The world happened the way mist happens. Tiny things lived and were afraid, named what they feared, luring it out of the mist. Now the ground shifts in haste, like a liar, wherever heroes swing their picks, as they pass the bones of those who were here before and, deeper still, unearth names better left lost.
Dark Legacy is a free text-based multiplayer game (a MUD) set in a weird-fantasy world. It runs in your browser.
A woman sits on a milestone by the road, a map spread across her knees. Her coat is stitched together from older maps, and the roads on it are moving. One of her eyes is glass. Something small and bright swims behind it.
“You’re late,” she says, without looking up. “Everyone who comes down this road is late. The world began without you, and it has been talking about you behind your back.”
“Alora. Second world from the sun, too many gods, not enough prayers to go round. There’s a mist on an island that bends the laws of nature, and a herd of glowing cows nobody likes to talk about.” She leans closer. “Mind the dark crystals. Things come to them.”
“Through the gate. Your browser will carry you: no wagon, nothing to download. When it asks your name, tell it you’re new, and the world will make room.”
“Sensible. The townsfolk sneer at silly names, and some won’t sell you bread over it. Sit a while and decide who you’ll be: what you were born, under which star, and what old blood runs in you.”
“Everyone says that.” She bends back over her map and draws a small road with your name at the end of it. “Everyone comes back.”
Never played a text game? New here shows how to start, what to do when you are lost, and where to ask. Using a screen reader? Read this first.
“Then you are in the ledger.” She turns back a great many pages. “Nothing is thrown away here. Eighteen thousand names, and I have never struck one out. Tell me yours.”
Type the name at the game’s login and it will know you.
Welcome back!
You actively jab, thrust, lunge, shoot, cast to survive.
On the night before the mines were changed, when not a dwarf in the hall was stirring, there came up from below the noise of a brawl. And a certain dwarf, who had four quarts of mead in him and was not wise, took up his axe and went down.
There stood two strangers, the one with a mallet and the other with a spear, and at their feet lay ten warriors of the hall. And the dwarf leapt upon them; and the one laid his hammer to the side of the dwarf’s nose, and he rose up, and up, into the rafters.
Then a small voice called from the floor: These are no mortal warriors. These are Balthildis and Hor. And the strangers said: Now that they know us, it is no longer any sport. And they went out through the roof and rode away upon a steed of eight legs, crying that mining might go to Hell, for they loved nothing in all the worlds so well as a good fight.
A retelling of The Night Before Mining-Patch by Vogar Eol> lunge stranger Attempting 'lunge' in 1.8 seconds. You lunge at a brawny stranger's chest! Vogar: Attacks a brawny stranger (31.4+6=37.4, 212.0 Target) *miss* A brawny stranger's muscles ripple as he prepares to stomp you! A brawny stranger swings his mallet towards you! Vogar: Makes a reflex check (9+3=12, DC 40), *fails* ... and strikes a blow to your nose. ... A brawny stranger causes 2219 blunt damage.
The same brawl, as the game would print it. The dwarf loses.
Swing a pick anywhere on land and the ground gives.
In the days when Alora was changing, and none could say into what, there were two miners, Shandar and Demetrious, and none in all the land were more given to the pick than they. And they said: Let us go down and learn the whole of the mines, that those who come after may be the wiser. And they went down.
Nine months they laboured in the dark, and then a tenth. And at the end they had learned this: that there are spoils beneath Alora, and that any may have them, and that the price of them is the mind. For it is not the falling roof that takes a miner, nor the things that breathe below, but the sameness of the dark, stroke upon stroke, until reason goes out like a lamp.
And Shandar came up and wrote it in a book, that others might be warned. And still, in every part of Alora, the picks are heard.
A retelling of Insanity! by Shandar2132hp 2262m 2208mv> You start harvesting from a mineral pocket. You pry uncut carnelian from a mineral pocket. You deplete a mineral pocket. 2132hp 2262m 2209mv> You harvest fertile soil (8) from a wall of loose soil. Fertile soil (8) falls onto the floor. 2132hp 2262m 2199mv> A skeleton yells 'I'm going to tear Sharask apart!' 2132hp 2262m 2199mv> You work up a sweat, harvesting from a wall of loose soil. 2132hp 2262m 2199mv> You harvest fertile soil (8) from a wall of loose soil. You strip out the last a wall of loose soil. You clear a path deeper into decayed vegetative matter. A passage opens up to the west. 2132hp 2262m 2189mv>
A few minutes in a mine, November 2026. Token announcements and two repeated lines left out.
The rock behind this page can be dug. Click, tap or drag on any bare stretch of it, and it walls the tunnel as you go. Your browser is making the rock up as you scroll, in the manner of the game. It is not the game.
No one walks Alora alone for long.
There was a thief in Alora named Kuli, and he stole a belt from Arendia, and fled with it through a waterfall and down into the dark, to a cave that had no other door. And Arendia followed; and before her went Deagol, her leopard, who had the scent of him.
And she bade her leopard charge. But out of the shadows sprang a second leopard, dark as the cave, and bore Deagol to the ground; for the thief also had raised a beast from the egg, and its name was Zytal.
Then Kuli cried: Finish her! And the two leopards rose, and stood nose to nose, and neither moved. And again he cried it, and louder. But the leopards had looked upon one another; and the commands of thieves, and of the owners of belts, were become to them as a small noise, far off.
A retelling of Blood Lust (part I) by Kuli NachtwindRecords held over every creature in Alora, their owners included.
From the live highscores. There are 127 kinds of creature an egg can hold.
And there are those who weary of wandering. They buy a plot and raise a cottage, a mansion, a castle or a citadel, and lay out the rooms, and write what stands in them; and in this way the players have built more of Alora than its builders did.
| Homes built by players | 969 |
| Rooms in those homes | 9,799 |
| Rooms built by the game’s 68 builders | 8,383 |
Anyone in Alora may write a book. Copies find their way into treasure chests, and strangers read them by whatever light is nearest. There are 874 so far, by 244 hands.
The tales on this page are retold from what players wrote. Two more wait on their own page: a portrait that would not stay down, and a herd of cows that shone.
This patch repairs mechanics that never worked as intended. Some buffs, some nerfs.
This patch fixes over a hundred server crashes, exploits, broken checks, and ways to lose stuff.
Unconscious: you can't attack while out cold, and you don't take double damage as if asleep.
Straight from #announcements on Discord. Everything since 2008, or the feed.
The game keeps count of everything and forgets nothing. The oldest thing in Alora is a pet dragon named Toots. A certain Zeratul once died sixty-one times in a single sitting.
A character with level 50 in three classes goes on to the epic levels, e1 to e1000, and then to ascension levels: a12 is twelve levels past e1000, and a0 is e1000 itself.
People have spent 1.13 million hours in here.
Taken . The game is at version 2.9.0.
This creature has greeted everyone who ever logged in. It says: Create your account and join us now!
Here the page stops, and the rock does not.Below this there is nothing but what your browser makes up as you go. None has yet caught it out.
At the surfaceClimb out
Dark Legacy