Discworld MUD

[4] The MUD was founded in Perth, Western Australia, by David "Pinkfish" Bennett,[5] Craig "Furball" Richmond, Sean A.

The MUD was later hosted for a time at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut by one of its undergraduates: Michael "Bastian" Hammill.

"Bastian" assured both Pratchett and his attorney it was a fan-based effort and invited the author to visit "Pinkfish's" creation.

The MUD is based on a from-scratch mudlib and runs on FluffOS, a fork of the MudOS driver, placing it in the LPMud family.

Several useful algorithms such as that for determining experience costs have been either reverse-engineered or extracted from the released code by players, however, and can be generally found on various informational websites.

Before code is released live for general play, it is tested for bugs, typos, playability and ensuring the integrity of the theme by a group of beta tester players, aka Playtesters.

World Cabbage Day sees several meet-ups in real life over the past decade on several continents, notably in the UK, US and Australia.

[citation needed] Roleplaying is optional, and players can be observed playing in many different roles both in and out of character, from organisational, to social, to 'numberchasing' (grinding, especially for skills).

[citation needed] Taking the humorous aspect of Pratchett's work and running with it, the atmosphere on Discworld MUD is frequently whimsical, with a general fondness displayed for silliness and nonsense.

A player who dies with no lives can only be revived by a magical rite that consumes expensive components and requires the cooperation of eight high level wizards.

The majority of the game world is not persistent, resetting areas and objects invisibly, but players' inventories, the contents of rentable houses, and safe deposit box-like vaults are saved.

[citation needed] A large part of the original intent for Discworld MUD was to move away from a restrictive class system, and to allow a player to do (almost) anything with enough effort and advancement.

Additionally, some changes to the world have been made to allow a limited degree of player-control (such as player-elected administration for some of the in-world organisations) rather than using NPCs created from book characters.

The largest divergence from canon, however, is the addition of a range of divine magic not unlike that described in the Warhammer Fantasy or Dungeons & Dragons systems, mostly restricted to a small number of player-worshippable gods.

Some typical activity on the MUD, featuring a map, soul commands, talker channels and performance of rituals.