I was here when it was all code.
Well, it still is all code, of course. But back then, there were no convenient maps, no speedwalking shortcuts that I knew about, and certainly no graphical world to admire. You typed a direction, read what happened, and typed another. North, south, east, west, northeast, southwest. Occasionally up, occasionally down. Occasionally somewhere you really shouldn't have gone.
I learned Ankh-Morpork by walking its streets. I knew plenty of shortcuts and could find my way to most familiar places, but my memory was never as good as the maps.
I recently tried to give directions from Sator Square towards the Shades. I remembered heading southwest and south, then west past the Drum, but confidently called Elm Street Green Street and forgot Filigree Street altogether.
Twenty years later, the general route was still there in my head, even if some of the street names had gone wandering.
And whatever you do, don't go into the Shades.
Some things you learn through experience.
Before the Disc
My fascination with text adventures began long before I discovered Discworld MUD.
I had an Amstrad and a Lord of the Rings adventure game that was almost as difficult to load as it was to play. Once I had persuaded the computer to run it, I would wander around Middle-earth for nine or ten turns before being killed. Frequently, as I remember it, by Tom Bombadil.
I hadn't read Tolkien at the time. When I eventually did, I was rather surprised to discover that Bombadil was not the murderous menace the computer game had led me to believe.
I also played the Fighting Fantasy books by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone. I enjoyed them enormously, although once you'd worked out the correct route, much of the mystery disappeared.
Then there were the computer magazines. I used to type in games from printed listings, sometimes spending hours entering code only to discover that I'd made a mistake somewhere. One magazine introduced me to Graham Cluley's Humbug, a text adventure with a wonderfully silly sense of humour. I bought it, only for Graham to make it freely available shortly afterwards. My timing was impeccable.
Eventually, having read nearly everything Terry Pratchett had written, I stumbled across Discworld MUD.
And there I stayed. On and off, for more than twenty years.
Wearysoul and Dobbin
My first character was a wizard called Wearysoul, who first logged on in October 2004.
I liked being a wizard. I made things, worked with wood, enchanted rings and tried to help new players. I even had an ambition to establish a shop supplying newcomers with free components and scrolls.
But wizards are complicated creatures, and somebody suggested that I try being a priest.
So Dobbin arrived in January 2006.
Dobbin became a priest of Pishe, a deity associated with healing and resurrection. It suited the way I wanted to play. I wasn't particularly interested in killing things. I wanted to explore, learn, help people and see what was possible.
I also made a rather unusual mistake.
In Discworld MUD, following a deity and worshipping a deity are different things. They influence which rituals you can use. When I started, I didn't understand the distinction. I thought that if I followed Pishe, naturally I ought to worship her as well.
Except Pishe doesn't want worshippers.
There is a way to change your worship, but it involves a long process, and I never quite got around to doing it. So Dobbin became one of the relatively few priests who both follow and worship Pishe.
An accident of character creation became part of his identity.
The Lord of Light
I tried to play Dobbin as a pious, peaceful priest.
This was not always easy in a game where killing things is one of the most effective ways of earning experience points.
You can gain experience by exploring, completing quests and learning languages. Learning a language can be particularly rewarding. But if you want to advance quickly, sooner or later the temptation to kill something becomes rather strong.
There was also the problem of being too good.
In the game, goodness is measured. And Pishe's religious alignment requires you to stay within certain limits. I frequently became so good that I was known as the Lord of Light, the most virtuous player online.
People joked that Dobbin must glow in bed.
Unfortunately, being too good could become a problem. Sometimes I had to go into the desert and kill a poor, defenceless vulture simply to become sufficiently less good to satisfy my deity.
There is something profoundly ridiculous about a religious system in which you must murder a bird to correct an excess of virtue.
I suspect Terry Pratchett would have appreciated that.
The Most Peaceful Player Killer
At one point I became a player killer.
Not because I wanted to kill anybody. I wanted to communicate with the player-killing community, understand their experiences and participate in another part of the game.
In those days, becoming a player killer was a one-way decision. Once you'd chosen it, there was no going back.
I accepted that.
One day, somebody on the main talker channel challenged another player to become a player killer and repeat something outrageous. It was a familiar sort of joke.
I said that I already was one.
There was an almost audible silence.
Suddenly people were changing the colour of my name to red, marking me as someone who could attack them.
I reassured one player that I wasn't going to kill him.
"They all say that," he replied.
Some players nevertheless tried to kill me. One attempted to steal from me, but I could perceive him approaching, so I hid. He couldn't see me, although I could see him standing directly in front of me. I managed to recover what he'd taken and, when he attacked, used my priestly rituals to calm him and imprison him in a crystal sphere.
Not bad for a harmless priest.
Twice, I believe, somebody killed me simply to collect my head. In Discworld MUD, a wizard can preserve a severed head with a pickling stick, allowing it to be kept indefinitely.
Somewhere, perhaps, there are two pickled Dobbin heads sitting in private vaults.
A limited edition.
How to Protect a Healing Rod
Priests could make ritual rods and exchange them with priests of other deities. This gave us access to abilities we wouldn't ordinarily possess.
Making a good rod took considerable effort, and losing one to a thief was painful.
I experimented with protecting mine. Great Stasis seemed promising: a thief would become trapped in a crystal sphere. Unfortunately, the rod was trapped with him, so I couldn't recover it.
Then I tried bestowing Heal.
Heal is normally a powerful restorative ritual. But when triggered through this particular theft protection, its effect was reversed. Instead of restoring health, it could remove an enormous amount, leaving the thief too weak to carry the rod.
Occasionally, it could even make them drop items, including the rod. I don't think I ever killed anyone by this method.
I hadn't attacked anybody. I'd simply made stealing from me a rather unfortunate decision.
That was one of the pleasures of Discworld MUD. If you didn't want to solve everything by fighting, you had to think. Just like real life!
The World Beneath the Words
Discworld MUD is enormous. There are thousands of rooms, hundreds of quests and more skills than any one character can reasonably master.
And the world keeps changing.
I remember Sto Lat before it was extensively rebuilt. I remember the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lurking in its sewers, before they disappeared. I remember the opening of new areas, changes to travel routes, and the arrival of horses and pet dragons.
Some old guides became dangerous because the places they described had changed.
In the Netherworld, near the town of Djelibebi, I repeatedly managed to climb the wrong wall. Once up there, there was no easy way down. You were trapped, and death was more or less inevitable.
Your name could end up on a plaque commemorating the unfortunate adventurers who'd made the same mistake.
Mine may well be near the top.
Other players sometimes contacted me from the wall, having seen Dobbin's name there.
At least I could offer informed sympathy.
I also belonged to the Rescue and Response Unit, a group of players who helped others escape dangerous situations, recover their possessions or return from the dead.
Sometimes the rescuer needed rescuing.
That's life.
A Community Worth Helping
For about ten years I was a player helper.
I helped newcomers find their way around, resurrected the dead, healed the injured and transported people across the Disc. I even wrote a series of cooking articles for the AM Daily, including recipes for Klatchian curry, Dibbler's meat pies, Great A'Tuin cake and Soul Cakes.
Many people in the game were extraordinarily generous. They gave newcomers money, equipment, advice and time. They helped people they had never met and might never meet in real life.
I remember returning after a long absence and discovering that people still recognised Dobbin.
That moved me enormously.
But there was another side to the community.
Some people exploited the generosity of others. I remember hearing about a player who received a laptop from somebody trying to help them through supposed financial difficulties, then allegedly boasted about having obtained it for free.
I once sent €20 to a player who said they were struggling to buy necessities for their child. Afterwards, I worried that I might have been deceived. I never knew for certain, but I told the administrators because I was concerned that other players might be approached.
There were also smaller disappointments.
Working as a taxi could become exhausting. Somebody would ask to be transported halfway across the world while I was in the middle of something else. I'd interrupt my own adventure to help, then return having forgotten what I'd been doing.
I worked for Tarnach's, the wizard shop, but disagreements about expectations and payment eventually made that less enjoyable than I'd hoped.
And my newspaper career ended rather ignominiously. I ran out of ideas and time, tried to pad an unfinished mushroom article with copied material, and was rightly told that I couldn't do that.
They suggested I stop writing for the paper.
It was disappointing, but fair.
The game could be generous and welcoming, but it could also be demanding, frustrating and occasionally unpleasant.
In that respect, it wasn't so different from the real world.
A World You Cannot Finish
One of the most difficult things about Discworld MUD is accepting that you cannot do everything.
There are quests restricted to particular guilds, achievements available only to certain characters, and skills that take extraordinary amounts of time to develop.
I once looked at Dobbin's skill tree and wondered whether I'd ever finish it. There were skills for swimming, sailing, climbing, lockpicking, pottery, carpentry, calligraphy, music, languages, medicine, magic, fighting and faith. Some I'd spent years developing. Others I'd barely touched. I could heal someone with extraordinary skill, make powerful ritual rods and pick a lock reasonably well, but my theatrical abilities were precisely zero.
There was always another skill to learn, another level to reach, another direction in which to develop. And the more I learned, the more I realised how much I hadn't done.
Dobbin eventually accumulated ten million experience points, something I'd once dreamed of achieving.
And then I didn't want to spend them.
I'd worked so hard to accumulate them that spending them seemed almost a shame.
The game is full of such traps. There's always something else to learn, another place to explore, another skill to improve. You can spend hours doing things that feel important inside the game while the washing-up, cooking and ordinary business of life wait outside it.
Eventually I played less and less.
I lost my player-helper status because I was no longer active enough. That was reasonable. A player helper needs to be present to help players.
I was sad when I left, but strangely, I didn't miss the game itself.
I missed the people.
Still Somewhere on the Disc
I occasionally return.
The game has changed. Player killing is no longer necessarily a permanent commitment. Ritual rods have altered the distinctions between priestly specialisations. Towns have been rebuilt, new places added, old jokes removed.
And perhaps I've changed too.
I don't have the patience to spend endless hours accumulating experience or repeating the same tasks. I have other things to do, other worlds to explore, and a few worlds of my own to create.
But somewhere on the Disc, Dobbin is still there.
A priest who worships a goddess who doesn't want worshippers. A former player killer who preferred not to kill. A rescuer whose name appears on a monument to people who needed rescuing. A Lord of Light who occasionally had to murder a vulture to become less good.
And, possibly, the only priest with two pickled heads in somebody else's collection.
After more than twenty years in the game, I also want to thank the people who helped make it work and kept it going. I can't name everyone, and I certainly can't remember everyone, but there are a lot of people in my personal hall of fame. People like Cheeky, who was very, very kind, along with the many others who helped create the game and still do.
There were helpful liaisons who would appear and suddenly everything would be much better. Or they would appear and say, "Well, in fact, there's not much I can do to help you with your problem. Hard luck for you." Sometimes they would give you a magic cabbage, which made the pain go away but taught you another lesson: sometimes you lose things, and that's part of the game. You've got to get on with it.
That is one of the great things about the game: the players. Although I had a few bad experiences, most of them were caused by me. When you play silly billies, you can't expect to get away with it forever.
I may not have many days of play left in me, but I still enjoy returning, playing, and annoying the hell out of you all.
I was here when it was all code.
And, in a way, I still am.