If you like tabletop-style roleplaying games this is a perfect time to try out Avendar! We are a RP+/PK+ MUD in active development, releasing new areas, new mechanics, and new stories. Be a hero or villain. Rob the powerful. Topple states. Leave a mark on the world, or be marked. www.avendar.net

Avendar is BACK, and not only! Ice ghouls have long been a danger in the Brintor Mountains, their origins a mystery until now....... This mini-dungeon is full of traps and puzzles, with new loot, new lore, and a new group boss! are YOU adventurer enough to defeat the strong as fuck ice mummy??

Avendar.net is down pending security updates. The game is unaffected, only the wiki will be down. ETA unknown, it will depend on our host.

had a real breakthrough for the archive project in the form of server logs dating all the way back to 2003. that's like, six kinds of logging to parse now lol at this point all but the very earliest eras of avendar will be catalogued and plotted out by storyline and character. that's pretty neat :)

we love being doomed by the narrative right folks

The Ruin of Velsk is now available to explore. Located on the border of Earendam and Sythtys, this mixed community of humans and srryn has been destroyed by recent conflict. The area features eight new bosses, new items, and more. The story is ongoing, so if you want in, now is a great time. :)

for a lot of ppl ttrpgs are a proxy for actual socialization. but that's a horrible distortion of what they should be about. at their best ttrpgs are about making up a bunch of really fucked up guys and putting them in situations and laughing at them

I still have to do a writeup about Sythrak dropping the flaming chair of the patrician into the middle of the patrician's palace but. I feel like everything went well, on the whole.

why choose when you can have both :v

lauren@lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com · 3mo ago

if they're drinking nounwine it's fantasy. if they're snorting a verb it's sci fi

shunned storytelling so far is the art of making sure everyone gets exactly what they want and no one is happy about it

Also, there's an article about all the lead up to this up! Should have part 2 (religion, culture, government) up tonight, but much of the history is finally written! avendar.net/Republic_of_...

Elanthe@avendar.net · 3mo ago

Big things happening lately! Sythtys has begun to make diplomatic overtures to Earendam, and Patrician Vhiona is stirring up the old guard by considering it. Earendam and Sythtys have been at war for millennia... so why now? Does Vhiona think she can get the srryn on board with a western expansion?

Big things happening lately! Sythtys has begun to make diplomatic overtures to Earendam, and Patrician Vhiona is stirring up the old guard by considering it. Earendam and Sythtys have been at war for millennia... so why now? Does Vhiona think she can get the srryn on board with a western expansion?

we're bringing PK back in Avendar :) #MUD

as posted in discord, in the new build we're introducing a new version of the practice system. instead of each lineage receiving a static number of practices, practices will cost money. the cost will scale on level and training tier. every skill has 3 tiers.

Elanthe@avendar.net · 7mo ago

we should have a working model of the new practice system soon. curious to see how people interact with it.

New house powers for Raiders and Merchants tonight. Will have more posted in Discord and in-game soon. :)

recently tried a prototype NPC healer. the idea is to create a suite of NPCs for various roles to support groups of PCs where that role being missing more or less completely precludes doing some kinds of content. they are strong but not as good as hero-level PCs. gonna do some refinement soon.

we should have a working model of the new practice system soon. curious to see how people interact with it.

In the past I have attempted to remove my personal feelings from rules enforcement because that is what I thought fairness was but I think that I was wrong about that. if someone is being so consistently belligerent that our interactions with them are just poisoned, that itself is worth acting on.

GNU Terry Pratchett, whose words will echo long after we, and our children, and our children’s children have moved on thank you, as always, for making me a better person (quote from Reaper Man)

Rhianna Pratchett@rhi.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Happy birthday, Dad. Wish you were here. You’d know what to do. Or at least you’d know what to write. ❤️

Middlebrow media enjoyers rise up. We want art with complex stories and emotional nuance featuring characters with interiority and yes we also want them to solve a murder or be a spy or kill a vampire or something

lauren@lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com · 7mo ago

i think its okay to use it positively. im reclaiming midwit as a positive trait for people who can enjoy tv shows about lawyers

Really want to finish the lineage lore books (aka bookman) for the school of heroes this week. shuddeni is probably the biggest lift remaining. "what did the shuddeni do before the war of night?" uhhhhhhh,

It's a big #gamedev day with getting called bitchy by a player for attempting to explain design decisions he doesn't like. I will not be looking at prod or discord for a few days.

rapidly approaching the point at which I have to actually sit down and sketch out some fight specs and I Don't Wanna I know it won't actually take me that long now once I scrape it together but there's still plenty of manual work involved!

at what point in a work do they cease being OCs and simply become Cs

When I see a written description of a piece of art in a game and it is only about the subject of the art, with absolutely nothing about how the art itself looks, that's a poor description no matter how cool the subject was. It's like trying to read a novel with every third word blacked out.

I'm gonna work on a new guideline document for roleplay and plots. Feels like folks could benefit from guidance.

Finished the prototype of my shapeshifter mob that responds to natural language requests to transform into any lineage/gender combo. Most complex prog I've ever worked on by far and IT WORKS 🥳

Engaging imagination in ways like this is why we still love MUDs.

Bearji@bearji.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Been thinking about the use of imagination in video games lately, or how I feel there are few and increasingly fewer games that ask the player to use their imagination to engage with them. This post Kazuya Niinou wrote to accompany Etrian Odyssey often comes to mind so I decided to remake it.

LRP isn't totally true, I published three new articles today on the wiki

it do be like this sometimes