Erryn's World RPG - Intro (Patreon)

With A Broken Pact finished, it's time to finally give that Erryn's world RPG I started so long ago a spot of attention. This thing actually has roots that go back way further than the start of Unbound Soul. I've mentioned the Discworld MUD* before, (go play it! It's great!) and way way back when C#3 had just discovered LINQ, I made a reimplementation of the FluffOS driver it runs on in C#. It never worked too well. (it could boot the discworld distlib and connect to intermud, which was cool, but a bunch of required features never worked and it never saw any actual use.) Since then, I've had several stabs at building a MUD in it (there was a pokemon one once. I was cute back then. ^.^) but none ever reached playable status. That original code base only lives on in the current code in a ship of Theseus sort of way, but if you're familiar with discworld, you'll see the little bits of influence immediately. (Or even the big bits of influence, like the entire colour scheme...) Of course, many things have changed, not least the fact that it's no longer a MUD. (An UD? A SUD? whatever you call it's it's no longer multiplayer.)

It's obviously not using C# 3 any more, either. It's built on .NET 6, now, so you'll need that available to run it. (For max compatibility, I'll stick to the oldest in-support LTS release of .NET.)

To use, extract the contents of the zip file somewhere. Doesn't matter where. On windows, run ErrynUI.exe, and you'll get a very basic MUD client. (numpad keys are bound to directions, but no niceties other than that.) On any other OS, or if you want to use a different MUD client, run Erryn.exe and it'll listen on 127.0.0.1 port 4242. (It will not accept remote connections, for security reasons, so you need to connect via loopback.) The client must be MXP capable and respond to an IAC WILL MXP message. I've only tested MUSHclient, but in principle I don't see why anything else wouldn't work.

This is a very limited demo. It contains two steps of character creation only; the first to pick your traits, and the second to pick your skills. Available traits are charismatic, dexterous, enduring, strong, very strong, wise and maybe, if you complete the stage in some way I didn't anticipate, quick. Available skills are concealment, basic cooking, basic farming, basic smithing and enlarged stamina pool. That second stage still needs lots more work; by the end of November, I plan to add basic tailoring, mana sense, inspection and weapon proficiency: dagger at the least. The eventual idea is for it to dump you in Dawnhold after character creation, where you can rush into the dungeon, help build the town, head out and do some farming, or whatever. I don't see myself ever getting that far, but it's nice to dream...

It's probably broken. Feel free to report bugs in the comments or on discord. If there's anything particularly nasty, I'll fix it before next Tuesday. (I noticed this morning that the 'commands' command crashed, which wasn't a great start... This post is a little late due to me taking the time to fix it. You'll certainly need that one in order to get going.) Anything not game-breaking I'll try to deal with next week.

*MUD stands for multi user dungeon. Go read the wikipedia page for the messy details about the differences between a MUD, MUSH, MOO, etc, but for the purposes of this post, the description 'text based RPG' will suffice.