Support & About — OmniVerse BBS

──[ A : ABOUT THE REALM ]──

MajorMUD was released on 4 November 1994 by West Coast Creations — Lance and Cathy Neumann, Michael Skupa, Craig Young and Geoffrey Rosen — a handful of people in Canada running a board called Dreamscape. It went on to become the game a whole generation of BBS users stayed up all night for, and in 1999 WCC sold it on to Metropolis Gameport. If you've ever poked at the guts of this game you'll have seen wccmmud.dll in there. Those are their initials. Thirty years on, we're still working inside a file named after them.

My brother and I have been playing since '95, '96. In '98 we ran a small local board of our own and spent an unreasonable amount of time hex-editing things we didn't fully understand — this was around when Nightmare Redux turned up and suddenly everyone could see how much more the game could be. We used to sit around imagining what we'd do if we could get past the surface and reach the actual mechanics.

We can now. That's most of what this project is.

The other half is the community. There are still MajorMUD boards out there, but they're scattered and most of them are quiet, and a realm with nobody in it is a hard thing to fall in love with. So the goal is a realm that's actually alive — one you can log into and find people in — and tooling that helps the other boards rather than competing with them. I'm not just running this. I play here too.

My brother Eli works on it with me — MUDQOL and its roadmap, Gryndak, XUPDATE, and the cross-BBS federation. Between us it's been a great many hours, and we've enjoyed nearly all of them.

──[ W : WHAT WE'VE BUILT ]──

Realmforge MudBrain. the engine the realm runs on — a MajorMUD reimplementation in PostgreSQL, about forty phase files deep, with the mechanics checked against the original game's own code so combat, spells and loot behave the way you remember rather than the way we guessed.
OmniVerse BBS. this site — a live realm tracker, the codex, full-world maps, rankings, lore, and a telnet client that runs in the browser so you can play without installing anything.
mudlive. the piece that makes the site live — it streams what's happening in the realm out to the web, which is why the player and monster pages move in real time.
MUDQOL. a quality-of-life layer for MajorMUD, with a public roadmap of where it's going.
MegaMUD Manager. run a dozen MegaMUD sessions from one window, as tabs. Free, open source, and hosted here.
Crosstalk & Federated MUD. the one we're proudest of — it links separate BBSes together so players on different boards can talk to each other. The MajorMUD community got scattered across a lot of small systems; this is our attempt to stitch it back together.
XUPDATE. the quiet one. It pulls new work down from source control during the nightly cleanup, so fixes and features land while nobody's mid-fight. If you've never noticed the realm updating, that's the point.

▸ GRYNDAK

Gryndak is a character played by an AI. Not a bot grinding a script — something that reads the room, decides what to do, and lives with the consequences. There's an observer if you want to watch over its shoulder: what it's thinking, where it's been, what it's fighting, and a wall of shame for every time it has died. Give it a moment to load.

MUDQOL's roadmap is published here · MegaMUD Manager's changelog is here

──[ $ : SUPPORTING IT ]──

All of it is free and always will be. If you'd like to help with what it costs to keep running, that's very welcome — and if you'd rather just play, that's genuinely fine too. The best thing you can do for a MUD is be in it.

Donations go toward the servers the realm and this site run on, the two domains, and the time that goes into MUDQOL, MegaMUD Manager, Gryndak, Realmforge MudBrain, the federation work, and whatever's next on the roadmap.

⚠ Donations don't affect the game. No gear, experience, stats, titles or head start, now or later. If you'd like your name on this page you can have it, and that's all there is to it.

♥ Support on Ko-fi

— thanks for being here · press [G]oodbye to disconnect —