I also like the idea of "safe room" style mechanics and mystery/gumshoe like puzzles. I think they can work well in a mud, though would be better with small groups that (as we discussed) would be best done with a small group in a sequestered location.
So a setting, uh, trope? I've been kind of experimenting with lately is the "After The End" setting, and I think it would work pretty well as a MUD concept. Essentially the idea is that the game setting takes place after the antagonist (whoever that is) wins the big war. Like imagine lord of the rings, but the hobbits get killed on the way to mount doom, and the one ring either gets picked up by Sauron or vanishes somewhere, and middle earth gets crushed by sauron's orcs and whatnot. The immediate period after everyone loses is interesting, but an even more interesting era is the one that is 100 or 200 years later. What's the world look like, having been ruled by the evil witch king for that long?
It also doesn't have to be "the world after the bad guy wins," it can be "the world after the [scourge] wins." In this scenario, imagine game of thrones, except the undead guys from across the wall sweep down and kill everyone. This is different because its not really a "rule the world" situation, where you can extrapolate how things would go based on the bad guy's personality. This is more like an apocalyptic survival thing. The demon gate doesn't get closed by the heroes. The great old ones don't get put back into slumber by the plucky 30s noir detective. the ghosts don't get captured by the ghostbusters.
So what you end up with is sort of a fallout or Matrix scenario. Underground vaults of humanity, maybe. Or bastions- big iron-walled fortresses that survivors live inside, like Attack On Titan. Outside the relative safety of the [safe zone] is miles and miles of who knows what. But there's old technology/magic to find. Maybe somebody was working on a mcguffin that was going to fix everything, and its still out there in some forgotten laboratory, if only you can get to it.
I think this works pretty well for a MUD because it means we just have to have a single big city area with npcs and shops and whatnot. Everything behind the walls is friendly, everything outside of the walls is not. Very simple to understand.
It sounds depressing, and it absolutely should be at the start, but the other thing is, it can't get any worse. the world went through the worst possible thing and came out the other side and now its time to put shit back together.
The players could be exiles. Maybe criminals, who get forced outside the walls, or maybe its a population thing. We can only support X number of people in our vault and sorry but you guys drew the short straws. Or whatever. Or maybe things have been quiet long enough that the decision is made to venture out and see if the world is still terrifying. Or maybe the water purifier breaks.
While I don't know the plot, I suppose Silo would also be a good example.
Yeah but its not quite right. Fallout and Silo are both ecological post apocalypse stories. The environment is deadly. In the case of fallout, that leads to other dangers because the environment causes tribalism and a collapse of civilization which leads to raiders and mutants and whatnot. Silo (at least the episodes I've watched so far which is season 1) is like "the air kills you if you go outside." For the purposes of a game where you engage in combat, its better if the apocalypse is because of dangerous mobile things that you need to kill.
While it might be interesting if the air is deadly so you have to like, monitor air quality like the metro games, it also kind of hurts exploration, which is a thing you want your players to do.
I’m still working on this, but got sidetracked by Grim Dawn. I’ll get back to it on the weekend probably.
Not much progress. The vps is very laggy when I ssh in, so I'm doing some troubleshooting...
