Playing with MUD
I have started building a new MUD. Meeting the Immortals in Melbourne tickled the nostalgia of an excellent MUD coder, Andrew South, the original Dragon Realms coder. It did not however do the same for the inventive and creative Kelly Grant, who was responsible for most of the DR history. That meant that Andrew had to find new people to cooperate with, and I am quite flattered that one of those he picked was me!

So now I am making up a new world. I love this part of the process. My head is filled with questions regarding the world: How does gravity work in a world made up of bits and pieces? Why don't characters die? (We agreed not to have true death, as that is just too frustrating for players to deal with.) What kind of travel is possible? What is the central piece of conflict? Here I am afraid that I am being too subtle. There is nothing black or white, so far. All of the administrators love that, as do the builders (great builders are drifting to the MUD, I have to hurry up and give them something to build!), but will this be playable? How large letters will we need to make the potential conflicts obvious to the players?

We are looking for more builders (and later on, administrators) though. The place needs a lot of work as we create it from the bottom up, and once it is open we will need administrators from all time-zones to answer questions, manage gaming, look out for abuse, approve of backgrounds, run quests and develop plots. If you happen to have spare time, love text-based role-playing, fantasy and want to spend hours making up descriptions for areas, please do get in touch! But for now we are piecing together fun bits and pieces, building a history, a theme and a fiction for others to play with and expand on - and I am goddess of the present, watcher of the pattern: the Weaver. Slipping into an online body is so very satisfying, it is a reward of its own, and I can't wait to get on with the roleplay!