Play now: www.dogmud.org (in your browser) ·
telnet dogmud.org 33333 · Free. Open beta. No monetization.
On the colony world of Gaius, belief matters. A symbiotic organism called the Chrysalis lives in every person, and it makes conviction physically real: magic is faith made manifest, and the way you live slowly reshapes what you are. The survivors of an old catastrophe have forgotten where they came from — but under the oldest hills, something that fell from the sky a very long time ago is still waiting to be understood.
The browser client in play: a hand-drawn zone map with quest markers, the descriptive stat sheet (no raw numbers — your character is "remarkable," not "127"), live vitals for you and your companions, icon-based inventory, chat channels, active conditions, and a full trigger/macro/alias automation panel.
Every stat and skill in the game advances only through use. Swing a blade and your blade-arm grows; haggle, taunt, and orate and your voice becomes a weapon; fold conviction into spells and the folds come easier. There is no character sheet to pre-plan and no build to ruin — your character becomes a record of how you actually played.
And the Chrysalis is watching. Fight like a wall and it thickens your hide; skulk and it sharpens your senses. Mutations emerge to match your playstyle — drifting outward from small generalist gifts toward nine identity clusters (Colossus, Ironhide, Ravener, Stalker, Ethereal, Manifester, Zealot, Weaver, Trickster), each crowned by a single earned apex transformation. Extra arms are real, rare, and let you wield up to six weapons at once. No menu. No respec. You grow what you've earned.
- Body — weapons, fists, and a deep grappling system: clinch, mount, side control, submissions, with position gating what both of you can do. Weapon reach matters; a longsword swings short from inside a clinch.
- Belief — conviction-powered spellcasting across five schools (elemental, enhancement, mental, vital, manifestation). Spells build in folds over rounds; defenders can unravel them; the strong-willed can finish a cast flat on their back.
- Voice — rhetoric is a true damage channel. Taunts hit, hold enemy attention, and scale like any other weapon.
Combat resolves on distribution-based rolls (crits and fumbles live in the tails, not on a d20), dodge/parry/block all genuinely compete every swing, and every line of the round is painted in color-coded prose. What you never see: raw damage numbers. Wounds are "light" or "grievous"; your foe is "staggering," not "at 34%."
- Shops with real economies — vendors price by their own stock and gold: overstocked goods go cheap, scarce ones inflate. Caravans and ferries physically haul the supply; foragers gather it; player crafters can sell into it.
- An auction house with NPC bidders — collectors, crafters, adventurers, a merchants' guild, and a crown assessor all bid real gold against you (and each other).
- NPCs with lives — townsfolk keep daily schedules, walk patrol routes, chat with each other, and remember you: gifts, insults, attacks, and quest outcomes persist, and reputation travels along faction lines. Guards remember crimes. Bounties accumulate.
- Weather, seasons, and three moons — storm fronts roll across zones, seasons turn, and the moons' phases mechanically pull at stats and magic.
Forty-nine zones and 1,300+ rooms of wilderness, cities, ruins, and worse; around eighty quests with branching dialogue and real choices; five crafting trades plus witcher-style alchemy where potions ferment, peak, and spoil (and toxicity is a resource you gamble with); salvage and foraging for materials; player guilds with shared treasuries; achievements and leaderboards; global chat, trade, and newbie channels; player-to-player mail with gold and item attachments; banks, warehouses, and a paid instance or two for when your party wants something that hits back properly.
- Play in the browser at dogmud.org — the
full dashboard client in the screenshot above, with maps, quest
tracking, clickable everything, and an automation panel (triggers,
macros, aliases) built in. Or use any telnet/MUD client you already
love:
dogmud.org 33333(GMCP, MSP, 256-color, UTF-8). - A guided tutorial if you've never played a MUD: a patient guide walks you through looking, moving, talking, and your first fight, one step at a time. Genre veterans can skip straight into the world.
- Updates without disconnects — the server hot-restarts in seconds; telnet sessions hold straight through and the web client reconnects itself.
DOGMud's world, systems, and much of the architecture are custom-built: distribution-based combat math, a unified three-channel damage pipeline, a 14-state grappling FSM, the mutation cluster graph, the living-economy loop, NPC opinion/faction/crime memory, a schedule/patrol/conversation layer, and a centralized messaging pipeline (compose → normalize → anonymize → color → wrap → deliver). Autonomous LLM playtest agents ("bug-finder," "feel-tester") play the game to surface issues before players do.
- docs/world.md — the world-design document (lore, factions, zones, species)
- docs/PATCH_NOTES.md — dated shipping log of everything
- docs/ — schemas, guides, and system specs
- novel/ — What the Moons Keep, a novel set on Gaius
Clone, go run ., and connect to localhost:33333 (telnet) or
http://localhost/webclient. A fresh checkout's default login is
admin / password (you'll be forced to change it). Useful environment
variables:
CONFIG_PATH=/path/to/overrides.yaml— config overrides without touchingconfig.yamlLOG_PATH=/path/to/log.txt— log to a file (default stderr)LOG_LEVEL={LOW|MEDIUM|HIGH}— verbosity; logs rotate at 100MBLOG_NOCOLOR=1— strip color from logs
DOGMud is built on GoMud, an open-source MUD engine written in Go by the GoMud team. GoMud provides the networking, templating, scripting, web-client, and world-loader foundation that DOGMud extends. If you're interested in building your own MUD, the original project is well worth checking out:
Colorization is handled through github.com/GoMudEngine/ansitags.