Kingdoms of the Lost: Merriment of Masks Festival

Kingdoms of the Lost is having another festival, this time in celebration of Halloween. This festival is dubbed their Merriment of Masks, and it will be running from now through Wednesday, November first.. Kingdoms of the Lost is a MUD - an old school, text-based online Dungeons & Dragons style of game, but with a completely unique world in a fantasy setting.

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Kingdoms of the Lost: Fall Festival Time

Kingdoms of the Lost is celebrating fall with a pair of festivals running in parallel with one another.

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Kingdoms of the Lost - Merriment of Masks festival is live

Happy Halloween to all of our readers. It is time for some tricks and some treats, and Kingdoms of the Lost - a roleplaying MUD that recently celebrated its fifteenth year in action - is having its annual Merriment of Masks festival.

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Kingdoms of the Lost celebrates 15 years

MUDs have been around for a long time, and while their text-based method of content delivery seems somewhat dated when compared to all of the shiny visuals found in today's modern MMOs, those very same graphical titles owe a great deal to the way MUDs took the tabletop roleplaying experience and converted it so effectively to online format.

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Kingdoms of the Lost - Spring Festival

MUDs are not nearly as popular as they used to be. There are plenty of other options out there for players looking to get their online gaming fix, from World of Warcraft to Guild Wars 2 to Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn and loads of games in between. Still, all of these games still owes something of a debt to Multi-User Dungeons - or MUDs.

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Ring in the New Year with a New Mud - Kingdoms of the Lost

Kingdoms of the Lost - a swords and sorcery fantasy MUD that gives you the freedom to play how you want.

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Gaming Thoughts... Creation in gaming

Not all gamers dream of building and creating video games, and that's fine - great even. After all, if we all wanted to sit around designing stuff, there wouldn't be nearly as many people actually sitting down to play them. Game editing has been around forever it seems, whether it's just using a specific game's engine to perform building tasks (like Roller Coaster Tycoon or SimCity).

City Building... without an always on connection

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Wow... so it's 2013 now

And just like that - 2012 is done. Over. Gone. Onto newer things - like 2013.

Seriously though - it's amazing to me how fast we shot through last year, and that we're already through the first week of 2013. I had some time off to kick off 2013 and I enjoyed it thoroughly. If I had to say which gaming endeavor of mine took up the bulk of my time, it would be Guild Wars 2, but I dabbled in a LOT of stuff over the last couple of weeks.

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Gaming Thoughts... 9/15/11 - Word of Warcraft

So my last post got me all nostalgic as I thought back to some of my earlier Blizzard titles like Warcraft, Diablo and obviously StarCraft. I spent a lot of time on these games. But like many people, the Blizzard game I probably spent the most time on was World of Warcraft. In fact, I've been a player on two different occasions.

I did not play right when World of Warcraft began, but I was not terribly far behind. I spent a good deal of time playing Alliance and got a couple of characters to level 60, and even went ahead and did the same for some Horde on another server afterward. I was really big into it, had quite a few epics and eventually got tired of playing and just quit.

I was an awkward MMO player though, especially that first time around. I almost never grouped, at all. I hardly ever did raids of any kind, which meant I was missing tons of content. Sure, I'd go back and run lower level stuff when I was bored/high enough level to solo it, but I just never really wanted to group much.

Fast forward a couple of years or so, and several of my old real-life buddies I used to play D&D with are all playing World of Warcraft on the same server. They wanted me to start up again and went so far as to chip in and get me the expansions. I played (very) heavily once again, and shot multiple characters up through the ranks again. I was even more diligent this time, having all of the crafting professions completely covered, tons of really good gear and even ran instances now with my friends. It was certainly a lot more fun the second time around, but still not ideal.

On the one hand, I noticed I was sinking just an absolute ton of time into the game. I play video games very heavily, and even I had to admit my time spent was probably unhealthy. The other thing is I still tried to be a husband, parent, full-time employee and found myself distracted when trying to group. There's no pause button. If a kid gets sick or dinner boils over, I have to hop up and deal with it. Now, my friends were pretty understanding - they know me, know my family, but it still made grouping with other people pretty much a migraine for me.

Once I was at the top of the food chain yet again, all that was left was lots of grinding. The sense of exploration was gone and it was just more of a chore than fun - and steadily sapping away some money every month to boot. So, this account eventually went the way of my old one - given to someone else I knew.

Still, when I look back on it, I still enjoyed Wold of Warcraft a good deal. I'm a big fan of RPG games. I played more than my share of computerized/console titles and D&D over the years. I run a MUD with my wife, which I usually describe as online, text-based dungeons and dragons. It's easy to see the influence MUDs have had on the MMO community over the years. They were the first MMO's - just without graphics.

Unfortunately the Warcrafts of the world have had their own impact on MUDs, and it fewer and fewer people invest in MUDs than they used to. Our own game used to have 50+ players a night, and now on a good night we see maybe 10. I think if my wife had gotten into World of Warcraft, I'd still be playing it today. I love doing things with her - the MUD is an example of that, but she tried it and just never took to Warcraft - but at least she did try it.

Still, I have a lot of fun memories from my time spent there. I've tried looking at some of the free MMO's out there like Dungeons & Dragons and Lord of the Rings - and I once won a copy of Guildwars, and while there's good things about each of them, none of them ever captured my imagination quite the same way World of Warcraft did.

Any of you reading ever play a MUD, or a graphic MMO? Did you stick to it? Were you a loner or a grouper? Do you still play?

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Kingdoms of the Lost - 10 year anniversary

So, I'm diverging just a bit from my usual posts - as is very evident by now, I am a huge fan of video games, but I also grew up on tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons, Magic: The Gathering, etc. Along the way, I discovered text-based online communities called MUDs. I played a few on and off over the years, but then in August of 2010 my wife and I started our own called Kingdoms of the Lost. It's swords and sorcery fare, and we've met and worked with a lot of amazing people over the years. We're actually celebrating our 10 year anniversary at KotL

This type of game's obviously not for everyone. In the day and age of modern MMORGP's like World of Warcraft, Everquest, Lord of the Rings Online - MUDs have fallen off the map somewhat. However, right now we have 12 people on, and last night we had about 20 on - 5 years ago we had 60 on, so while it's dwindled, it hasn't gone away. To see who's on now, you can click here.

Still, it's free. It's a community. It's an opportunity to roleplay, meet new people, kill some time at work (if you're like me and lucky enough to have cpu access) or between classes - whatever. Anyway, there's a lot going on this week, so if you have any interest in taking a peek in, this is a good time to do so. We're giving away lots of free in-game stuff, we've just added a ton of new content and we've seen some of our old friends resurface lately on there as well. 10 years... It's been a long, fun ride.

How to play? Well, you need to connect, either via telnet or by downloading a client - I use GMUD - and directing it to kotl.org port 2222

Here's some more information about the game:

Our website

Our community supported story archive

Our Facebook page

Our Forum

Some information about the game

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