| abstract
| - MUDs, or Multi-User Dimensions, really weren’t anything new when I wandered onto the scene in 1994. These text-based multiplayer online games had been around for two decades before I played my first modern MUD, Infinity. I had played British Isles and Island of Kesmai - both charged hourly play rates, as I recall - back in the days of CompuServe. But with the explosion of the Internet, free MUDs cropped up all over the place, with just about every theme imaginable. At the time, I worked as a professional journalist with the St. Petersburg Times. While I had a journalistic curiosity about these games, I didn’t really think of running my own. I’m not much of a coder and, honestly, seeing so many games already online would probably discourage most people from trying their own hand at it. It’s hard to stand out, after all. One afternoon, I was checking out The MUD Connector. The MUDs I’d played so far were, like Infinity, focused on solving puzzles and quests. But I’d seen some discussion in the forums about actual roleplaying games, and I was intrigued by the idea of real-time interactive storytelling. As a kid, I’d participated in tabletop roleplaying. That was fun, but it wasn’t really about getting into a character and bringing it to life. It was more about building up a character’s skills and then pitting those skills against increasingly difficult monsters and ambitious campaigns. That afternoon, I ran a MUD Connector search for Star Trek roleplaying games. I’d been a longtime fan of the original Trek television series. I thought it’d be fun to hurl myself into a virtual world where I could mingle with Klingons and Romulans who acted like real Klingons and Romulans. When I found TOS TrekMUSE, I found a home away from home. Set in the Star Trek universe just after the events of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, TOS TrekMUSE boasted a fairly decent and active playerbase when I joined. People played from around the world: I knew Swedish Romulans, British Vulcans and all-American Klingons. The game developer invested a lot of time and energy into space and combat-oriented code - not always to my tastes - but it was their playground, and I just played in it. Much of my experience on TOS TrekMUSE was enjoyable. But one of the first things I discovered that sets roleplaying games apart from your standard quest-and-kill MUDs: You really become emotionally invested in a game where you bring a character to life. Suddenly, you’ve got a greater vested interest and a sense of self-preservation, particularly when the game institutes permadeath. On Infinity, you could die, and this would cost some gold, experience points and equipment, but you’d still have your character. You could rebuild. On TOS TrekMUSE, death meant death. Death meant an end to your character; an end to your character’s story. Three key incidents stand out for me in my memories of growing frustration with TOS TrekMUSE. The first was when I lagged out, and a twink - a troublemaking player who sets out to cause grief for other players, usually out of boredom but occasionally out of pure maliciousness - shot and killed my character while in a main corridor on Starbase One. Enough people made enough noise about that injustice that the admins resurrected my character. The second was when the USS Yorktown crashed into the sun due to an oversight by a player at the controls of the starship. More than a dozen characters got wiped out in an instant. Starfleet suffered embarrassment, both in-character and out-of-character. No amount of grumbling could get this reversed. Either you knew how to fly a ship properly with the coded space system or you took your chances with the lives of your fellow characters. The third and final incident: A group of Klingon characters infiltrated Starbase One and, using macros to make command shortcuts, ran around shooting Starfleet characters. They just ran from room to room, shooting. They didn’t pose. They didn’t give anyone a chance to shoot back. It wasn’t about roleplaying, it was about killing. Two characters from the crew of the USS Excelsior, which my character commanded, died that day. One was a doctor, and I’m sure she wasn’t even armed. The staffers refused to overturn this outcome, no matter how loudly we complained. If the code allowed it, they reasoned, then it was fair. It was about this time, in 1997, that I started pondering the possibility of running my own game. I’m of the general opinion that if you don’t like how someone runs their game, and they clearly don’t want your advice on how to do it better, then you’ll be much better off in the long run to either play somewhere else that more closely suits your tastes or really put your money where your mouth is and run your own game. So, I started poking around. First, I’d need a theme. Then, I’d need to pick a codebase. And, finally, I’d need to put together a team of people to help me run it, because these games don’t work well at all as one-man operations. Initially, I considered a TOS-era Star Trek game to directly compete with TOS TrekMUSE. But another game, Strange New Worlds, had already gone head-to-head with TOS TrekMUSE - and had done all right for itself. Throwing yet another Trek game into the mix seemed like waste of time and creativity. I considered The Next Generation, Babylon 5, Star Wars, the Belgariad, the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, The Lord of the Rings, Xanth. All of these themes intrigued me, but it felt to me that I’d be following too much in someone else’s footsteps. I concluded that if I was going to do this, I was going to do it right, in a universe of my own creation. I didn’t realize at the time that original themes are often doomed to fail.
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