Experience

An obvious motivation for playing MUDs is to see your character grow as they gain experience, a noun which in itself bears one of the major distinction between MUDs.

Many MUDs for instance, rely on fighting for bringing experience to their players: the bigger the monster, the larger the reward. Some other MUDs rely upon exploration, or role-playing.

In Frandum though, only questing will help you grow stronger. Your life as a Frandum player will be a struggle to prove your worth to the gods, until they decide to grant you the gift of immortality. Performing quests, whatever they are, is the only way to have your power acknowledged by the gods. This also means that you will never have to do the same quest more than once. Ever. In Frandum we strongly believe that grinding is not fun.

Background

Spawned from the swedish game DUMII in 1994, Frandum has since evolved on its own, never relinquishing its origins yet finding its own way into the multitude of fantasy worlds. The world had long been an aggregation of areas built by the different generations of Wizards, until a big picture began to appear.

From 2000 to 2010, a slow yet deep work was overtaken to merge the existing areas into a global pattern, and to set into place a coherent world, with its own races, its own kingdoms and its own history, so that we are now confident the world of Frandum is unlike any fantasy world you have seen, even though references to famous novels, movies or legends can be found in several areas.

Maps

The game proposes maps based upon five levels of "zoom":

• A vicinity map displaying the long names of the surrouding rooms but on a small grid (building)
• A medium map with the initials of the room (ideal to find directions in a city)
• A remote map with only one letter per room (for orientation in the wildnerness)
• A feature map displaying specific characters based upon the civilization level or vegetation type of the rooms
• A kingdoms map displaying the colours and first letter of the name of each kingdom, pretty much like the political map displayed on the website

Sample screenshot - Medium map

These maps are generated automatically, based upon the rooms you have visited: you will see "x" on the maps hinting at places you have not visited yet...

Sample screenshot - Feature map

Other features

The game implements notions of object and monster types, and their properties: it is easy to find a sword which will be more efficient against orcs, or a jeweler who will only buy goldsmitheries. Thus, don't be surprised if you catch cold after spending too much time in the tundra: fortunately, you may gather fruits and leaves from any plant to help you brew potions, or branches from the trees to build a new shield. And these are only examples...

Characters in Frandum tend to be the same on a given level of experience. The main differences come from their history rather than a class they would have chosen at the beginning of the game. Thus, a player who chooses a race, an alignment, who learns various spells and skills, or who joins certain guilds, will differentiate from players making other choices, but none will be optimal.
Once they become Wizards though, players will be able to choose a class and specialize in the three realms of fighting, magic and priesthood.

Frandum has a chat channel (everyone) and an ooc command (one to one) to discuss about the game or other out of character things. For more RP discussions, we enjoy a lot speaking together in the Crossroads of Wildstone (CoW). If you need to contact an admin for help or any other reason and none are currently visible, the report command is yours to use: an answer will come within a few hours at worst.

Killing other players is totally forbidden in Frandum, yet if you really want to compete with other players, you can always challenge them without any danger in the arena due north of the CoW, or participate into a Tournament of Death.

Last but not least, we have developed a specific, web-based client for Frandum in order to enhance your gaming experience: learn more here. If, on the other hand, you are a screen-reader user, notice that there are a lot of options to remove the ascii spaghetti and shorcut commands to quickly get the information you need.