A text MMO
Iron Psalm
A text world that lives in a browser. The land was grown before any player walked it. The people on it know only what their kingdoms have told them, and the kingdoms tend not to agree.
Pre-alpha
The short version
A multiplayer browser game played in text. The world has been growing for ten million years before you arrived: mountains where the rock pushed them up, rivers along the lines water chose, towns at the meetings of road and harvest. You share it with other players and a population of characters who go about their business whether anyone is watching. Crafts and reputations outlive the bodies that earn them.
Why bother
01
Geography is a consequence.
The iron under a hill is there because heat from the deep earth cooled the rock that way. The bend in a river follows the line the water chose centuries before anyone surveyed it. Nothing about the map is arbitrary.
02
The people don’t agree.
Every culture has its own fragmentary, partly-wrong account of the world. The priest of one kingdom will swear it is hollow; the priest of the next will swear it floats. You learn anything by walking between kingdoms and being wrong long enough to grow out of it.
03
Bigger than any MUD has been.
Over 8.4 million rooms. Continents that take real time to walk across, oceans deep enough to sail, mountains you can climb. No MUD has ever tried this scale.
What it feels like
You wake in a barn at the edge of a kingdom you cannot pronounce. There is a coin in your pocket that nobody here mints, and a token on a leather cord around your neck that your hands recognise before you do. The landlord wants to know your trade and the priest wants to know your god, and neither will be entirely satisfied with the answer. Outside, men are arguing about the calendar. A wind off the hills smells like iron, and the road past the barn goes east into a country whose maps you have not seen.
The world has been here for ten million years. You arrived this morning. You will have to start somewhere.
In the world’s voice
Foreword
We are not a Society. We hold no charter, claim no seat, observe no common liturgy. What we are is a practice — a habit of letter- writing carried on between cold libraries that smell of vellum and tallow.
Open the primerStay close
The work happens in the open.
No date is set. The places below are where it shows itself until there is one.