Armageddon (MUD)
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Armageddon is a low fantasy MUD, influenced heavily by both the Dark Sun game setting and the Dune novels. It began in 1991 as a DIKU-Based MUD and was intensively customized and modified since. Armageddon is coded mainly in C, with elements of Javascript.
While still sharing some elements (Dark Sun's muls and templars, and Dune's spice, and merchant & noble houses), the MUD generally moved away from its roots by numerous original additions being made over the years, such as the Shadow, Lightning, and Void Elementalist classes, and the implementation of sub-classes. Armageddon is one of the three highest-ranked RPI MUDs online, the other two being Harshlands and Shadows of Isildur.
Armageddon, like others of its type, differs from most MUDs in that it has no levels to be gained; a player's fighting prowess, like his abilities of woodcrafting or bartering, is measured entirely by skills which rise individually and invisibly by in-game use. Another important aspect is that of character death, which is a one-time-only, permanent thing. While players in most Hack and Slash MUDs tend to have three or fewer characters throughout a multi-year career, players on Armageddon can go through ten or even twenty times that number in the same amount of time, as there are no character resurrections and the game world is brutally lethal, both because of the man-eating beasts roaming the world and of the ruthless humanoids that populate the city-states. There are simple reasons given for both of these features (skill-level invisibility and permanent death): power levels and skill percentages tend to seriously detract most players from roleplaying realistically, and true fear of death cannot develop when murder results in a minor inconvenience to the victim character.
As opposed to many MUDs, Armageddon allows only a single character at a time, and uses an account system in order to associate each character with its owner. A player's account also acts as a sort of personal record, storing staff comments about the player as well as a general measurement of trust - 'Karma' as it's called there. Karma allows a player to create a character using restricted classes and races, most notably magick-users.
When Armageddon began it didn't have a Karma system in place, allowing any player to play any race or class. However, as the staff began to focus on the roleplay flourishing in Armageddon, it put in place a Karma system around the year of 1997, where races and classes were split across various levels. This restricts new players to a basic range of races and classes until a staff member gives them access to a higher level, which is done when the player shows herself trustworthy and capable of playing other classes or races correctly.
A staple, if widely disliked feature of Armageddon, was the Saturday downtime, where the MUD was closed to regular players in order to allow the staff to update and do maintenance work. This policy has been removed thanks to the addition of code allowing stable hotfixes. Armageddon is sometimes seen as bureaucratic - the guidelines for each staff member are very strict.
Armageddon was also the first MUD to add the 'think' command, which allows one to silently express the thoughts of their characters without sending them to everyone in the room. The 'feel' command, similar to 'think', has also been added recently.
External links
- [Armageddon Website]
- [Armageddon Forums]
- ArmageddonMUD itself is located at: telnet://ginka.armageddon.org:4050
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