How I fell in Love with Reading by playing a MUD game in 2025
Part 1 : How I find out about MUD
I spend my summer playing old roguelike games like Angband, Brogue and PosChengband. I got recommended the game called Warsim: The Realm of Aslona and while looking at some video of the game on youtube a got recommended this video i didn’t think much of it until i really played some hours of Warsim: The Realm of Aslona and who really in love with how a simple text based game could grab my attention more than some big AAA game or even some of my favorite game. So I watched the video and was like are there still people playing this type of game, why and how ? So I went digging and find another video after watching I checked the comment section and find someone telling “I started on a mud in 96 and i still play it almost daily” and he responded to his comment with “Its a heavily modified source code, very one of a kind and the guy in charge is constantly online and adding stuff fixing stuff. Great place. Dark Wizardry if ya wanna see.” So now I have a game to try and play called Dark Wizardry.
Part 2 : Spending a night deep in the tutorial dungeon
Before telling you how my night went let me preface this by talking a bit about what Dark Wizardry is.
The website describe the game as the following : “Dark Wizardry is a true multi-class MUD allowing you to level in all 5 main classes (Warrior, Thief, Mage, Psionic and Cleric) at the same time, while specializing up to four times throughout your adventures in extra-classes such as a backstabbing Assassin, undead-conjuring Necromancers, peaceful earth-loving Druids, or many others!
You can explore our enormous world of over 100 custom areas, with almost no stock zones, completing countless quests and collecting artifacts and equipment from the furthest corners, and you can remort as one of 45 races, allowing you to unlock even more character levels, areas and equipment.”
Seems like a really in depth game with multi-class and of the good stuff right ? Well time to get started !
Lucky for us the game can be played directly in the browser so I went for that as it's my first time trying this type of game but I saw there is also a client you can download. So first I add to make my character, I choose his name, race and class. I went for a dwarf warrior named Nesasio and then I was faced with the game.. the interface was just a terminal like part and a map part (because hand mapping is a thing from the past i guess). I only have the name of the room my character was in and the description of it and nothing else, I was really curious about this because I have a really hard time reading book in life because I just never really get into it and get bored pretty quickly so I was nervous about what this type of game can offer for someone like me. I began by using the “read sign” command to read the sign that was in the room. The sign told me to get into the tutorial dungeon to learn about how the game works and how to play. The fact that you actually make use of the cardinal point to move is really nice and not gonna lie it manages to make travel very intuitive and I never felt lost during the tutorial (also thanks for the automapping thing on the right of the screen). I made my way through the end of the tutorial with relative ease and learn every syntax and thing to know as i go, after finishing the tutorial it was pretty late at night and decided to call it for the day and went to sleep but I was really enjoying the way the game as some many things to do without needing any type of graphical showcase it was just wall of text describing every thing my character who doing. I find that cool and all but I don't know if it was the setting or just me but i wasn’t really into it.. yet.
Part 3 : Voyage in Middle-Earth with a detour in 2064 Seattle
After my night with Dark Wizardry I felt pretty curious about how many MUD games still exist, so I went on a journey to find another setting that can grab me more and one where I have a more vague knowledge about it.
I came across MUME which stands for “Multi-Users in Middle-earth” and was immediately intrigued because I was wondering how they manage to make the world feel alive and immersive and how much of the Middle-Earth they actually made in the game. I downloaded their client because I didn’t want to play it in the browser this time, make my character (a Dwarf Warrior) and the game starts with a brief narrated section as a Tutorial and well.. It was actually really good and nicely paced. After that I can choose which town I should start in and choose Black Hill. I moved around the village and really immersed myself in this world that I kinda already knew and when it all started to click in my head I could feel that my interaction with this world felt like I was actually doing something ! I had a great time playing, I went into a mine gathering ore for an apprentice blacksmith, killed some snake for a hunter and interacted with the world along my travels.. all of that in a text-based fashion and I loved every single bit of it. After that I went and tried another one called AwakeMUD CE which is literally Shadowrun 3rd Edition in your Terminal and it blow my mind how deep this one way but I’m still really early in the game so i’m gonna talk much about it but it's really something you should check if you liked Shadowrun.
So now I know for sure that I actually like reading. It's just a matter of how I engaged with it.
I don’t really know how to end this other than thank you if you made it this far. It's actually my first time making something like this and I hope I did an ok job at it and that you kinda wanna try some MUD game for yourself.
