MUSH Survival Guide: About MUSHing
What th--
So some 'friend' of yours or other has repeatedly insisted you try this 'MUSH' thing, because it is full of awesome people and because you will totally enjoy reading white on black text for hours on end. However, they're blabbering about things like 'pose orders' and 'telnet clients' and you want to stab them in the gut to make them stop talking. This is an understandable reflex response, and this guide is here to ease you away from the violence and towards the wonderful world of /archaic roleplay mediums/.
Oh? You, in the corner, with the hand up. Oh, okay, so you're used to MUSHing, you've dealt with this nonsense before, you just want to know what's specific to this MUSH? Well, alright, we can handle that too! Alright. Well, since we've got two groups of people, we're gonna need to split this up a bit. Those of you who've never heard of this MUSH thing keep reading directly, the rest of you can skim past until you get to the PersonaMUSH specific bits.
What IS a MUSH?
So, what IS a MUSH, exactly? Well, let's try to frame it in terms based on your potential prior experience with roleplaying games!
IRC/Forums/AIM/etc:
If you're used to roleplaying via forums/bulletin boards or chatrooms, think of MUSHes as a midpoint between the two. You're roleplaying in a series of chatrooms, themed after specific rooms that would, in character, exist in the room. These tend to be laid out in a manner that from a 'physically moving' perspective are fairly rational.
So instead of a list of 'tavern, tavern(rafters), town fountain, jail', for instance, you might have the Town Square room, which links to the Tavern room, which links to the Tavern(Rafters) area, as an example. This is not nearly as cumbersome as it appears, because you aren't often moving between rooms in the middle of a roleplay.
MMORPGs/Second Life:
Let's say you're used to MMOs such as World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, or Second Life. MUSHes are text-based MMOs at their core, and spring from a thing called a 'MUD'. Imagine if WoW/CoH was all text-based and you entered commands to fight instead of clicking on buttons, and everything was visually described instead of graphical, and you have roughly the right idea. MUSHes, however, are purely roleplaying, and generally have minor or no character progression systems.
If you're coming from Second Life, it's seriously just a text-based version of Second Life that's a little more specific.
How does I shot MUSH
(Got a client already, thanks? So you want to connect and even see what the devil is going on. Well, you're going to need some kind of fancy client for that. It's okay, these are relatively painless to install and use. Now, since telnet clients are old hat, most of these haven't been updated in forever. This is okay; They do not NEED regular updates, so don't be alarmed if a client linked below hasn't seen work done on it since 2003 or whatever. It will work just fine. Thankfully, pretty much every OS in existence has at least a few clients.
Yes, you probably have a Telnet client already on your computer. No, you really don't want to use it for this.
Windows
MUSHClient
http://www.gammon.com.au/mushclient/mushclient.htm This is also a popular client, and it's probably one of the most regularly updated. Used to be a pay client, is completely free now, and has a variety of nifty features.
SimpleMU*
http://simplemu.onlineroleplay.com/ This is a relatively simple client to get used to. While it claims to be shareware, it will Mildly Nag at you for thirty days and then pretty much leave you alone. There are options to even turn off the nag screen. If you do obtain a full, legal copy of it, you get some additional features that are kind of handy, but hardly necessary to get the job done.
MUCKclient
http://muckclient.software.informer.com/ This is a very simple client, and does not have a wide variety of features to it. If you're really seriously just looking to 'press button, receive MUSH', this is not a bad one to start.
Pueblo
http://pueblo.sourceforge.net/pueblo/
PersonaMUSH is set up to use a bunch of fancy things this particular client can handle. If you're feeling /sassy/, give it a try. It does not, by default, do a lot of the trickery regarding spacing of monospaced fonts Stuff will look weird until you futz with it.
Mac OS
Atlantis
http://www.riverdark.net/atlantis/ This is the one many Mac users swear by. As I don't /have/ a Mac, I can't tell you if it's really that great, but it's supposed to be, so give it a try?
Savitar
http://www.heynow.com/Savitar/ This is the other one I keep hearing about, so give it a try?
Huge List Here http://www.hsoi.com/mud/clients/ I suspect this list is a little terrifying if you're new to MUSHes, so please try the top two first, and if they blow up, click these at random?
Linux
Kmuddy http://kmuddy.com/index.php/Main_Page Relatively simple client, comes with a binary so you don't have to compile it, all around good times. Has a variety of basic functions to make your life simpler and easier! :D!
Kildclient
http://kildclient.sourceforge.net/phpwebsite/index.php
Also a very userfriendly client, if you have troubles with KMuddy for some reason.
TinyFugue
http://tinyfugue.sourceforge.net/
I'm only suggesting this because you already use Linux, so the concept of 'inordinate amounts of front end effort for maximum end-use benefit' doesn't particularly faze you. Requires ridiculous setup to get going in any rational sense, but can do basically anything once you get it running.
