--- title: "Free Ale" description: "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." date: "2026-09-27T00:00:00.000Z" textKind: "original" source: "The Usenet records under src/content/archive/ (UsenetArchives captures, Message-IDs in each record), Frontline's history timeline, src/config.c, lib/text/credits, and Zach's own account" canonical: "https://darkpawns.org/blog/free-ale/" --- In December 2002 somebody posted an ad for Dark Pawns to rec.games.mud.announce. It says the game was "now in its eighth year of continuous operation" and had "a robust, stable codebase with quality staff and players." [It was me.](https://darkpawns.org/archive/usenet-2002-12-14-eighth-year/) I have no memory of writing it. We were always trying to get more people to play with us. In May 2004 I started [a thread about it](https://darkpawns.org/archive/p501/) on the dp-players.com board (I was Aidan there), and the players mostly agreed ads didn't work. I put it plainly myself: "most people play because friends of their's play." Then everyone told the story of the friend who got them hooked. That 2002 ad is one of eighteen Usenet records we just added to [the archive](https://darkpawns.org/archive/), recovered from UsenetArchives and dated December 1996 through December 2002. Most of them are ads. Read in order, they are the game's old forwarding addresses. ## Where the game lived
Dec 1996 knight.ufp.org 4000 first recovered ad Dec 1996 www.augusta.net 4000 final beta May 1997 pawns.guru.org 4000 grand opening, May 21 Aug 1997 darkrune.guru.org 4000 moved Monday, August 4 Sep 1998 mud.darkrune.org 4000 back after an outage Dec 1998 pawns.wolfpaw.net 4300 new host, new port Dec 2002 darkpawns.com 4300 my ad Today darkpawns.org 7777 telnet in, or play in a browser
Where the game lived, dated by the first recovered ad that gives each address. The game itself goes back to September 1994, on knight.ufp.org.
The earliest is from December 3, 1996. Oddity announced "Dark Pawns - knight.ufp.org 4000" with "over 5,000 rooms (not bad for being new :)" and closed on "we have the coolest gods around! (Hmm, maybe I should change my handle to Modesty :)". The only reply came two days later and reads, in full: "Where & How?" (In 1999 Frontline, by then one of the game's two implementors, [wrote](https://darkpawns.org/archive/usenet-1999-02-11-license-dispute/) that a 1994 ad from knight.ufp.org was still archived. We haven't found it.) Three weeks after that, Serapis was advertising the final beta from a new host, www.augusta.net, promising "5 classes, 6 races, vampires and werewolves for all..." Two days before Christmas, he signed off with ["Free ale through \"](https://darkpawns.org/archive/usenet-1996-12-23-beta-ad/). After that the ads mostly track the moving vans. pawns.guru.org in May 1997, opening "after 2 years of testing and development (and drinking beer...)". darkrune.guru.org in August (the ad announcing the move is dated August 5, 1997; Frontline's timeline says October). mud.darkrune.org in September 1998, after an outage the ad answers in advance: "Yes, we were down for some time. No, we did not really go away." Then pawns.wolfpaw.net in December 1998, on port 4300 for the first time ("Both the hostname AND port number have changed"). Frontline's [history of the game](https://darkpawns.org/archive/history/) says Wolfpaw hosted us free "in exchange for some advertising", which explains a few of these. By my ad it was darkpawns.com 4300. Today it's `telnet darkpawns.org 7777`. The feature lists drift too. "Free Rent In Town" in 1997 becomes "No Rent Ever! Just quit in the safe room for your hometown." in 1998. Six races become seven. From September 1998 the ads carry the line "No cheesy ASCII art in our News Group ad", directly under a title spelled out as D A R K P A W N S in spaced capitals. ## The ad that turned into a fight On February 11, 1999, Frontline posted the ad to rec.games.mud.diku, calling Dark Pawns "a completely original Dark Fantasy Multi User Environment." KaVir replied the same day: "So why does it say 'Based on CircleMUD 3.0, created by Jeremy Elson' on the login screen?" CircleMUD was free, and [its license](https://www.circlemud.org/license.html) asked for credit in return: keep the credits file intact, keep the HELP CIRCLEMUD entry intact, and name the DikuMUD and CircleMUD authors in the login sequence. KaVir said Dark Pawns had replaced the first two and never named the Diku team at all. Frontline answered that the Circle code "was only used as a model to enhance the existing diku code." [The thread](https://darkpawns.org/archive/usenet-1999-02-11-license-dispute/) ran seventeen posts over four days and got hot enough that Frontline wrote, "I have held back from any personal attacks during the course of this thread and I expect you to do the same." Frontline had joined in March 1996 and inherited code he described as "an awful mix of hybrid code, obviously diku style based but I can't honestly say it was diku for sure." The [history timeline](https://darkpawns.org/archive/history/) he later recorded lists a CircleMUD version under each era: 1.7 at the founding in 1994, 2.2 in December 1995, 3.0 by 1996. His last word in the thread was a promise: "I will take some steps within the mud to clarify the situation for anyone else who may be interested." KaVir's last word was a jab: "I'd also like to congratulate you on creating such a faithful Diku-lookalike; it certainly had me fooled." It didn't settle anything. In June 2000 Dark Pawns turned up on a Usenet list called ["The DikuMUD Hall of Shame."](https://darkpawns.org/archive/usenet-2000-06-18-hall-of-shame/) ## The names on the splash page I've always wondered about the names on the login screen. Every time you connect, this is under the logo: ``` Based on CircleMUD 3.0 created by J. Elson and DikuMUD Gamma 0.0 created by K. Nyboe, T. Madsen, H. Staerfeldt, M. Seifert, and S. Hammer ``` Those five wrote DikuMUD at the University of Copenhagen. The last version of the source also carries the CircleMUD credits file, Diku team included, behind [the `credits` command](https://darkpawns.org/help/info/credits/), and a [HELP CIRCLEMUD](https://darkpawns.org/help/info/circlemud/) entry. Those are all three things KaVir said were missing. I can't tell you when those lines went in. The C source survives only in its final version, which announces a 2008 pwipe on [that same screen](https://github.com/zax0rz/darkpawns/blob/a9fdbf6a6801bfb32d250de13a5ca5930a1df5bd/src/config.c#L249-L251). My guess is this thread. Nobody has to show those names anymore. DikuMUD switched to an ordinary open-source license in 2020 and CircleMUD followed, as the license page linked above explains. The rebuilt server shows [that screen](https://github.com/zax0rz/darkpawns/blob/a9fdbf6a6801bfb32d250de13a5ca5930a1df5bd/pkg/session/terminal.go#L31-L33) exactly as the old one did anyway, spacing and all, because [the first rule of this port](https://github.com/zax0rz/darkpawns/blob/a9fdbf6a6801bfb32d250de13a5ca5930a1df5bd/docs/fidelity/RULEBOOK.md#r1-player-facing-bytes-are-law) is that whatever a player sees has to match the original. So KaVir's jab has aged into a job description. Dark Pawns is a faithful lookalike on purpose now. ## Read them yourself All eighteen records are in [the archive](https://darkpawns.org/archive/), with the newsgroup, the date and the Message-ID for every post. Email addresses are redacted; everything else is as it was posted, typos and all. The license threads are preserved as a disputed record. If you posted one of these, or argued in one, I'd love to hear from you: [darkpawns.org/contact](https://darkpawns.org/contact). And if you'd rather play than read, it's `telnet darkpawns.org 7777`, or [play in your browser](https://darkpawns.org/play/). I still think people play because their friends do, so bring one.