Main Page
with information about the Cygnus X-1 MORPGs.
This site, in time, will house information about things going on here - most likely to start things with Cygnus X-1, the "Old-School MORPG" games being setup for your enjoyment. For right now, this is a placeholder while I start piecing together information that will be useful and necessary. To prevent spambots from crapping things up I've disabled anonymous edits, as well as the ability for anyone to create accounts, but if you want an account to be able to edit things then contact me and I'll get you set up with one.
To start, here's a FAQ.
Contents
MORPG? Gesundheit.
What's a MORPG? Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. Let's break that down:
- Role-Playing Game, or RPG, is anything like Dungeons & Dragons or any kind of game where you play a character. RPGs sometimes focus heavily on the "role playing" aspect, while other times they lean on statistics like Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution, and Charisma. Ever play any of the Fallout series of games? The S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats come directly from that: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, Luck.
- Online, meaning it's played on teh Internetz and not just on your local computer. There's not many Online Role Playing Games that aren't also multiplayer, but technically playing a game of NetHack on a remote machine would count.
- Multiplayer, so more than one player is connected at a time.
What happens when you combine them all? You get a game where multiple people can connect at the same time, interact with one another, and play in an online world. Like, a MUD!
So what's a MUD?
A MUD is a multi-user dungeon. The idea is that multiple users could connect at the same time, and all of them could be playing the game together. There's out-of-band chatter, there's role playing, there's adventure, there's fighting (and maybe even player-vs-player or PvP), and most importantly there's camaraderie and friendship. Some people that I know played MUDs all through college and formed lasting friendships with those imagined avatars - remember, it was all text based, so your character's appearance was only as good as your ability to describe it!
Wait, then what's this TomeNET thing?
One of the original games that I introduced to my kids was NetHack. NetHack is based off of the game "Hack", which itself is based off of "Rogue", and thus falls into the category of RPGs called "Roguelikes". What's a Roguelike? The "Berlin Interpretation" of a Roguelike is basically:
- Random levels
- Permanent death
- Turn-based
- Grid-based
Modern games such as "Brut@l" and even "Spelunky" are considered Roguelikes (or perhaps "Rogue-lite" which usually comes into play when things like turn-based are not adhered to). And my kids love those games. So I introduced them to NetHack, which predates them all. They played with various tilesets and thought the game was pretty neat, and I thought why not have us all play at the same time? Of course multiplayer means breaking turn-based play (you don't all want to sit around waiting for one player to move before your move counts) but surely things have come around that account for that, right?
Thus we arrive on things like MAngband and TomeNET, both of which are Roguelikes that allow for multiplayer gameplay. They don't work over a simple 'telnet' interface like a MUD does, but they do still work over a text connection - which means the kids can connect to the server with their Chromebooks and run the client there, and you can run the clients on your own computer and connect to the server to join us.
Why?
Well, it started with an Atari. No, really.
My kids were interested in some of the old games I played, and one system that influenced me heavily was my Atari 800XL (and I have to thank Randy for my introduction to that). One game that I enjoyed playing was Jewels Of Darkness, a text-based adventure game which included some of the gems "you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike" and the magic word 'xyzzy'. I introduced these games to them, and they played some on Atari emulators and such. Then one day I mentioned the idea of a MUD to my son and he said, "I wish I could play on something like that."
Well why the hell not, I thought?
So, I went searching. I found various MUD programs and looked for one that was not only updated most recently (so more likely to have newer features and an active developer community) but also included some "default rooms" since one thing I don't have is time to write a full adventure. And I found "tbaMUD" which seemed to fit the bill nicely.
What's with the name Cygnus X-1?
In the constellation of Cygnus There lurks a mysterious, invisible force The Black Hole of Cygnus X-1 Six stars of the northern cross In mourning for their sister's loss In a final flash of glory Nevermore to grace the night
Why the name? Waaaay back when I first got interested in these things, there was a bulletin board near me called "Red Sector A" that did all things Rush. They eventually got into the Internets, and ran a MUD and a talker (a talker was like a MUD without the dungeon, and I ran one too - based on "Elsewhere Too" or EWtoo) one called Syrinx and one called Cygnus. I don't expect to start converting all of the stuff inside the game to fit inside a Rush universe from a 10- or 20-minute song, but I like the name, it doesn't appear to be in widespread use right now, and so there it is. A line from that song has also been in my email signature for close to two decades, so I kinda like it.
