For nearly three decades, the multiplayer text-based gaming community has been treated to the stories of murder, corruption and betrayal that emerged from the immersive, roleplay-intensive MUD Armageddon.

While much of its history was tumultous and plagued with drama between the community and its staff, Untold Dawn pays homage to one of the biggest inspirations of the game.

The founder and lead coder of Untold Dawn, Rune, found his welcome into the RPI MUD genre through Armageddon, several years ago.

The world of Armageddon was riveting, with secrets galore, decades of lore written by both players and staff, hundreds of art pieces that players spent weeks or months making, in one of the most adrenaline-packed sandbox games ever made.

Rune had a lot of fun playing various characters in this game that he dearly loved. One example of this can be found in the following log of a scene played by one of Rune's characters:

Man & Dog Log (Armageddon MUD)

This is the log of a play in which one of Rune’s characters, Flaire, participate in a play in Armageddon.

Untold DawnRune

The game had two city-states when Rune started playing: Allanak and Tuluk. Both of them rivals, it pitted one side of the game world against the other, each city having its own spin and tales of wars that were fought and diplomatic conflicts between the two.

Armageddon made levelless skilling before it was popular; it made perma-death be synonym with Roleplay-Intensive (RPI). The idea was that players would roleplay realistically through the possibility of losing their character. Later, this concept would be adapted to give a sense of reward when you managed to achieve great feats despite the perils, a concept that has since been adopted by several popular games and genres.

At the same time, when the game got older and wizened, its staff had issues adapting its ancient rules to modern times and fielding in the gaps that were found. For example, until 2019, it was possible to play a minor in the game, something which sounds unbelievable.

A lack of a clear direction and lack of experience from some of its main staff members saw it drop from peaks of 80 players to peaks of 20. The failure of Armageddon Reborn, the closure of Tuluk and various other scandals saw Armageddon have trouble sustaining player numbers.

But despite this, Armageddon's Season 1 was a taste of what this ancient and historic game could have been like if it had adapted to the times. The team of producers and staff looked to have a genuine interest to do things better, and it showed.

Several locations that could easily be considered telnet world wonders will never be seen again, potentially, but will remain in the mind and heart of the thousands of players that it had.

For several years, it was the home of several highly skilled writers, and today we mourn its closure.

And while we might never see the battle between His Shadow and His Light again, those who played Armageddon should feel grateful they got to experience such a vivid and intense experience.

If you are a former Armageddon player looking for a new home, feel free to read the section below which details how Armageddon inspired Untold Dawn, a space frontier post-cyberpunk RPI.

Shade and Profits.

Inspiration for Untold Dawn

Armageddon MUD served as inspiration for many of the systems in Untold Dawn, due to the fact that Rune played it for many years.

The short description system and emoting system is identical to Armageddon and Diku-MUD codebases. We believe this format is optimal for both long prose and short, quick scenes.

The base of our tick based combat system is inspired by the hack and slash epoch of Armageddon. While our combat system is planned to be completely different from Armageddon, our definition of an MVP was shaped by our experience in this game.

The LEARN command is an adaptation of the learn command in Armageddon, modified to encourage roleplay. It was recommended by a former player of Armageddon.

Several of the plots and major RPTs that the Untold Dawn team ran were done thanks to their experience either running or being part of similar RPTs in Armageddon.

Untold Dawn also seeks to improve on many of the mistakes of Armageddon, with carefully thought features and a focus on positive community interactions.

It took Armageddon many years to have more dynamic player-ran factions, something which we have tried to solve by letting anyone make a faction, rent headquarters and set salaries for members if they have the money, with minimal staff support.

We also iterated on the renting system and improved on it, allowing for players to rent anything and share its permission both with groups or other people.

If this feels like it could be your new home, come and join us in our Discord: