TorilMUD

TorilMUD
Developer(s)	Kris Kortright, project community
Engine	Sequent
Platform(s)	Platform independent
Release date(s)	1996
Genre(s)	Dungeons & Dragons MUD
Mode(s)	Multiplayer
Media/distribution	Online
System requirements Telnet client or MUD client, Internet access

TorilMUD is a DikuMUD, a text-based online role-playing adventure game, and is one of the oldest of its kind. At its peak in the 1990s it had hundreds of players online at any one time. As of 2012 10 to 30 players are on line, mostly experienced, skilled players. Players on TorilMUD may have a number of characters, however, they cannot play more than one at a time. The atmosphere is friendly and helpful.

Game characteristics

TorilMUD is set in the Forgotten Realms Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting. (Toril is the name of the planet where the continent Faerûn, which "Forgotten Realms" refers to, is located.) Its technical infrastructure is based on the Sequent derivative of the DikuMUD codebase.

History

TorilMUD originated as a project fork of Sojourn MUD, which was founded in 1993 by Kris Kortright, Tim Devlin and others who had previously worked on Copper II, Copper III and Black Knights Realm. The oldest zone on TorilMUD, the Lava Tubes, comes from Copper II, and the Underworld and Alterian Wilderness zones are from Black Knights Realm.

Sojourn was based on the Sequent codebase, the Epic spell system, and areas from Black Knights Realm. The City of Waterdeep was the first zone built entirely for Sojourn, and remains TorilMUD's most heavily populated hometown. Brad McQuaid, with Kris’ permission, used it as the model for the city of Freeport in EverQuest.

Sojourn continued until 1996, when a difference in creative vision among the staff led to the project being forked into TorilMUD and Duris: Land of Bloodlust. Of the two, TorilMUD is regarded as the more direct inheritor of Sojourn's legacy. Toril continued until 1998, when it became Sojourn 2, and underwent another rebirth in 2001 as Sojourn 3. Kris retired in 2003, and Sojourn 3 was reborn as TorilMUD. (Or, as the old-time players refer to it, Toril 2.) Throughout these rebirths, the areas and code continued to grow: there are currently 300 zones (with several more nearing completion), 16277 types of monsters/mobs, and 13753 different items.

Many TorilMUD staff members were staff on Sojourn 3, Sojourn 2, and some are even from Toril 1, providing a degree of continuity. All Toril staff started as players on the MUD, giving them a great deal of personal experience with the game.

Brad McQuaid was an avid player of Sojourn and, after its demise, TorilMUD. Seeing the commercial potential of virtual worlds in the course of his MUD career, he went on to create EverQuest.

Character Creation

Names

Naming your character requires choosing a suitable and unique fantasy name appropriate to the race. Silly names, actual names, and actual words are all prohibited in character names.

NOTE: You can complete character creation by selecting a generic name from the name generator choices. Once you are ingame, you can petition the staff and ask for a name change and then select any suitable name that you can think of. Normally this must be done by level 20.

Stats

Rolling: During character creation you may roll endlessly until a set of stats are acceptable, then 3 stat bumps may be applied to stats of your choosing.

Restat: After character creation, one time only, you may use the Restat command to change your stats with a point-buy system. This will reset all of your stats to a base 70 and then allow you to increase stats of your choosing with a pool of points. The higher you buy a stat though, the more expensive the point cost.

• Strength: Affects how much weight you can carry and give you bonus to Damroll.

• Dexterity: Gives bonus to Hitroll.

• Agility: Gives bonus to Armor Class.

• Constitution: Gives bonus to Hitpoints.

• Power: (Generally unused)

• Intelligence: Lowers Spell Memorization times for mages.

• Wisdom: Lowers Spell Memorization times for priests.

• Charisma: Affects store prices.

Alignment

Alignment can restrict which items you can use, which creatures you encounter that will be aggressive to you, and possibly even where you are allowed to go.

There are 2 aspects to your alignment, with 3 options each:

• Order: Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic

• Morality: Good, Neutral, Evil

Changing Alignment

While you will select an alignment combination from the options available to your race/class at character creation, you may later change your alignment during gameplay through special alignment quests.

Races

Unity Grouping: Whereas there used to be a restriction preventing grouping between the Good Races and Evil Races, in October 2011 those restrictions were removed with the introduction of Unity.

Innate Abilities: Some races have passive innate abilities such as infravision or ultravision, and some races even have invoked innate abilities such as levitate or faerie fire.

• Good Races
  • Human
  • Barbarian
  • Moon Elf
  • Half-Elf
  • Shield Dwarf
  • Gnome
  • Halfling

• Evil Races
  • ​Drow Elf
  • Duergar Dwarf
  • Illithid
  • Yuan-Ti
  • Ogre
  • Swamp Troll
  • Orc
  • Half-Orc

Hometowns

Each race has a hometown which the character begins and some races have more than one hometown that they may choose from.

• Waterdeep: Humans
• Baldur's Gate: Humans
• Calimport: Humans
• Silverymoon: Humans
• Leuthilspar: Elves (Evermeet)
• Ashrumite: Gnomes
• Mithril Hall: Dwarves
• Griffon's Nest: Barbarians
• Beluir: Halflings
  • Map of Beluir
• Ghore: Trolls
• Faang: Ogres
• Bloodtusk: Orcs
• Hyssk: Yuan-Ti
• Dobluth Kyor: Drow (Underdark)
• Menzoberranzan: Drow (Underdark)
• Gloomhaven: Duergar (Underdark)
• Ixarkon: Illithids (Underdark)

Scardale: This is the newbie town, all new characters can go to this zone until level 20. To return to your race's hometown, type recall followed by enter toril.

Map of Scardale

NOTE: Storage in the inn in Scardale, or equipment from a corpse in Scardale cannot be retrieved once you are level 20 as you can no longer recall to Scardale.

Underdark: Some evil races live in a vast underground world. These areas are significantly more dangerous than the above ground hometowns, and are intended for advanced players.

Evermeet: The Island of Elves is a place that is separated from the rest of the world. Players that start here will not be able to leave (Except to go to Scardale) until level 20.

Classes

Chosen when a character is created, your class will define your skills and abilities.

There are many classes, divided into 4 general categories:

Fighters

• Warrior: These are the tanks that excel at surviving attacks and rescuing their groupmates.
  • TorilMUD Warrior Guide
• Paladin: A holy knight with some warrior skills and also some priest spells.
• Anti-Paladin: An unholy knight with some warrior skills also some evil priest spells.
• Ranger: Primarily archers, with some good 2-weapon ability, some warrior skills, and a few nature spells.
• Dire-Raider: Evil archers, similar to rangers except their spells are more like shamans.

Thieves

• Rogue: Thieves who excel at sneaking, hiding, stealing, and make excellent assassins.
• Bard: Magical singers whose various songs have many effects. Also receive a small number of rogue skills as well as a small selection of mage spells.
  • "TorilMUD Bard Guide"
• Battlechanter: Very similar to the bard, with a slightly different selection of spells and equipment allowances, due to their slightly more barbaric nature.

Priests

• Cleric: The best healers in the game.
• Druid: Nature priests with some healing spells, some damage spells, and a variety of utility spells.
• Shaman: Able to summon a spirit animal, they also possess a combination of healing, attack and status affecting spells.

Wizards

• Enchanter: A supportive mage who excels at casting protective magic on allies.
• Invoker: An offensive mage that is extremely focused on damage attack spells.
• Illusionist: A tricky mage who has a combination of many interesting spells.
• Elementalist: Able to summon elementals and cast elemental attacks spells.
• Necromancer: A mage who is primarily focused on animating corpses to serve them as pets.
• Psionicist: Not technically a mage, they have potent mind powers capable of devastating psychic attacks. They also can dominate particularly weak creatures, who will then serve any command the player gives them, and ultimately they drain such pets to feed their psionic points.

Remort

There is also a special remort class that can be quested by a high level character of the suitable class:

• Lich A necromancer that has advanced to become an undead creature themselves, and the ultimate master of necromancy.

Game play

TorilMUD offers exploration, quests, and both solo and group gameplay, adventures. Prior to playing most players would want to toggle wimpy to an appropriate number of hit points and toggle "vicious" on. Vicious permits killing of mobiles; if it is not on the player cannot deliver the final blow and get experience for the kill. The command "toggle" brings up a number of options.

Getting started

Even if your race has infravision you can't actually see in the dark. Luckily your newbie book is lit, so hang on to it. Eventually you will run into a room with water. Buying a canoe, or even keeping a plank, will eventually be helpful. Lit articles or equipment is marked "illuminated."

Commands

• Score: This command will show you certain stats about your character, such as your money, your experience, and what spells are affecting you.
• Att: Attribute is a command that shows you more info about your character, such as stats, AC, hitroll, damroll, and saving throws.
• Tog: Toggle lists certain game settings that you can turn on and off, such as chat channels, wimpy (which sets how much hp you auto-flee at), and vicious (which makes you auto-finish mortally wounded enemies.
• Kill/Hit: These 2 commands are interchangable, and are used to initiate combat with a target.
• Mem: Memorize is a command that must be used by spellcasters to prepare their spells. All casters must be resting to mem, and mages must also have a spellbook in their inventory. If used while standing, this command will simply show you a list of prepared spells and spell pending memorization.
• Flee: This command is used to get out of combat and will send you in a random direction to the next room.
• Search: has a chance to reveal hidden items, creatures, or exits in the room. You can also find hidden items that are within containers by search <container>.

Grouping

NOTE: Certain spells and abilities, such as bard's song only affect players that are grouped.

• Experience: All groupmembers in the room during a kill will split the experience gained.

• Gsay: A chat channel that is heard only by your fellow groupmembers.

• Consent: By consenting to the group leader, you can be enrolled in a group. Consent can be used from anywhere in the world.

• Follow: By following a group leader, you can be enrolled in a group. Follow can only be used in the same room as the leader.

• Max: There is a maximum of 15 players in any group.

Leaving and reentering the game

• Rent: Normally the way a player leaves the game is by renting in an inn. Inns are found in all home towns and in other cities. Renting is free for low level players. Your entire inventory and equipment is stored. On reentering you are still wearing your equipment. Storage may also be rented where extra equipment may be stored. Equipment may be transferred in an inn between multiplayers; this is the only exception to the prohibition on multiplaying.

• Camp: If you are outside of a city, and away from significant zones, you may also use the camp command to set up a temporary save spot, but this will take a minute of gametime before you leave the game.

• Quit: Using the quit command is not recommended, as you will drop all of your items on the ground if you do and will reenter at your start location rather than the spot you quit.

• Linkdead: You can instead just sever your connection to the game to go linkdead and you will disappear into the void, preserving your gear. However the best way to leave the game as stated above, is renting. For purposes of interpreting multiplaying rules a linkdead character is considered to be in the game.

See also

TorilMUD has a retro evil twin with much of the same DikuMUD coding, DurisMUD, which styles itself "Land of bloodlust." "Welcome to Duris, Circa 2001!"

External links

• Official website
• Todrael's Lair, the Unofficial TorilMUD Wiki (Somewhat out of date. Does not include the Unity modifications)
  • Newbie guide (Somewhat out of date. Does not include the Unity modifications)
• TorilMUD Forums
• Searchable equipment stat generator
• TorilMUD page Mud Connector
• telnet torilmud.com 9999
• TorilMUD News
  • Twitter account TorilNews
• Software tickets and reported bugs
• Facebook Group "TorilMUD/Duris/Sojourn MUDders Unite!
• "Summer Reruns – TorilMUD June 28, 2012"
  • "Pwipe – Death or Rebirth? April 15, 2007"
  • "15 Years of TorilMUD October 24, 2008"
• Simple road map of TorilMUD
• Maps
• Yarash's Mages' Sanctuary