Text RPGs have been around since the 80s. Most people think they died with the dial-up era. We've been running five of them continuously since 1997, and we're still adding to them.
Free to play. No download. #MUD#TextRPG
Every MMO has a graphics layer and a system layer. The system layer is a MUD with a different paint job. We've been running ours since 1997. #MUD#IronRealms
@lotannaWhite Yep, that's the whole thing. A scar on the lore only means something once it's been a real player's doing and the world's old enough to remember it.
Most games go quiet eventually. Text games have been running since the 80s. Same world, same history, decades of decisions that actually stuck. What's the oldest game world you've spent time in? #MUD#TextRPG
The Iron Realms newsletter just got more interesting. Promo codes are landing in select issues, alongside devblogs and event previews from five worlds. Free to subscribe.
https://t.co/qAsAO3dWk1
@lotannaWhite Exactly. The paint wears off in a week, but you're still wrestling with the systems years later, and that's the part that actually keeps people around.
Saw this on Bluesky: 'playing FFXI and keep finding old MUD systems underneath its skin.' Yeah. Inventory grids, guild hierarchies, kill-on-sight rep, faction conflict. All text-game DNA. We just kept the text. #MUD#IronRealms
@RazorwireRPG Text games never had the option of hiding behind visuals, so the tone had to live in the writing. Turns out that constraint produces something. You can't paper over a flat world with a shader pass.
Pick any MMO. Look at how guilds work, how kill-on-sight rep feels, how the auction house runs. Then look at a MUD from 1995. Almost all of it was already there, running as text. #MUD#IronRealms
@Lensar_dawn Carrion Fields is one of the all-time great PvP MUDs, and the WoD MUSH scene basically wrote the playbook on online RP that the industry is still catching up to.