Unity Live on TorilMUD

TorilMUD, the MUD I was playing back in 1993 is still going and still getting updated.

They have some new ANSI color at login

While work has been ongoing for almost a decade straight at this point, since the last big pwipe, with a lot of focus on making the game align with D&D 3.5/4.0 rules and lore (the whole thing was based on D&D 2.0 back when I started), the changes have been mostly evolutionary, tuning and improving what had gone before.

Not that some aspects haven’t changed a lot since 1993.

A lot of what passes for user interface in a text only game is more informative. For example, you can now see as a simple percentage how far you are into a given level. In the past you had to run to your guild leader, and he or she would only give you a cryptic message that changed every 10% you advanced. But much of the game nuts and bolts of the game look and feel as they have for nearly a decade.

The major exception has been new zones, which have continued to come online throughout the life of the game, constantly breathing new life into the game and expanding it to its current enormous size.

Now, however, things they are a changing. A new Unity update has gone live on Toril MUD which includes the following.

All racial grouping and spell casting restrictions have been lifted.
Dayblind has been replaced with a reflexive Daylight Adaptation power for all Underdark races. This power will allow them to see during the day in exchange for a hit roll penalty. This penalty is gone by level 20.
Half-Orcs have been added as a new PC race. They can be any class except Psionicists.
Vision code has been overhauled and restored to its previous state.
Mountain Dwarves and Grey Elves have been renamed Shield Dwarves and Moon Elves, respectively.
Trolls’ in-combat regeneration rate has been restored to what it was prior to this January, when it was accidentally downgraded.

Out of that, there are two big items. The first is racial unification, the “unity” after which this update has been named.

Racial Unification

All races and classes can group together freely in Unity. NPCs will respond to good and evil races in the same manner, and equipment can still be restricted to either side, but all characters are welcome to group with whomever they choose.

While role-play and theme are very important to us at TorilMUD we’ve decided that it is time to break the artificial barrier of the Race wars. Just as in tabletop D&D, your character is your character and you can now role play them as you see fit. All player characters are by definition extraordinary individuals who may find themselves in extraordinary situations that wouldn’t be appropriate for normal people. We hope everyone will enjoy this opportunity to forge your character’s own path.

Mixing of the races is a huge change from the old days. There was a time when one of my characters, a halfelf druid, was banished from all good aligned cities because he was caught casting a heal on an evil race character.

Now, while being an outcast kicked off a time that included some of my best adventures in the game, it was meant to be a punishment, a warning to others. If I had wanted to get back in the good graces of the gods and be once again able to walk to streets of Waterdeep, there was a set of demanding tasks I would have had to perform. Lucky for me I was having more fun running with the evil characters, living in the neutral city of Baldur’s Gate, and generally seeing more of the game than I ever had.

And the other big deal is a new race.

Half-Orcs

To celebrate the unification of the races, we’ve added a brand new player race called Half-Orcs. Here are some pertinent details:

Hometown in Baldur’s Gate

Can be any class except Psionicist

Small boosts to Strength and Agility

Small penalties to Intelligence and Wisdom

Innate power: Furious Assault

Can wear both evilrace and goodrace gear.

As was speculated about elsewhere, the penalty to intelligence and wisdom no doubt reflects genetics passing down genes from somebody who thought mating with an orc was a good idea.

But a new race is a rare thing indeed. I believe it has been more than 8 years since the last new race, orcs, came on the scene.

All of this made me want to log back on and just look around. But that lead me to another change they put in place a while back. Accounts.

For the first 17 or so years, each character was an account unto itself. Now, each player has a single account to which he can attach all of his characters.

Making a new account was easy.

Recalling passwords, some a decade old, was not.

I used to keep some of the passwords on my Palm IIIc back in the day. However, that device finally died about two years back, the battery unable to keep a charge. And the data management application that lets you read and edit what has been sync’d to your computer does not appear to run under Windows 7.

However, I did keep all the sync files, and have dragged them from computer to computer over the years. I was able to open up the memo pad data in Notepad++ and retrieve the password for my main character, Zouve.

The other character I am likely to play, a paladin with a holy avenger, is more recent than my last backup of the memo pad though. His password is encrypted in ZMud. I am going to have to figure out a way to get ZMud to spit that out so I can associate him with my account.

But TorilMUD still lives. There were about 50 people online when I finally got logged into the game. A far cry from a busy night in the old days, but a respectable number of players for such an old school game in the age of FarmVille.