:00 UTC (14:00–18:00 EDT, 11:00-15:00 PDT, 20:00–00:00 CEST, etc.). I hope many of you will join me to help me experience the game in proper multi-player mode. If you do decide to join.

 

• There are instructions here.
• To abide by game etiquette, no attacking players more than two levels beneath you.
• I'm told it's against the rules to play two characters simultaneously.
• And no verbal abuse.

   

Whether online or for my next entry, I'll see you soon!

   

****

   

Next entry in this series.

   

06/15/2026 

 

Yendorian Tales: Here There Be Dragons

 

I spent a lot of this session watching dragons fly overhead.

       

The land of Yendor is in trouble. Monsters have been invading the mines, threatening the production of Nuore, the reagent necessary to fuel all magic. The great wizard Zamora was struck down by a shadowy figure during a public address; the orb that was supposed to banish all evil was stolen. Our only clues to restoring order are to be found in Zamora's journal, which only members of the Society of Wizards can translate. The first one, the Hermit, told us to seek out the Diplomat. The Diplomat, who turned out to be the governor's advisor in Port Hope, asked us to retrieve a Grapnel Arrow and then use it to grab the Great Red Gem in a particular mine.

   

I ended the last session wondering what mine would contain the gem. Fortunately, I found it almost immediately. It was in the cave network northwest of Port Hope, and probably the reason I didn't note it during my first circuit of the cave is that I didn't register it as important. High on the cave wall, one square between it and the the party, it was out of reach except for the Grapnel Arrow. The only annoying part was having to flee from dozens of parties of bats on the way.

        

Grabbing the gem.

       

Using the Key of Port Hope to warp immediately to the city (hell, yeah!), I gave the gem to Paundor. He crushed it into a powder and then said to go to Moloch, where we'd find someone to help us further. He also increased our dexterity by 4.

      

As his dialogue closed, an apparition of the orb appeared, and Zamora's voice said: "Half of 'W' is sixth." This goes with our previous clues that:

   

• The first of last is third.
• The third of first is last.

 

"Half of W" probably doesn't refer to its position in the alphabet, since it's at an odd number (23). It probably means either V or U. We still don't know how many letters there are between "sixth" and "last"; if half of W is V, it's at least one, since no word ends in VR. So possible patterns are:

  

_ _ L _ _ V _ R

    

_ _ L _ _ UR

 

My crossword mind sees BELIEVER in the first case and SULFUR in the second, but there are of course many other possibilities, especially if we increase the number of spaces after the sixth position. For all I know, it's FILIBUSTER. 

    

We used the Key of Stachus to get most of the way to Moloch. You might recall that we learned last session that there is an island in the southwest quadrant of the game map, but it's surrounded by fog. I wanted to walk along the water to see if I could see the fog. It turns out that I couldn't, but while walking, I found a buried treasure chest that had the Key of Saccate, the starting city. That's great. Saccate has almost all the game's services, and it's close to the other starting cities, where I know I can pay for training, sell excess goods, sell gems and Ancient Scrolls, and get healed.  

        

I wipe out three parties of mages.

     

Even better, there was a second chest with a Scroll of Death. That sounded awesome, but it doesn't work in combat. Instead, it wipes all enemy parties off of the game map, which is a nice way to avoid having to fight or flee from all of them when I'm just trying to get somewhere. On the other hand, it can only be used once per rest, and the enemy parties repopulate fast. I tended to save it for when I saw parties of mages. It's hard to flee from mages (if you want to flee), as the final character to flee is the target of all attacks and is often killed.

        

Speaking of combats, my characters got some very powerful, almost game-breaking spells at Level 8. The two clerics got "Critical Wounds" and my wizard got "Spontaneous Combustion." Both damage all enemies on the screen (except those immune to fire, in the case of the wizard) for about 10-20 points. Very few enemies can stand up to a single round in which all three spellcasters unleash. The only thing stopping me from just spamming these spells is the cost in Nuore and the fact that I have limited spell points, but both increasingly ceased to be much of a concern during this session. Even if I wasn't finding processed Nuore (needed for spellcasting) and purple potions (which fully restore spell points) fairly plentiful, the economy has become so generous that I could just buy heaps of them.

      

Casting "Spontaneous Combustion" at mummies and zombies.

        

Before hitting Moloch again, I went to Mine 8 to its southeast. The lucrative mine had a lot of platinum, gold, and silver plus a large treasure chamber with plenty of gray (moderate healing) and white (full healing) potions. Enemies were demons and devils, but I mostly just ran from them. There were fixed battles with demons and mummies, plus a memorable one that combined swamp trolls, ghosts, and alligators.  

   

In Moloch, I had already met the person who would help me: Bysette. Last time, he demanded to know who had "sent me," and I had no answer. This time I did: PAUNDOR. "You will need to return a ring I lost before I can assist you anymore," he said. Where did he lose it? On a ship called Blackmane. He couldn't tell me anything else, so now BLACKMANE is one of the keywords I feed to all NPCs. When I get done exploring the cities I haven't explored, I'll return to the original ones and prompt those NPCs, too, I guess.

    

I kept working my way counter-clockwise around the world. As I approached the mountains to the northeast, dragons and wyverns started appearing overhead. When they fly by, which they do frequently, the game pauses for the animation. As long as the party isn't in their direct path, they just continue off-screen and I can move again. If the party is even slightly clipped by a wing, however, we enter combat. I can kill a wyvern—I did it back on Level 3, you may recall—but the red and green dragons are something else. Like demons and devils, they have an ungodly armor class. I can barely touch them. Still, I'm sure with a concerted spell-based effort, I could make it happen. I just wasn't in the mood to put in that kind of effort yet.

     

This wyvern is about to get me.

      

There are some caves depicted in the mountains that are only accessible from the desert side, so I couldn't explore them yet. I was able to enter one cave southeast of Devon and Duomin. It had a couple of treasure chambers with lots of ore and mining tools, which was ironic because there was nothing to be found in the cave's walls. Fixed combats were with thieves and mages.

   

Devon, which I reached next, was a dead city, like Magincia in Ultima IV. Set in the middle of a creepy swamp, it was swarming with skeletons, ghosts, and other undead. There were only a couple of NPCs. The first, a ghost named Paltivar, was haunting his own shop, moving crates, hoping his assistant Joseph would return. He reacted to JOURNAL and said that he'd help me if I found his assistant. More on that in a bit.

        

Devon's cemetery.

        

The second NPC was Joan, attending the grave of her husband, Winze, and somehow not getting attacked by all the undead in the area. She confirmed that Winze was a member of the Society of Wizards, but I couldn't get anything else from her.

    

Finally, a wizard named Alcott was holed up in the temple. He admitted quite freely that he was the one who had raised all the undead and sent the townsfolk fleeing. After a few bits of dialogue, he attacked me with an army of zombies, mummies, and ghosts. I destroyed them with mass-damage spells, but Alcott himself was stubborn. He finally fell to my blades, drank a potion, and disappeared.

     

Littering!

        

My notes said that Joseph was the NPC permanently in the drunk tank in Mantov. I assaulted someone to get a quick trip to the Mantov jail. Joseph wanted a bottle of Sweet Wine for his cooperation. The tavern didn't know what I was talking about. So that's another thing on my list of keywords.

       

How far in the past? Devon has been a ghost town long enough for a brand-new city (New Devon) to be built.

           

In Duomin, a mining town, everyone was abuzz because a kid had been kidnapped by a dragon. His mother, Whitney, begged for his return. The city had an armor shop, a mine shop, a tavern, a fighter trainer, and, surprisingly, a jail. I thought all arrestees went to Mantov, but apparently not, because Keith and Humphrey were in there for horse theft and drunk and disorderly, respectively. 

      

I think Victor was one of the guards.

          

I got another hit on JOURNAL with Prezlin, the owner of the alchemist's shop in New Devon. "Please find out how my old friend Winze is doing and let me know." When told that his friend was DEAD, he suggested that we meet at his shop in New Devon.

    

All the rumors said the dragon flew east after kidnapping the boy, so we went directly to the mine visible from Duomin, which I labeled Mine 9. Despite circling it three times, I couldn't find any sign of a red dragon or a kidnapped boy. What I did find, aside from a bunch of random battles with gnolls and mine trolls, were eight treasure caves. I came out of the mine pockets spilling with weapons, armor, ore, potions, scrolls, and processed Nuore. I don't know why the game got so generous when it had already been pretty generous.

       

I would pay real-world money for an "open all chests" spell.

                 

Further up the mountain range, I found a path into the mountains. Exploring was a pain in the neck, having to stop frequently for the dragon animations, flee from the occasional attack, and reload every time someone got frozen by a wyvern.

   

I eventually found my way to another cave, entered, and was almost immediately greeted by a red dragon blocking the path. Individual red dragons aren't that hard. One strategy I use for tough enemies is to toss a silver potion on them early, which poisons them and makes them take damage every round. If I can't seem to hit them, I toss gold potions on them every round, which reliably do 15 points of acid damage. My clerics heal characters as needed while my mage, taking a purple potion when he needs to recharge, blasts away with "Beam of Death" and "Ball of Power."

   

When the dragon was dead, I got a message that a young boy went running out of the cave. I warped back to Duomin with the key, talked to Whitney, and got 5,000 gold pieces and enough experience points for Level 9.

      

Nothing ever explained what the dragon wanted with the kid.

        

I warped back to Staccate and the surrounding cities to level everyone up, which cost almost 50,000 gold pieces, but I had about 300,000 by then. I was feeding the new keywords to everyone I encountered in both towns. In Helsingor, I got a hit on BLACKMANE with a Captain Chigon, who I must have missed the first time. He admitted to being a pirate and said that he disguised Blackmane as a passenger ship, then robbed the passengers during the first night at sea. He insisted on fighting for Bysette's ring.

   

When battle began, he was accompanied by about two dozen assassins, rogues, and harriers. Assassins have a chance of one-shotting characters during their attacks, so the battle took me a few tries. When it was over, I had Bysette's ring.

   

Before returning to Moloch, I decided to spend some of my money on enhancements. The guy in the Athaneum can add +1 to non-magical items and +2 to magical items. The cost was only a few hundred gold pieces per enhancement, not the tens of thousands I assumed. I'm not sure why I didn't do this earlier. I thought I could go immediately to Port Hope and get the same items enhanced up to +4, but it turns out that the guy there only works with items already at +3, so I have to find an intermediate enhancer.

       

Alcala's equipment after our visit to the enhancers.

       

I brought the ring back to Bysette, who gave me a "magic branch" and told me to seek out the Merchant. If it's not clear, I think these titles—Hermit, Diplomat, Merchant—all belong to members of the Society of Wizards. (I wonder if the Merchant isn't Prezlin, who I've already met, given that he owns a shop.) Again, a floating orb appeared with Zamora's voice: "It is in the middle backwards." This suggests, if taken literally, that the letters TI appear in the middle of the word. Putting that together with our previous hints, the options are now:

    

_ _ L T I V _ R

    

_ _ L T I U _ R

    

This assumes that "middle" is literal, and there thus must be an equal number of letters to the left and right of the TI. It also assumes the word isn't ridiculously long. I suppose it could be. It could be:

   

_ _ L _ _ V T I _ _ _ _ _ _ R 

   

But it's probably not. On the other hand, I can't get any real words out of the first two options, so either it's a proper name or a nonsense word.

         

Hmph. I'll bet it's just a regular branch.

      

Miscellaneous notes:

   

• The game won't let you carry more than 50,000 lose gold pieces at a time. Once you hit that number, you have to store the excess in a chest. If you get the excess from trading in shops, I guess you get a free chest with it, because that's never been a problem. You can also occasionally find empty chests in dungeons and such. But if you don't have an empty chest and you hit the cap while exploring out in the world, you're out of luck. The game is inconsistent as to whether, when you don't have any "loose" gold, it will deduct from a chest. Sometimes it just says you don't have enough. 

      

Here, I have 269,472 gold pieces

        

• My thief has gotten a lot better with his lockpicks. He only springs about one trap in ten. Unfortunately, one of the traps that started showing up this session can curse multiple players. That status means that the character misses most attacks. It can only be healed at healers, as far as I can tell. It's not worth the risk. My spellcasters now open all chests. I wish I'd put a second wizard in the thief's spot. 

• Speaking of healers, you can donate money to their temples. I'm not sure whether there's any benefit to doing so. Nothing ever seems to happen. 

      

"Surplaying."

      

• The city keys subvert the crime and punishment system. You can get drunk in Saccate, and instead of leaving town by the main gate, just teleport somewhere (even right back to Saccate). Your crimes are wiped away.

    

I ended this session in the far north of the map, first by visiting what I labeled "Mine 10." It had Nuore, nickel, and iron. The centerpiece was a fixed battle with a unique creature called a paleoscinus, which looked sort of like a giant armadillo. He shot spikes at us, but he thankfully wasn't hard to hit.

      

I felt bad about killing him. He looks like a pet turtle I used to have.

             

Behind him was an exit to the desert—which I don't think I'm ready for yet—and a chest with the Key of Anatolay.

   

The town near Mine 10 turned out to be a town of giants—ogres, cyclopes, stone giants, and forest giants—with giant-sized buildings and a giant-sized jail. A human NPC is in one of the jail cells, but if I talk to him, he just says: "Since I have given you my map of the desert there is nothing else to tell you." I don't know what he's talking about, and I assume it's a bug. If this was my only way to get a map of the desert, that's too bad.

   

Most of the other encounters in the city were hostile. Giants have a "stomp" attack that does damage to everyone, so I avoided as many battles as possible. I was able to talk with Koleman, King of the Giants, in his throne room. He didn't have much to say, just that he resented the "little people" invading his space. 

       

Forest giants apparently wear animal skins inside modern, pristine buildings.

       

I'm almost done with my primary exploration of the main world, and I'm hoping things move quickly after that. This game is fun enough, but it's not a 40-hour game, and most of the things that I liked about it 10 hours ago are starting to wear a bit. 

    

Time so far: 26 hours 

     

****

 

Please remember that this Saturday, 20 June, is MUD Day! More information is found here.  

 

****

   

Previous entry in this series

 

Next entry in this series 

 

The Search for Freedom: Undistinguished Destruction

Really, he looks just like his statues.

 

Guest Post by Alphabetical Anonymous       

Our Teddy-led crew of adventurers continues to descend to the depths of the Smythetown catacombs in order to defeat the evil wizard Macabath. He is the local representative of the undead lich Kamazol, who reigns in hell and hopes to return to conquer the world through a portal that will open during a triple-lunar conjunction expected to occur in 1000 days. Our party has slowly dithered about as they found their footing in this new region; it’s now time to step up their game and make some serious headway. I therefore vowed to keep pushing down until we found Macabath, slew him, and so moved on toward the main quest.
     
We just discovered a two-handed silver sword, which the manual reports to be the second-best weapon in the game. I give it to my fighter Tyrion, the only one of my party who can wield it due to his strength. With it he deals an average of 17.5 damage per blow, with a maximum of 25. Damage is doubled when any character successfully backstabs an enemy, so this gives Tyrion the chance to kill just about any monster in a single hit. I then give his +1 Longsword to my mage Elphaba; it feels unnatural to have a magic-user wielding this weapon, but (again) she’s the only other party member who can wield it. [Ed. Coincidentally, mages and clerics in Yendorian Tales can also wield any weapon or wear any armor, provided they have sufficient statistics.] Melee weapons have continued to be sufficiently effective that I haven’t done much exploration of ranged weapons or attack spells.

      

Tyrion's two-handed silver sword packs a serious punch.

      

In fact, I’m getting ahead of myself: the first order of business is to spend a bit of time grinding on Level 1 of the catacombs. We fight rats, bats, and other easy foes until all but Elphaba and Durkon can level up. We tromp back up the stairs to the Training Hall. “Do you want to train,” grunts a muscled man every time we enter; that’s consistent, but more disconcerting is when the game follows it by randomly selecting the exit sound effect that says “Goodbye...” in a falsetto. My favorite of these last lot is definitely the stern “Good luck on your quest,” which seems just waiting to be remixed with some hip-hop beats.

In any case, the trainer lets us pay 50-60 gold per character to level up. The game manual includes detailed tables to show what sorts of increases in hit points and magic points should be expected at every level; almost every character statistic is well-explained there. In addition to these automatic improvements, each character can choose two base statistics or skills to increase. The former means the usual strength, intelligence, dexterity, etc.; the latter allows an increase to "Pick Locks," "Spot Traps," "Disarm Traps," or "Critical Hits." I think that each of these also increases by a small amount with each increase in character level, and the amount I can increase these skills seems to be random for each character and at each training session. For example, my Teddy thief, Ruxpin, has the choice to increase Pick Locks by 8%, but Critical Hit chance by only 1%. My party has continued to be clobbered by traps, so I decide to take two increases to "Disarm Traps," bringing him up to 44%. I boost Tyrion’s strength by two so he earns an extra damage bonus. Cleric Becket increases strength (so he can eventually wield a weapon) and wisdom to increase his total magic points. Finally, my mage Kizke increases his dexterity (for extra to-hit and armor bonus) and intelligence (again, for more magic points). At least as important as all these increases is that essentially everyone’s total hit points have doubled. That first leveling-up is so often the sweetest.

     

Every Teddy who's been good is sure of a treat today.

    

Having reached character level 2, we descend again to the second level of the catacombs. The enemies are palpably easier now, and we win our battles without much trouble. In one particularly satisfying bout, Tyrion backstabs a Troglodyte to deal 40 damage. Now we’re talking! The biggest danger continues to be not monsters, but traps. After defeating some ogres, we find a locked chest and have Ruxpin try to pick it. This of course sets off a "Psychic Drain" trap, removing 200 experience points. Luckily he remains at Level 2. This is only karma, though, since I had suffered a previous full-party death after a similar, earlier experience. We stick with it and move on.
      
Though the catacombs are filled mostly with monsters, there are a small number of special squares that typically contain some short message or encounter. Mainly these take the form of cryptic messages, such as “Do not enter” (near the northwest corner), “Watch your step” in a twisty maze to the southwest, and “The third is older than the oldest dragon” at the center of the twisty-passage maze; also a separate pair of messages, first “Choose right over left” and later “but never more than twice.” We also find a “fine weapon” in a glass case, and are asked what we want to do. We’re out to save the world, so we break the glass and find a sturdy longsword +1; unfortunately, the only two characters strong enough to wield it already have equivalent or superior weapons. We’re told that "Surprisingly, no alarm is set off" which seems suspicious, but if there was any consequence I never saw it.    

      

A relatively rare role-playing choice.

      

We also encounter a higher density of squares with various negative effects. First are trap squares; these have a chance to be detected upon entering the square. If detected, a character can attempt to disarm the trap or the party can simply retreat to the preceding square. Ruxpin continues to spring traps right and left, either without detecting them or when attempting to disarm them. Some of these have a chance to be dodged, such as crossbow bolts or darts. Some affect only a single character, such as the "Psychic Drain" trap. Others affect everyone in the party, sometimes quite severely: falling into a pit of spikes, being choked by a gas cloud, or setting off a bomb trap. Through trial and error, I discover the immense power of the "Trap Zap" spell, which removes any traps in the three squares directly ahead of the party. Not only that, but the spell updates the automap to show the location of the zapped traps—even if a closed door is between us and the trap. In one case the spell even alerted me to the presence of a one-way door that I wouldn’t have been able to re-enter.

We had also already encountered magical darkness; this causes any magical "Light" spells to cease, and it temporarily blocks the effect of any lanterns or torches. The automap still fills in automatically though, so there’s not too much danger of getting lost. Then there are Magic Drain squares. These sound simple enough: every party member loses one magic point in the square. Not too bad. The trick is that the one-point loss is incurred by almost every action in the square: turning, looking at the automap, viewing a character’s inventory or statistics, etc. It’s still not any sort of deal-breaker, but one has to be alert. After more mis-steps than I care to enumerate, we discover that the “right before left” clue applies to a set of trapped one-way corridors on the eastern side of the level, and we descend to Level 3 of the catacombs.
     

I forgot that I meant to go and explore those black squares.

    

Down the stairs, I encounter the first new monster types in over ten hours of gameplay. As before, the same two types always appear together but in variable numbers. These include trolls and orcs, goblins and kapich (suggestions welcome on this one!), and crocodiles and gremlins. Many of these enemies hit significantly harder, have more hit points (up to 45 or so for trolls), and have up to three armor points apiece—but even fairly large packs still don’t tend to do much damage. In particular, Tyrion's two-handed silver sword starts to really prove its worth against larger enemies. The spoils of victory also increase, with up to 15–20 experience points per character, and 150 gold, per battle.
        
We also meet our first undead: zombies and skeletons, who are always found in the company of an evil mage. Poor Becket finally proves his worth: between him and Durkon, their first ten invocations of “Turn Undead” banish the undead, one by one, without fail. With each invocation, a scratchy voice calls out “Begone, creature of evil.” The evil mages are potentially dangerous: they can cast "Armor Enhance," “Magic Missile,” and even “Sleep.” But as with all monsters so far, the AI is relatively dim, so the battles aren’t as strategic as they might otherwise be. At first I worry that I need silver weapons to physically harm the undead (we received a hint about this), but it doesn’t seem to be a problem with skeletons or zombies. These enemies ultimately don’t pose much of a threat. That’s just as well, because there are lots of combats and I often find myself fleeing whenever given the chance, which usually succeeds. By this point some enemies drop chain mail when defeated. It offers the same armor bonus as leather +1, but requires more strength to wear. I’m not sure of the tradeoffs involved, but we stick with the leather. Eventually our inventories all filled (each item takes up the same space; only arrows stack) and we just start dropping torches, cloth armors, daggers, and knives behind us. I could be wrong, but it starts to feel that after the initial 5–10 hours the economy has started to break.   

           

Turning undead rarely fails to satisfy.

      

The third floor is also chock-a-block with traps and message squares. We trip a gas trap, which knocks us all pretty low; shortly thereafter we stumble unexpectedly into a BOMB trap, which knocks out everyone but Becket and Tyrion. We spend a quarter-day healing and resting to recover magic points. So far the 1000-day time limit doesn’t seem too oppressive; I hope that I won’t later find that I’ve been resting too liberally. Also near the stairs, we learn that "The final must be found, to reach the Other Side" and that "There is more than one way to skin a cat." Then we are told that "A magic mouth on the door demands 'Speak the words in sequence to enter.'" Alas, Tolkien leads me astray because THE WORDS IN SEQUENCE and variants thereof fail to open the door. We keep exploring and find several additional messages: "The second is wide as a river," "The first is not closed," and "There is always a safest route." 

    

You'll have to use your imagination; graphical special encounters are rare.

     

We also discover what seems to be the roughly one unique encounter per level. We enter a new square and are suddenly told: "A scantily-clad woman is bound and gagged in this corner of the room. She looks up and sees that you are not Kamazol's evil minions, come to do what dastardly deeds they might desire. She motions for you to free her. Do it? (Y/N)." We think about it, eventually deciding that in a game written by a teenage boy such an encounter can only have a positive end. So:
        

You untie the woman and remove the gag. She smiles, and begins to open her mouth, as if to thank you. It is then that you catch a glimpse of her wicked fangs. You have fallen into the trap of the Pennagalan, a vampiress. You have but moments to react before she is upon you.

       

Playing in 1994, I would have thought this was just a strange, made-up name and moved on. In 2025, I learn that this is a type of Malay undead—a witch who meditates in vinegar and learns to float her head off of the body, trailing the organs behind. Wow, what a Halloween costume that would make! In any case, we immediately start combat. With 68 HP and 2 Armor Points, she’s the single toughest enemy we’ve faced to date. But she’s alone, and though Magic Missiles seems to do only 2 damage per casting, Tyrion critically hits her and we defeat her. 

      

The killing blow. I'm not sure why Tyrion "hits 2 times."

       

After exploring the rest of the floor, we’re forced to confront the magic-mouth doorway again. I don’t do a good job of consulting my notes, because I forget that we had heard on the second floor that "The third is older than the oldest dragon" and I don’t even recognize that "The final must be found, to reach the Other Side" is part of the clue. Without realizing that the answer is four words, we’re doomed: Open wide, open sesame, open sky; none of these work. Thankfully, a quick text search suggests that the main program file contains all dialogue as plain text; that could be handy to know, for later! It shows me that the answer is (OPEN WIDE ANCIENT PORTAL), and we are told that "You may pass. Enter at your own risk." 

   

We enter, but it isn’t particularly more risky than other regions we’ve already explored. It’s yet another large room filled with traps, darkness, and magic-loss squares. Liberal casting of "Trap Zap" lets us make easy and relatively safe headway, now that I understand how it works. We pick a final lock to find that we have gone through a one-way door, and are told that "There is no turning back now." 
    

The magic  mouth is a special square just  about in the center.

     

A few steps beyond, and through another one-way door, we see the screen at the top of this posting: "You have reached the living quarters of the evil Macabath himself. Foul potions line the walls of the room, and body parts sit in vials, no doubt for future experimentation . . ." Macabath then surprises me by propositioning us: "Welcome, brave ones. I am impressed that you have outwitted all my traps and puzzles." He takes a step back. "How would you like to join me? With your strength and wisdom, and my magic, we could rule Smythetown forever!" I was excited and hoped for a real role-playing choice here. But alas, with no chance for user input the game forces words into our mouths: "Never, vile wizard. Your curse on this city shall be removed, by your death." We then find ourselves in combat with six orcs (~10 HP and 3 armor), six kapich, (~15 HP and 2 armor), and Macabath himself (100 HP and 3 armor). We whittle away most of the little green minions, surround Macabath, and start up some solid backstabs . . . and then crash back to DOS, with "Sound Card Error #210."  

     

The full battle map that I stitched together.

       

Irritating, but luckily we had of course saved right outside of Macabath’s quarters. This time, enemies start in somewhat different locations; there are only 10 minions instead of 12; and best of all there are no crashes. The trick is not to get mobbed by the little green guys, who can otherwise prevent access to Macabath while he casts spell after spell. In this case, the combat is surprisingly straightforward. We make short work of them all, and Tyrion again delivers the killing blow: a backstab with a two-handed silver sword that does 68 damage. But amusingly, the battle isn't over until we mop up one last orc, who was hopelessly stuck marching up and down in the easternmost corridor. We receive 145 experience each and 1206 gold pieces.
     
We are told:

       

Congratulations on defeating the evil wizard Macabath. Now the curse on Smythetown has been lifted, and you may leave the city to begin your true quest (once you register of course). If you haven't registered yet, you must do so now in order to leave the city.

         

We can’t backtrack, so we step forward: "You feel a sudden, jerky motion and before you can comprehend what has happened, it is over. You find yourself back at the entrance to the catacombs." That was handy!
       
Life is good. It has taken our party 21 days of game-time to defeat three levels of dungeon. The manual says that the game has 22 dungeon levels, so if we can keep this pace up, clearing them all before the 1000-day deadline should be no trouble. Everyone has enough experience to level up; we have over 4000 gold and nothing to spend it on; and the citizens even pulled down Macabath’s ridiculous statue in the town square. Although I’m excited to head out and explore the world, I recall that we learned in the catacombs that "An evil Wizard can only truly be slain with a magic spell." Have we forgotten something? 

     

A world that responds to our actions is always welcome.

     

Time played: 22 hours. 5 party deaths. 2 reloads, 2 crashes. 

    

****

   

Previous entry in this series

     

Next entry in this series 

   06/13/2026