Daily Archives: December 15, 2023

Thirty Years of TorilMUD

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It seems strange writing about a 30 year old game.

Not that writing about old things is exactly something odd around here.  I have been writing about modems, Usenet, and jobs I had in the 90s of late.

The strangeness isn’t that TorilMUD is old.  I write about a lot of old games of the past.  It is more that it is still an active, going concern 30 years down the road from when I first started playing it.

TorilMUD – Since 1993… or 2003… a long time

Granted, there have been changes since late 1993, when a coworker of mine at Global Village said I had to try this new game he found online.  It started as SojournMUD in 1993, then split into TorilMUD and DurisMUD, the latter being PvP focused, in 1996.  Then the first Toril MUD shut down, then it came back as SojournMUD again in 1998, then was reborn again in 2001, then had another pwipe and came back as the current TorilMUD in 2003 when Kris Kortright, the original developer, moved on.

There was a lot of upheaval in the first decade of TorilMUD, and I did not come back after every pwipe.  There are no 1993 characters left, except possibly in some file backup somewhere.

So perhaps the interesting bit is that it has, as a game, survived for the last 20 years without another pwipe or reset.  When I log into it these days, which I do every couple of months, I see some of the same characters, or their alts, that I played with during my last true active era in the game, which was from 2003 pwipe up into the launch of EverQuest II, where a good chunk of our TorilMUD guild went off to play… though we kept playing TorilMUD for quite some time after that.

Not only does it survive and still have a small but dedicated player base, it gets updates.  I watch the web site and see new zones and new classes getting added from time to time.  Plus it went through a whole transition to a more modern interpretation of the Dungeons & Dragons play model, leaving behind 2.0 (we will always have THAC0) to adopt some closer to 5th generation and the options it affords.

Because, as its core, TorilMUD has always been a Forgotten Realms campaign, a MUD that in many ways brought to life the locations of the Faerun and the planes surrounding it.  I have ventured forth from Waterdeep to the Underdark and Baldur’s Gate and Calimport, and Mithril Hall, and Jotunheim, and the City of Brass, and many more in between.

I have written a whole series of experiences about the elves of Evermeet and their hometown of Leuthilspar, where I started my adventures back in 1993, as well as tales about other parts of the game, about how questing was back in the day and how I attempted vendor arbitrage at one point in the game, hauling bronze arm plates all across the countryside, some fun NPCs, how tightly held game information was back in the day, and even about Dartan and his portable hole and all it contained.

There are a lot of memories there.  A lot more for me than I have in EverQuest really, though EverQuest took most of its design cues from TorilMUD due to Brad McQuaid being an avid player, though some thing had to be modified to fit into a commercial, live ops virtual world.  Did EQ have full zone respawns at launch?  Or was that something else they needed to adjust.

As with many posts, I started out on this one not quite knowing where I would end up.  I thought it might be just a mention of the anniversary and maybe a list of links to some past posts.  Well, I’ve gotten the links in, and there are some prime tales at some of them.

But I can never tell just how much such memories will trigger when it comes to nostalgia.

In away, its closeness to EverQuest in my heart is much more than a shared origin.  They are both titles that I have a lot of emotion tied up in.  They are also both games that, when I started in on some tale of the past about I immediately start thinking about whether or not it is viable to go back, to start over again, to play through it all one more time.

It is tough.  As a text based game it is simplicity itself.  You don’t need a powerful processor or an up to date video card to play.  I think I first played on a Macintosh Quadra 800, my home machine at the time, and a Quadra 630, which was my desktop machine at the office.  I used a simple terminal emulator that only had ten configurable macro keys, but it supported full ANSI color.  And that was one of the things about TorilMUD, then and now, that it went all out on color in its text.

The names of your gear, for example, were colored to give you a sense of what they might look like.

All Slots Filled on my character… from back in the day

At one point I had the Macintosh PC Compatibility Card installed in my Mac… borrowed from one of their sales reps who I worked with at Global Village… so I could run ZMud, which was the premier MUD client of the day.  I had macros, triggers, maps, healing lists, buff stats, and a host of other functions.  I remember getting auto-rescue setup.  As a tank there was no real aggro mechanic and if a mob switched to one of your party, you had to use the “rescue” command to save them and get the mob back on you.

But is going back worth it?  If you think EverQuest was not very solo friendly, then Toril MUD was even less so.  And it is grindy, as leveling up is not very quest oriented at all.  It is more a matter of farming a zone of appropriate level with a group, splitting coin, and rolling on the occasional piece of gear that shows up.  You need two, a healer and a tank, to get anywhere, but add a mage to cast stoneskin and your horizons are considerably expanded.

In the end, when you get to level 50 and have done your class quests to get your special items, the reward is end game raiding, which are done in full, 16 player groups.  The bounty from raids can be great.  But they take time.

The problem is that text on the screen isn’t as clear as it once was, a rapidly scrolling text even less so.  At one point they were working on reducing combat spam, which can float dozens of lines up your screen with every round of combat.   And my old copy of ZMud… can I get it to work yet again on Windows 11?  But there are other MUD clients out there like MUDlet, and if I were to start over, it might be a thing to start from scratch rather than with a hoard of maps.  (There are even clients for iOS and Android, though I am not sure how that works.)

We shall see.  It calls to me, but I don’t answer calls like I used to.  Too many wrong numbers these days.  Makes me wonder why I even have a phone… metaphorical or otherwise… sometimes.

But I am still happy it is an option, that 30 years later it is still there and playable.  And it remains a massive place.  The current “world stat” command returns the following:

  • Total number of zones in world: 359
  • Total number of rooms in world: 68373
  • Total number of different mobiles: 20762
  • Total number of living mobiles: 49254
  • Total number of different objects: 20903
  • Total number of existing objects: 161689

That is a lot of stuff going on, and it is all Forgotten Realms.

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Past milestones with thoughts and links: