Ragnarök (MUD)

Ragnarök is an interactive text-based online computer game, known as a MUD (Multi-User Dungeon). It was started in 1992 and housed on a server in Portland, Oregon. Ragnarök was intended to be themed in a world and time similar to Medieval Europe, but not actually intended to be set in any known land. As a result of development latitude given to younger creators of the game by the administration, many deviations from this intended theme have been produced, explained away by the lack of limitations of "magic" required to create areas.

Backstory and Inspiration

The main theme (as much as the MUD has a central theme) was inspired by The Compleat Enchanter by L. Sprague de Camp. One of the short stories in that book, The Roaring Trumpet, tells of the adventures of Harold Shea who lands unexpectedly in the middle of the time of Ragnarök in old Norse mythology. Klive, one of the original implementors of this MUD, found the idea of Norse myth to be a fascinating fantasy game setting. Furthermore, there is a striking resemblance between the fact that in the story, the characters use mathematics and symbolic logic to transport themselves from our modern-day world to these parallel realities, and how modern MUD players utilize computer technology to (mentally) transport themselves to the alternate fictional realities of the game. Harold himself is memorialized in the game by an NPC named Harald who wanders around the town talking to the players, and occasinally getting in the way of errant caber poles.

Origins and Early History

Ragnarök was created by four friends, known in the game as Klive, Rodolf, Skeezics, and Fizban. Klive had the original idea and put things in motion by borrowing the basic MUD library files from an older, then-defunct MUD hosted at Sequent, named "SquintMUD". Even back in 1992, that codebase was obsolete and required the LPMUD driver to run in backwards-compatibility mode to run. This would eventually, in the coming years, prove to be a fateful decision which has caused more problems than the effort of beginning then with a more modern implementation would have cost.

With this basic mudlib, including a church (recast in Ragnarök as the House of Bonder Sverre; the entry point in the game and where the ghosts of dead characters can go for resurrection), a little town, some surrounding wilderness, and a single quest ("Orc Slayer"). The town's streets and buildings were renamed and fixed up to align with Ragnarök's theme, and the game waited for people to become wizards and create more of it.

The first two players, Galadriel and Wulfblat, helped to review the world before the doors opened to the public. They each contributed realms of their own, as have the four founders and every wizard since. Wulfblat rose to the level of Demigod and did much to contribute to the mudlib implementation as well as his own loved and feared quests but eventually faded into inactivity as real life took over (a not uncommon fate of MUDders) Eventually all of the original founders left active participation in the game, except for Fizban. Galadriel remained, and, although somewhat more behind the scenes than publicly present within the game co-owns the MUD along with Fizban, who she is now married to (in the game and in real life).

The game has expanded significantly from these humble beginnings, to include over 75 realms contributed by various wizards, with over 45 specific quests to achieve.

The MUD administration created a new office after several years of operation, when Fizban and Galadriel knew they would not be able to directly run the game for a period of time. The office of Steward was given to the archwizard Carmatheon to manage the affairs of the MUD during this period. This mantle was passed to others, including Aedin and Tasha, before Fizban returned to full activity again, making Steward more of an honorary title but still keeping the charge to act in the stead of the higher-ranking admins in their absence.

Later Developments and Problems

Rag (as Ragnarök is commonly referred to within the player community) underwent a series of technical changes over the years of its operation. It began life running on a Sun SPARCServer 470 (Solaris). When that hosting situation became unavailable, Fizban took the game code and set up an Intel i386-based IBM PC running FreeBSD. A local ISP, Teleport, provided colocation services to host the system. Eventually it moved from there to a series of Intel Pentium and Pentium 4 PCs, and moved from FreeBSD to Ubuntu Linux.

One unfortunate fall-out of these system upgrades was that the very old driver, which by now has been very thoroughly customized and hacked, was so old (and non-compliant with ANSI C standards), it simply would no longer compile and run successfully on a modern OS. Eventually, by mid-2007, it broke fatally. Caught between the choice to run on an outdated OS (with potentially serious security bugs) or working to upgrade the game itself, the latter route was taken. Unfortunately, this has taken longer than expected, and as of this writing (October, 2008) Ragnarök is still down for maintenance. Work is still underway to bring it up on a new LDMUD driver with a major mudlib rework so that compatibility mode is no longer necessary, and so that Ragnarök can keep up with driver upgrades as they come out.

Current Status

Ragnarök came back online in November, 2009.

Game Features

Basic gameplay

Gameplay is mostly achieved via basic and often intuitive commands. For example, typing "n" would cause a player to go north, "s" would cause the player to go south, and so on. Weapons, armor, and objects are also typically very easy to use, and when their use is not obvious, a player need only examine the object to gain insight into its use. The basic objective of the game is to kill monsters and complete quests to advance in levels, until level 20. Death carries a penalty of the loss of one level, unless a player is already at level 1, in which case, the player retains his or her current level.

At level 20, the player has technically won the game. It is at this point the player is known as an initiate, and must make a decision regarding his or her future. If the player decides to continue on the current path, he or she becomes a hero, and a new adventure begins (the player is automatically advanced to level 21 and achieves full hero status). If the player decides to become a wizard, he or she will participate in development of new areas, objects, etc. and will automatically advance to Apprentice Wizard (level 60). Apprentice wizards must develop an entire area which must be approved by a sponsor wizard (at least sage) to be promoted to full wizardship.

Quests

In addition to simply [...] monsters, there are a number of quests that a player must complete in order to advance in level. The first quest, Newbie School, seeks to teach new players the fundamentals of play. Other quests are not designed to teach players about gameplay, but are instead designed to test players' critical thinking skills and gameplay acuity. Each level has its own quest point requirements.

Levels

On a broad scale, levels in Ragnarök are the quickest way to determine the role or status of a player or wizard.

Unique Features

Every MUD has a certain set of features which distinguish it from other similar systems, and will attract people who like those features (and repel those who like something different). The following are the main points which describe the flavor of this MUD, for purposes of comparison.

Emphasis on friendly atmosphere. Rag is intended to be a meeting place for friends, and has developed a somewhat close-knit player community. Aggression between players ("player [...]"), or other harassment of other players, is not allowed in this game.

Room descriptions are, by administrative mandate, required to be full and meet a certain standard of quality. The four founders were particularly against walking into a room and seeing, "You are in a room. There is a rock here." And examining the rock yields, "It's a rock." A style of prose reminiscent of the old Infocom games is the ideal.

Proportional XP awards. When a group of people gang up to fight a monster together (particularly players whose levels differ widely), the experience points given to each player are proportional to the amount of damage each individual dealt during the battle.

Lockers are provided for players to store equipment and treasure between play sessions.

The "magic map" provides a graphical map of all the realms a player has explored to date. The realm authors compose this map (it's not automatically generated), and can vary from simple schematic room diagrams up to detailed floor plans with illustrations.

Party support in the game allows groups of players to band together, making it easier to keep together when exploring and engaging in combat as a group.

Guilds in Ragnarök embody in one entity a rough combination of the concepts of "race", "class" and "clan" as other games might call them. Players all begin in the Adventurer's Guild but can choose freely to join other guilds. Some have special requirements for joining, some have penalties for leaving, but each give a particular added flavor to the way a character is played. Examples include Faeries, Elementalists, and Ninja.

Client Support

Ragnarök is generally compatible with MUD client software. It is known to work with ZMUD, although player rules prohibit use of client automation features such as triggers. Rag will also function reasonably well with a simple telnet connection to the game server. For best results, a client should display text in a fixed-witdh font of 80 characters or more across, with support for ANSI escape sequences. (Ragnarök can be configured to suppress ANSI codes, but the game does make significant use of colored text.)

Rag also offers its own client specially written for this game, called "MSH" (short for "MUD SHell"). This is primarily intended for wizards, and adds enhancements related to editing and maintaining game source files used to implement realms. It does have a basic player client capability as well, and while it was planned to include macros, triggers and an in-line display of the magic mapper and other graphic content, those upgrades have not materialized yet.

ANSI Codes

Specifically, a client needs to handle ANSI color codes ($[n;...;nm), including foreground (3n), background (4n), bold (1), underline (4), and reverse video (7), as well as reset (0) modes; cursor home ($[nH); and clear screen ($[nJ) commands; where "$" denotes the escape character (0x33). Additionally, Ragnarök reserves the escape sequence $[K~~...~~ for its own extensions. These are supported by MSH and could be put into plugins for other clients.

Notable / Active Wizards

Throughout the history of the game, several people have made significant contributions to the geography and makeup of gameplay. Some notable and active wizards are detailed below:

Media Articles about Ragnarök

NetGuide magazine, December 1994 issue. A review of the MUD, including the following: "If you've been itchin' to kill evil Smurfs who hurl Monty Python-style witticisms, or explore a world filled with similarly bizarre creatures, then . . . Ragnarok . . . is for you."

Related Works

L. Sprague de Camp, The Compleat Enchanter.

External links

• Ragnarök Home Page
• Play Ragnarök - will load in Telnet client