And You Wanna Know Why?
Mickey and Mallory Knox were in Dark Pawns. The source code that survived kept their speeches and lost their bodies, so I gave them new ones on the original server and let them kill a warrior named Wayne.
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You type and
the world answers.
A multiplayer text RPG, first opened in 1994.
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Inside Dark Pawns
Explore the world- 30 levels + remort
- Start again at level 1 in an advanced class, keeping your equipment, gold, and statistics.
- Three-character parties
- A solo level 15 character will not survive a level 15 fight; run up to three characters at once.
- Wyldlands & blood
- Vampirism tied to the moon, and dreams in the Wyldlands that become real.
- rooms
- 9,590
- Every room and connection on the map
- mobs
- 1,319
- City guards, guildmasters, and dungeon bosses
- objects
- 1,672
- Quit in your temple to save your gear without paying rent
- help topics
- 429
- In-game reference files from the server
Latest from the restoration
Field notes from the Go port, the C oracle, and the Wayback Machine.
Welcome Back, Serapis
Room 8008 had a prayer that made three staff names immortal. We ported it to Go faithfully, then wrote a test proving it worked.
Free Ale
Eighteen Usenet posts from 1996 to 2002 are now in the archive. Most are ads for Dark Pawns, one of them is mine, and one turned into a four-day fight over the names on the login screen.
The world in its own words.
Excerpts from the original website and the world files the server loads today, with every original spelling left intact.
Like a great game of chess, the world has become a board filled with bishops and kings, stately queens, white knights and dark pawns striving to rise through the ranks into godhood.
Outside those thick walls that enable “civilized” persons to sleep so well lies an untamed land, some partly still ruled by the power of fangs, claws, and magic. The other parts of the savage land are not ruled at all, twisted and warped by forgotten times into a vision that would make any sane man’s nightmare seem like a pleasant summer daydream.
Beware the unseen, adventurer. The power is there, cloaked in a forgotten tomb or a dragon’s hoard, but it is there.
If you are in a fight and things are beginning to get a little uncomfortable (maybe you are dying), just type 'flee', and presto! You are out of harms way - that is, IF there is a suitable exit nearby, and IF that exit doesn't simply bring you from the ashes to the fire... but then, who wants to live forever?
It is rumored that in the magick-rich Wyldlands DREAMS have the power to physically effect the dreamer, in essence, the DREAMS become real.
Field guides to the original world
The map, database, and help index are generated at build time from the same files the server loads. They are useful before you enter and after you get lost.
The world
Six starting classes, six remort classes, seven races, vampirism, and the rules of life and death.
Map
Every room and every connection, drawn from the world files.
Database
Every mob and object loaded by the current server, indexed by its in-game ID.
Help files
The commands, spells, and reference files used in the game, preserved word for word.
Over thirty years in the record
Copies of dp-players.com (which I ran as Aidan in 2004) and Frontline’s darkpawns.com survived in the Wayback Machine, alongside eighteen threads from rec.games.mud. The archive preserves 55 sourced records and documents where every page came from.
- knight.ufp.org: Serapis (Derek Karnes) and Tracer (C. Jackson) open Dark Pawns on CircleMUD 1.7 in September.
- Version 2.2: Frontline (R.E. Paret) and Orodreth (S. Thompson) become co-implementors and ship the largest update in the game’s history.
- The break-in: An intruder wipes talon.wolfpaw.net; Orodreth’s backups save the world and darkpawns.com is registered.
- The quiet years: The public server closes, and Frontline later publishes the surviving C source and world files on GitHub.
- DPReturns: Former players reopen the C codebase at dpreturns.com (now darkpawns.net), started by Slayer, expanded over the pandemic years, and later maintained by Vintage.
- The Go restoration: A new open-source server loads the original world and verifies its behavior byte for byte against the C oracle.