Welcome to The Living World

The Living World is a persistent fantasy world that you play in a browser. There is nothing to download and nothing to install. You open the page, make a character, and walk into a town that is already running, with other people standing in it.

It is built on the rules of old-school Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: THAC0, descending armor class, ability scores rolled with dice, and a hard ceiling on how powerful you can become. Today is the day we start telling people about it, so this post is the short tour.

How to start

Playing is free. Create an account, then roll a character.

Character creation follows the book. The server rolls six ability scores for you using 4d6, dropping the lowest die on each. You may reroll up to three times, and the server keeps count, so a lucky streak is something you earned and not something you edited. You then assign the six values, pick a class and a race, and give your hero a name. Each account holds two characters for free.

Once you are in, you spawn in the middle of Eastford. Move, look around, talk to the people standing in the square, and try the weapon in your hand.

What is live right now

Five classes. Fighter, barbarian, ranger, rogue and mage. The three warrior classes (fighter, ranger, barbarian) sharpen their THAC0 by one point every level. Rogues improve every two levels, and mages every three. Hit dice run from a d12 for the barbarian down to a d4 for the mage, and each class carries a default weapon die to match. Mages also have a mana pool and spells.

Two towns. Eastford is the village where everyone begins, with town guards who take a dim view of trouble. Ravenmoor is a walled town under a cold moon, and there are no guards at all. A glowing ring on the ground in the south clearing of each town carries you to the other. Walk into it and you travel.

PvE. Bandits and marauders are out there, and they hit back. Killing monsters earns XP, XP becomes levels, and levels are capped at 10. A monster stops giving you experience once you are five levels above it, so nobody gets to farm beginners forever.

PvP, with honor. Players can fight each other. A kill is rewarded with honor, a separate score tracked per character, and not with experience. Honor has rules designed to make farming it pointless, which we will explain in this week’s dev log.

A real HUD. A player frame with health, mana and experience, a target frame, a cast bar, an inventory, and a character sheet.

Why a persistent world

Everything that matters is decided on the server. Your hit points, your rolls, your position, your honor and your inventory are all stored in a database and checked by the game server on every action. Your browser draws the world and sends your intentions; it is never trusted to say what happened. That is what makes a shared world possible, and it is why we can promise that the dice are fair. We say more about that in the next post, What is The Living World?.

What is next

We are early, and we would like to be honest about that. This is a test build. The game does not yet have the full item economy you would expect from a world like this, and clerics and druids are on the list but not in the game, because we do not have the art for them yet. Death has no penalty for now: you wait out a thirty-second timer and the server puts you back at the spawn.

Planned next is more content, written as data and not as engine code: more regions, more monsters, and loot. Each of those arrives as a post here, so subscribe to the RSS feed or come back and look.

Pick up a sword, or a staff, and come and look around. We would like to see you in Eastford.