Welcome to RetroMUD, traveler. This is a complex and interesting
little
universe you've found, one you may find difficult to leave. The worlds
of the Retroverse are significantly more complicated than others, with
new things being added all the time. If you're new to MUDs entirely,
you may struggle, although it's not an impossible task to start here.
If you're a MUDding veteran, you may be in for a few surprises!
Believe it or not, you just took one of the biggest steps to
understanding RetroMUD: you're reading a help file! RetroMUD has a
developed help system, and for the majority of topics you can simply
type "help " to get a meaningful explanation of the subject.
Reading and understanding help files not only makes your life easier,
but helps you gain the respect of the community on this MUD. The next
best thing to do is to call on that community for help in a more
direct way. Simply ask on the mentor channel (type "mentor " to do that), and there is usually someone around who can
give you an answer, often in the form of pointing you to something
you can read, but sometimes with an explanation made up on the spot.
There's no need to be embarrassed to ask questions; we've all been
newbies before and we know how much there is to learn here. As long
as you're polite, people will usually be helpful.
Now for a bit about the MUD itself. It's designed as a "party MUD",
which means that there are a series of special guilds, each of which
with a purpose that, when added to other guilds' abilities, can make
for a complete unit (called a "party"). Overall, no guild is "better"
than other, although some may require more experience to be used
effectively.
The most important thing to consider when choosing your guild is your
own personality. What would you like to do, or who would you like to
be? If you enjoy your role, you'll enjoy the game a lot more.
For information about those guilds, you can type "help guild ", although it is often MUCH easier to simply go to the website
http://www.retromud.org/ and look at the "Guilds" section. The same
thing can be done for races, "help race " or the "Races"
section on the website. For suggestions on race/guild combinations
that are effective, the "mesh" command (type "mesh ") can
be helpful if you have no idea what you need, although it's usually
easy enough to see what will be effective overall. The most important
things in a race/guild combination are:
- Skill/Spiritual/Hermetic maxes: Guilds with many skills need a
high skill max, guilds that use hermetic magic need a high hermetic
max, and guilds that use spiritual magic need a high spiritual max.
- Alignment: If your guild is aligned to good or evil, make sure your
race doesn't have any penalties for being that alignment.
- Limbs: If you need to wield or cast spells quickly, make sure your
race has usable limbs.
More information on race/guild combinations can be found at:
http://www.retromud.org/faq_race_guild.html
So take a peek there if you're uncertain about a combination.
You'll probably want a description for your character too, and this is
one of the easy parts. It can be just about anything! If you're
wondering about how to set it or the finer points of setting a
description, check out "help desc" for all the information you'd need.
The average description seems to run around 4 or 5 lines, but there is
no strong standard. Do what feels long enough, and it'll probably be
just fine.
Once you enter the game itself, you'll be on one of the Retroverse's
six planets. That's, right, 6 of them. Where you begin depends on
your
guild. For detailed information on any one planet, check the website
under "Planets". You can also type "help " for
information in a concise (if not glossy) form. The planets are (in
increasing distance from the sun) Sosel, Wysoom, Welstar, Raji,
Perdow, and Crypt.
Sosel: Known home of the Druid, Monk and Ranger guilds, also the
secret home to the Cultist guild. A primitive world, Sosel is not
for the weak, as the jungles of Sosel are filled with predators like
piranhas in the rivers, dinosaurs in the foliage, and dragons in the
skies. While many of these will cut you a little slack as a newbie,
that mercy won't last for long!
Wysoom: Home of the Abjurer, Fighter, Jomsviking, Merchant, and
Sentinel guilds. A world of great oceans, much of Wysoom is
underwater.
Other than drowning, the only danger of travelling Wysoom are the
mosquitoes (well, big ones!). For those whose races are at their best
in the seas, Wysoom's oceans can be a welcome sight.
Welstar: A haven for those of good alignment, Welstar is home to the
Biomancer, Paladin, and Templar guilds. For the most part, this is a
planet of tranquility...unless you're evil, in which case this can be
a pretty rough neighborhood! Welstar is civilized, with several
established cities. It is also the home of Keystone City, whose gates
are a common meeting place for players ("help ngate" for a bit more
information on that).
Raji: Here you find the Alchemist, Bard, Mage, and Psionicist guilds.
Raji is the world of air, where land is a rare and unstable thing and
those without wings are more limited in their movement than the
natives. Fortunately, there are skyships to travel between the major
"islands" of Raji, as well as a few less mundane methods. Without
flight of some kind, those not on one of Raji's islands can only flail
around in the air, too thick to fall but not quite thick enough to
travel through with any effectiveness against the quickly-changing
winds.
Perdow: The planet of darkness and chaos, Perdow, is the secret home
of many things...in fact, there is more about Perdow that you won't see
on a map than things that are known! Watch out for the bandits too--
they may know that newbies have nothing worth taking, but you won't be
a newbie forever. Don't wait for the sunrise on Perdow: it's never
coming.
Crypt: Crypt is the planet of death. It is the home of two guilds
devoted to the subject, the Necromancers and the Fallen. Very little
lives on Crypt, although many creatures call it their home. Those few
living things that do survive there are alien in many ways. The
planet itself is a crypt--entirely underground and filled with the
dead, both inhabitants and doomed travellers like yourself.
To travel between these worlds, which you will surely want to do
someday, you can use the "newbie transport" (help newbie
transport)...but only as a newbie! Later, you'll have to rely on
more complicated or unreliable methods, detailed in "help
interplanetary
transport".
Now, that sounds pretty big doesn't it? Well...it is! One of the
most important things to do as a newbie is to take a good look around,
since exploring gets much more difficult once the various monsters
consider you a worthy adversary (or a food source). It is highly
recommended that you get a bare minimum of 30% exploration (you can
check your explore with the "score" command, "help score" for
information). The "help explore" file gives information about how to
raise your explore percentage, but as a newbie one of the major
benefits
is just figuring out what there is to do here! I recommend exploring
the major cities and newbie areas first, then branching out and looking
at everything you can find.
Exploring has a second benefit, too...it gives you experience points.
Just by exploring 40% of the Retroverse, which isn't all that hard
once you get the hang of it, you can get something in the area of 150k
(yes, 150,000) experience points in just a few days. Really, as a
newbie,
nothing will help you advance faster than exploring, which is an added
incentive. It's known that it's possible to even get 60% explore as a
newbie, although 40 or 50% is a realistic compromise between time
spent exploring and the experience you gain from it. One thing is
certain, exploring can be the difference between a level 4 who can
barely
kill a fly and a level 15 who can face real challenges with some chance
of survival.
And now, how you advance levels and grow in power: in RetroMUD, you
have two levels, your "adventurer levels" which is what level your
character is overall, and your "guild levels" which indicate how much
of your career is put into specific guilds. You can never have more
guild levels than adventurer levels, of course. Detailed information
on advancing can be found at http://www.retromud.org/faq_advancing.html
as well as a summary of the advancement process by typing "help
advance"
in the game. Remember, most of your bonuses come from guild levels, so
be sure you spend all your unused levels to get the maximum benefit.
The guild system that RetroMUD uses has three tiers of guilds:
primary, secondary, and tertiary guilds. Your primary guild is the one
you start the game in, consisting of 20 levels. Your secondary guild
is the next tier, and consists of 14 levels. Tertiaries are, of
course,
the third tier, which consists of 9 levels. The secondary guilds you
can join are determined by your primary, and your tertiaries are
determined by your secondary. To see a list of what guilds a given
guild allows joining, check out the "choices" command, for example
"choices cultist" to see what secondaries the Cultist primary guild
allows (help choices).
Because of this tier system, typical advancement looks like
20/14/9/9/...that's primary/secondary/tertiary/tertiary/... Doing
things in the standard way, moving up the tiers, is the most common
route, but there are many variations on which tertiary guilds people
will take, and some even take primary or secondary guilds as
tertiaries (still only 9 levels, of course). Fortunately, you will
have a long time to consider your advancement before you reach that
point.
A quick word of warning, too: RetroMUD is designed to challenge
characters at any level. Part of that challenge is the inclusion of a
wide variety of difficulty in the creatures, but part of it is also in
what are called "level locks". Basically, characters outside of the
specified level range can't enter a locked area. The majority of
areas aren't locked, but there are special "newbie areas" that only
newbies can enter. If you advance too quickly, you may get locked
out of those areas before you're ready to survive in the big, mean
areas.
How do you get ready to advance and take on bigger challenges? By
training! Training costs both experience and gold, although much of a
newbie's training can be done for free, since your guild understands
the difficulties that a newbie can have trying to make it on his own.
For the syntax of how to train, and a bit of important information on
gold-free training, check out "help training" (for skills) and "help
studying" (for spells). Note: in general, skills are "use", hermetic
spells are "cast", and spiritual spells are "invoke"...check out "help
use" "help cast" and "help invoke" for the syntax on these commands.
There are two other things a newbie should be familiar with, the
newbie guide and newbie advantages. The newbie guide, also called a
planet guide, is a valuable (if chatty) resource to a new character.
For information on what he's capable of, check out "help guide". The
latter bit of crucial information can be found by reading "help newbie
advantages" carefully. As you'll see, newbies start out with a
variety of things to help them along, but these vanish as you grow and
advance in levels. Generally, it's a good idea to check that help file
before you advance a level, so you'll know what advantages you're
losing
in return for new skills and stats.
So now you have the basics of how to explore, how to advance, and how
to train. A bit of friendly advice, as long as I'm at it: explore
until you have a good percentage and a lot of experience points, then
advance to level 15. That's right, pop all the way up there. The
increase in stats will help immensely, and it won't even use up a big
portion of all that exploration experience you've built up! After
you've done that, spend all your remaining experience training all your
critical skills and spells as much as you can.
Once you've done that first advancing and training, you'll want to get
to the more dangerous part of adventuring--combat! The RetroMUD
combat system is fairly intuitive to those experienced with MUDding,
although it has a few interesting twists thrown in. The one bit of
advice I'll give you about combat is "don't go alone"...this is a party
MUD, and there are some things that are only intended to be killed by a
combination of several guild's abilities. In addition, when you're
new, your party members will often be willing to offer you advice and
help.
Often people will settle in with a group of people they like to play
with, but most are willing to take on anyone who seems to get along
well with the group. You probably guessed it, and you're right--combat
is the main way that characters gain experience in the Retroverse.
Killing a monster generally gives you experience points proportional to
the difficulty of the creature, with some variations.
Well, that about wraps things up, doesn't it? Remember, you can
access this file at any time by typing "help getting started", and the
"mentor" channel (mentioned above) is always available. There are
still
many, many things about RetroMUD left for you to learn, many challenges
that may surprise you...think you're up to it?
|