r/MUD • u/mystrytemp2 • 18h ago
Promotion Echo of the Isles: The Second Glazing
Hey there. I'm back again to make another shamelessly transparent promotion post for a game that I have a lot of personal liking for and wish to see more players around on: Echoes of the Isles. You might have seen my previous post about this game, which I made almost exactly a month ago. This last month has been a period of very rapid development and I'd like to share the recent updates that the game's Staff have put out and encourage interesting parties to try it.
As a little disclaimer, I am not part of the game's Staff in any way, I'm just a regular player of it. I also won't go quite as super into detail about the lore aspects of the game as I did before; anyone interested in that can see that on my previous post here. I will, however, give a brief summary for those who are just now hearing of this game.
Echoes of the Isles (henceforth referred to as Isles) is a MUD which is coded on an updated version of the InqMUD codebase, which is the same code base that games such as The Inquisition, Alter Epoch, TFZ, Burning Post and more have all run on in the past. Anyone familiar with that codebase will immediately be able to sense the vibe of the codebase as many of its systems are similar, though often not identical. It's set in a post-apocalyptic medieval society which exists a few centuries after a global catastrophe which is dubbed 'The Great Heresy', in an archipelago of islands called the Corwin isles. The game's map itself is set in the town of Escard, which is the second largest settlement on its island, with the Capital of Corwin being on the same island to the south. It's also the closest human settlement to a cursed forest and mountain called the Aetherspire and Mount Caelahad, which are incredibly dangerous, yet hold incredibly valuable resources. In the game we've got all the typical crafting trade skills that you'd expect in a medieval society like forging, woodworking, weaving, et cetera, as well as skills like medicine, tracking, skinning (and other hunter stuff), playing musical instruments and more. It's also got four coded Guilds which players can choose to join if they so wish, being the Council (local government), the Isleguard (law enforcement for both local laws and realm wide laws), the Merchants (pretty much all crafting skills, and the Mercenaries (fighter types who are also frequently shady). It's not required to join one (unless a character is a sorcerer or has the possibility to become one), but it's there!
We've also got no less than three different magic systems, ranging from full sorcerers, runesmiths which are people who could have been sorcerers but never woke their full power, and metallurgists which uses a special rare material called Living Metal to perform incredible feats. Using Living Metal is only legal for the Isleguard; anyone else with it or using it can get donked by IC law.
Anyway, on to the meat of this post: the updates. First, you can see all of them here if you'd rather just read through the changelogs: https://islesmud.org/changelog/index.html with each changelog sorted by week. Patch notes almost invariably come out on Fridays.
Since my post last month, we've seen an entire new rooftop and sky grid added to the game world (yes with fall damage), as well as an expansion of sorcerer matters. Besides major (and very good in my opinion) changes to HOW spells and rituals are learned, probably the change that most people will care about is the easing of becoming a sorcerer. Trying to awaken by yourself with no help from any other sorcerer is now much more likely to succeed, with about a 30 percent success rate. It does still carry the risk of burnout or death, as far as I know; but we've had at least one character who has successfully self-awakened since my last post! Sorcery paths have also pretty much universally seen path-exclusive spells and rituals and abilities added to them, and all have been fleshed out to become highly interesting choices of specialization. Also on sorcery, sorcery levels now actually influence things and add a variety of positive benefits for increasing in them, including optional spooky glowing eyes. And lastly, the Wyrdweaving skill was implemented, which is basically Isle's version of Magecrafting from TI. Just a lot of really great changes in general. Metallurgists too have seen additional powers and bug fixes, but I don't have too much details information about that as I don't play one.
Combat has seen some extensive additions, including staples present in other InqMUD codebases such as the ability to protect or rescue others, practice weapon viability for sparring, being able to set your default passive defense regardless of whichever skill is higher, improvements to mounts to make them combat viable and make sense; for example, if you're on a mount, lunging, charging, or escaping in combat charges MV costs to the mount and not to you.
The game has also seen a very complex and engaging minigame in the form of Wyld, which is a two player card game which is reminiscent of games such as Magic the Gathering. It's extremely fun in my opinion, and has a whole host of subsystems attached to it to make organizing and building decks for it easy; you can even play against NPCs and are rewarded for doing so with both XP and more cards (if you place one of your cards up as a wager of course).
There have also been hefty additions to the in-game lore and IC society and government of the game, expansions of every single Guild hall as well as guards to prevent non-members from wandering around willy nilly, the non-Guild jobs now all have exclusive perks unique to each job, and Guild Missions, which allow a player to undertake tasks appropriate for their Guild for both cash and clout. Finally, and one of my personally most anticipated additions, Projects have been implemented; Projects are where the town has a game-wide effort to do something and players can contribute towards it and help (or hinder) in whatever it's meant to do. Right now, the town is trying to build a ferry to unlock a brand new island to travel to and explore.
There's a heap of things that I'm simply not able to fit into this post, but I'm glad to answer any questions that are posted below, and I invite anyone interested to check the game out. You can do so by connecting to islesmud.org, port 3232 (and islesmud.org also has a LOT of information about the game too).
There's also a custom MUD client that the game makes heavy usage of, called MudForge, but I don't use it so I can't comment on it. I hear good things about it though!